Original research
Doping risk and career turning points in male elite road cycling (2005–2016)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2018.03.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Objectives

Determine whether career paths of elite male professional riders explain the risk of being sanctioned for an Anti-Doping Rules Violation through the International Cycling Union.

Design, methods

A discrete-time logit model explored the link between career path and ADRV risk in a database of 10,551 riders engaged in the first three world divisions (2005–2016), including 271 sanctioned riders.

Results

Despite a longer career (7.8 years), sanctioned riders have a precarious path. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider within those who experienced a career interruption is 5.80 times higher than for a non-caught one. 61% of the caught riders have experienced a team change. The odds of finding a caught rider within those who experienced such a change is 1.35 times higher. 44% of caught riders start before 23 years, vs 34% for non-sanctioned ones. The odds of being sanctioned are 1.69 times higher for doped riders beginning before 23. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider are 1.94 times higher among those starting their careers before 2005 (establishment of Pro Tour), than those who started in 2008 or after. In that year, the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation and the biologic passport were both launched.

Conclusions

Caught riders could have extended their more precarious careers with doping. The post-2005 generation effect could mean that riders are cleaner or slicker at hiding doping. The higher risk of being caught for riders starting after 23 might indicate that an early professional socialization reduces the risk by teaching them to be cleaner, or better at hiding doping.

Introduction

Since the 1960s, doping has been seen as the main threat to an athlete’s health and sport integrity. The creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 1999 and the establishment of WADA code in 2004 are viewed as the real start of anti-doping efforts. In 2005, the WADA launched the Anti-Doping Administration & Management System (ADAMS). Cycling is probably the sport affected the most by doping scandals in its image and its economy, especially since the end of the 1990s.1 However, this discipline also strengthened its position as the leading sport in anti-doping. In 2008, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) created the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation (CADF), a fully independent body delegated to manage the overall anti-doping effort from the strategy set up to preliminary result management. Teams, race organizers, riders and the UCI fund the CADF. The CADF launched its own in-and-out competition testing program in 2008, including a biological passport.

However, to operate these anti-doping programs, cycling stakeholders base their actions on the existing knowledge about doping and its determinants as identified by previous reviews or meta-analyses.2, 3, 4 Within this large range of academic works, some scholars assume that athletes are workers and that their sportive career can be a work career. Considering performance production as a job allows one to assume the subjective decision to dope as the objective result of labor and employment constraints rather than a moral transgression5. In other words, doping ensues from a freewill alteration6. In this perspective, Mazanov7 highlights that enhancing supplements8 or doping could be a response to social constraints and in particular, employment and labor. In terms of employment, performance incentives included in contracts of athletes or support personnel9 could lead to illicit enhancing practices to prevent or deal with injury and fatigue10, but also to cope with workload in or out of competition11. From this point of view, athletes could be seen as employees like any others, using drugs in the workplace for dealing with their profession.

Our purpose here is to address this question of the link between doping use and employment as professional cyclists by focusing our attention on riders’ careers as a succession of employment situations. But a career is also relative to each rider’s personal situation, but also to the context of the competitive system. For our part, we observed careers that occurred since the establishment of the Pro Tour in 2005, important achievement in male road cycling commercialization and “mondialisation/globalization” processes initiated in the 1990s.1 The system is based on the distinction of three team levels: continental (3rd division), continental professional (2nd division), and world team (1st division). UCI makes participation compulsory for teams in the race of their respective level in addition to those they want to do at the other levels. Even if cycling classics and the Grand Tours confined teams mainly to Europe, their race activities could be now developed worldwide.

In the same perspective of the previous works about the link between doping and professional constraints,12, 7 our main hypothesis is that riders sanctioned by UCI for ADRV present some specific characteristics in terms of career in the context of the Pro Tour (2005) establishment. Then, the risk of finding a sanctioned rider could increase according to his characteristics or turning points13 in career path like interruption or team change.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Data including the entire population of 10,551 riders engaged for at least one year in the first three world divisions from 2005 to 2016 were collected. These data primarily came from the UCI for the years 2005–14 and were complemented during the period of 2015–16, in addition to being consolidated with reliable public information collected on websites dedicated to cycling. In this database, 271 road riders among the 400 riders of all disciplines who had been caught and sanctioned by the UCI

Results

Two categories of results emerged from our analysis. The first one concerns career duration and stability. The second category is about the moment in a rider’s life and in the context of the Pro Tour competitive system (Table 2).

First, we can examine the link between the ADRV event on one hand and career duration or turning points on the other. The odds of being caught (O.R:1.1) increase each year, but we observe that career duration, which averages four years globally, reaches 7.8 years for

Discussion

The finding of increased longevity despite the career instability of caught riders leads us to argue the idea of a relation between the risk for being caught and career path feature. Even if riders have a slightly-increasing risk (O.R 1.10) to be caught every additional year, the finding of the near-double longevity of sanctioned riders compared to the non-sanctioned ones allows us to assume that their illicit practices helped them to extend their careers. This result is consistent with other

Conclusion

To conclude, we have to point out some limitations of our work, but despite these weaknesses, also highlight its contribution to understanding doping as a response to work conditions. The first limitation is that our data were related only to male riders officially sanctioned by UCI for an ADRV, and not to all doped riders. Our data are also vulnerable to retrospective testing programs that could lead to the identification of a significant additional number of ADRV committed by riders with

Practical implication

  • Our results show the appropriateness of a prevention policy based on teams’ framework regulation and providing means to help them build a safer human resources management.

  • The identification of career turning points and characteristics of riders already caught could be used to set up criteria for the target selection of future testing programs.

  • Strengthen collaboration between NADO’s, CADF and UCI will help to build a stronger and unique database about sanctioned riders within the pack of the

Acknowledgement

This research was conducted without any material or financial support. Therefore we have no one to acknowledge.

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