Sports and Play Chapter 5: Deviance in Sports

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But as the money associated with sports has enabled athletes to hide their drug use,

anti-doping agencies work to maintain an image of purity in sports.

Using nutritional supplements is now a standard practice in....

nearly all sports. As one high school athlete explained, supplements "are as much a fixture in sports participation as mouth guards and athletic tape."

They feel that the essential purity and goodness of sports have been stained by performance-enhancing drugs and that any strategy that will purge them from sports should be supported. This approach also allows them to avoid critical questions, such as these: Number 1

Is it logical to praise athletes as warrior-heroes when they take injections of painkilling drugs to stay on the field, and then condemn them as cheaters when they take steroids, HGH, and other substances that help to heal injuries more quickly, rebuild muscles damaged by overtraining, or relax and recover after exhausting and tightly scheduled competitions?

History is clear: As long as there have been sports, people have bet on them—and tried to fix them.

Scott Eden, ESPN (2019)

The processes involved in harassment and abuse have been studied meticulously since the 1990s by Celia Brackenridge from the United Kingdom, Kari Fasting from Norway, and their colleagues.

The dynamics of these processes vary from one situation to another, but they are most likely to occur in sport organizations where coaches and/or administrators have unquestioned power and control over the careers of athletes and are not held accountable for anything except sport outcomes.

Informal norms

are customs or unwritten, shared understandings of how a person is expected to think, appear, and act in a social world.

Formal norms

are official expectations that take the form of written rules or laws,

The hubris that emerges on some sport teams can create serious problems,..

because it leads athletes to support each other in a general belief that community norms don't apply to them (Tracy & Barry, 2017). But this possibility has not been studied, so we don't know if there may be a relationship between the dynamics of collective overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic and high rates of deviant underconformity off the playing field.

Character and greed may be related to deviance in sports,...

but there are important cultural and institutional factors as well, and they must be considered if we wish to understand this issue. These are identified in the following sections.

Only then might they say that she went too far...

in conforming to the norms of the sport ethic. But they would seldom use the word deviance to describe her actions, because overconformity is seen as normal in elite gymnasts.

Supranormal

in that they overconform to norms widely accepted in society as a whole.

Athletes who miss practices or games due to sickness or injury often are defined as deviant by coaches and teammates, even though taking

"sick days" is accepted as normal in everyday life. College athletes with scholarships violate formal NCAA rules if they hold jobs during the school year, and coaches may punish players who fail to attend class, whereas other students work and cut classes without violating formal rules.

The problem with most studies is that they don't take into account three important factors:

(1) students who have a criminal record are less likely than other students to try out and be selected for sport teams; (2) athletes may receive preferential treatment enabling them to avoid being charged for a crime after being arrested; and (3) deviance among high school athletes may be obscured by a "facade of conformity"—that is, athletes who conform to norms in public, but violate them only in private where detection is rare.

Every time people repeat the rhetoric about "winning at all costs" and "money" as explanations for everything that athletes do, they obscure two important things:

(1) the deeper meaning and personal issues linked to being an athlete today in societies where sports are highly visible and culturally valued, and (2) the organization of today's high-performance sports, in which athletes must train full time at a level of intensity that precludes other commitments in their lives and makes them dependent on psychological, physiological, medical, and pharmacological support to be successful

Legendary Ironman, Scott Tinley, uses slightly different words to explain his motivation in a sport that pushed him beyond his limits on a daily basis for over 20 years

... as the winningest triathlete in the world in 1985, I was earning less than a moderate living ... It wasn't the material compensation I coveted, but the respect commensurate with the amount of pain I suffered each and every day in training. ... [The] motives required to accept high levels of pain ... were firmly steeped in issues of identity ... It was a kind of external branding of my skills as an endurance athlete and I had somehow internalized that identity with the support of the signifying and surrounding culture Tinley, 2019, pp. 64-65).

More recently, a former member of the USA Gymnastics team, explained her training with these words:

... we are taught to soldier on through intense training sessions, ... though injury and fatigue, through pain ... Pain was a fact of life for me ... but so was silence (Williams, 2018).

