Experiences, attitudes and trust: an inquiry into elite athletes’ perception of the whereabouts reporting system

Abstract

The duty of elite athletes to report whereabouts is a controversial and debated element of the World Anti-Doping Code. Though the obligation to provide whereabouts information has a real impact on athletes’ daily lives, knowledge about athletes’ perception of and trust in the system after the Code was revised in 2009 is still scarce. This study contributes to the discussion on the legitimacy and institutionalization of the whereabouts system by integrating the points of view of Danish elite athletes (with/without whereabouts obligations). In total, 645 athletes completed a web-based questionnaire about their perceptions of the whereabouts system. The results showed that elite athletes’ perceptions were ambivalent: a majority of athletes seemed to accept the system as a necessity, a duty or a compliment to their sporting level. On the other hand, the system did, to a greater or lesser degree, interfere negatively in everyday life: three quarters of the athletes felt reporting whereabouts was too time-consuming; fear of a warning was a concern for more than half of the athletes; four in ten found their joy of being an elite athlete was reduced; and four in ten experienced the system as surveillance. Athletes’ trust in the system was remarkably low when it came to questions concerning how it operated in other countries and its ability to catch doped athletes. A particular remarkable finding is that distrust seemed to increase once athletes had personal experience of reporting whereabouts. This must be considered a major challenge for future anti-doping policymaking.

Keywords:

• anti-doping policy
• elite athletes
• institutionalization
• joy
• surveillance
• World Anti-Doping Code

Notes

1. It has not been possible to access results from the BAC study. The number of athletes participating in this study has not been reported.

2. No significant differences were found between athletes currently reporting whereabouts and athletes with past experience of reporting whereabouts in any of the 12 items. However, Figures 1 and 2 illustrate athletes’ personal experiences and attitudes as perceived by athletes currently reporting whereabouts because we would like to illustrate more exact percentages from athletes obliged to report whereabouts after the second WADA Code (2009). Furthermore, retrospective answers may be less exact as previous experience may be years ago, and questions were asked in the past sense.

3. With regard to the questions in the third section (about trust in the whereabouts system), our aim was merely to discover whether personal experience of the whereabouts system increased or decreased trust in the system in order to further explore the legitimacy of the system. Therefore, the variables of athletes reporting whereabouts today and athletes’ previous experiences with reporting whereabouts were merged. Subsequently, the last section analyses differences between two groups of athletes: one group with personal experience of reporting whereabouts (‘ERW athletes’) and a second group with (as yet) no experience of reporting whereabouts (‘NRW athletes’).