Fair play in sport: the Brazilian pedagogical construction of antidoping as a civilizing element

Abstract

Anti-doping has among its purposes to test athletes and promote educational actions. In Brazil, the Brazilian Doping Control Authority (ABCD) has been responsible for such actions since 2014. The objective was to analyze ABCD’s anti-doping education actions based on the civilizing process theory. A multisituated ethnography was used to follow anti-doping, a process that took place over 19 months. The results were divided into three empirical-analytical categories: 1) interinstitutionality, which shows ABCD actions to create interdependence ties with sports institutions and the field of Physical Education; 2) pedagogy for children and youth, which indicates that education actions were mainly aimed at the underage athletes; and 3) the use of athletes and former athletes as examples, in which the search for individual accountability and a displacement of the individual from the configuration is analyzed. Anti-doping education is an element of the civilizing process that seeks to incorporate mechanisms of self-control.

Keywords:

• Sport
• doping
• civilizing process
• fair play
• education
• Brazil

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.