A constructionist approach emphasizes six things

1. People create norms and laws 2. Norms and laws can be changed. 3. The establishment of normative boundaries is influenced by who has power 4. There are two kinds of deviance: underconformity and overconformity 5. Deviant underconformity 6.Deviant overcomformity

hose most likely to overconform are athletes who have a strong need for approval and respect from other athletes and their coaches. This need is most characteristic among the following athletes: Being an athlete, you're always like-what can I do more? What can I do better?

1. Those with low global self-esteem and a strong need to be recognized and accepted as athletes by their peers in sport. 2.Those who perceive achievement in sports as the surest way to be defined as successful and gain the respect of others. 3. Those who link their identity as an athlete to their masculinity so that being an athlete and being a man are merged into a single identity. 4. Those who play on teams in which coaches and teammates make overconformity an important feature of acceptance as a team member.

Sports Ethics: Athletes accept risks and play through pain

According to this norm, athletes are expected to endure pressure, pain, and fear without quitting. When athletes talk about this, they simply say that "this is part of the game." In the process of saying this, athletes develop a narrative that normalizes pain and injuries as an unavoidable part of what they do and who they are. This is clearly illustrated in the comments of X Games athletes who endure pain and injury as they push limits. Levi LaValee, a medal-winning snowmobile athlete, said, "I've been injured so many times ... [but] every time I'm injured, I can't wait for the moment until I can get back on the sled [and] drive again" (George, 2013). For many elite athletes, the endurance of pain comes to be seen as an indicator of inner strength and commitment; eventually, many athletes view pain as positive—as a sign that they are alive and doing what they were meant to do. Coaches in most high-performance sports seek athletes who feel this way and then use them as examples of what they expect from everyone on the team.

The Olympic Training Center [in Colorado Springs] was the Wild West. It was really bad ... You train six to eight hours a day ... You had a two hour workout on Saturday morning. Saturday nights and Sundays was drinking and mischief and hooking up.

Anna Kim, USA Taekwondo (in Fuchs, 2018)

We now face a future without clearly defined ideas about the meaning of achievement in sports. There are new financial incentives to succeed in sports, athlete identities have become more central in the lives of sport participants than ever before, and performance-enhancing technologies have become increasingly effective and available.

As this occurs, the cost of drug testing has increased to a point that is not sustainable for organizations that do not have surplus money to spend. Therefore, we need new approaches and guidelines. Old approaches and guidelines combined with coercive methods of control are not effective. Trying to make sports into what we believe they were in the past is futile. We face new issues and challenges, and it will take new approaches to deal with them effectively.

Widespread participation is needed if sport cultures are to be successfully transformed.

At present, both nation states and corporate sponsors have appropriated the culture of power and performance sports and used it to deliver messages that foster forms of deviant overconformity for the sake of national and corporate interests. There is no conspiracy underlying this, but it creates a challenge that can be met only through our collective awareness of what needs to be done, followed by collective efforts to do it. Even then changes will be incremental rather than revolutionary, but changes are possible if we work to create them in our sports, schools, and communities.

Without asking these questions and changing the current approach to testing, doping scandals will continue to occur.

Athletes will be caught, people will express their disgust and demand that the cheaters be punished, and then everyone (other than the punished athletes) will feel good until the next scandal occurs.

4. A constructionist approach: There are two kinds of deviance: underconformity and overconformity

Both involve ideas, traits, or actions that fall outside the normal range of acceptance in a social world.

The seriousness of problems during this phase depends on many factors.

But the difficulties of retirement from elite sports have become more common as the demands and expectations in high-performance sports have escalated since the mid-1980s. When sponsors and television entered the scene, and when training came to be based on rationality and science, expectations for elite athletes intensified. The "off-season" disappeared, there was no time for other jobs or education, and no excuses for poor performances.

We were definitely paying players ... Everyone was paying players. ... They are the only people in college basketball who can't get paid.

Christian Dawkins, defendant in college basketball scandal (in Powell, 2019)

Deviant overconformity special social control problems in sports.

Coaches, managers, owners, and sponsors—people who create and enforce rules—often benefit when athletes overconform to the norms of the sport ethic. In their eyes, athletes who willingly put their bodies on the line for the team are a blessing, not a curse. In the eyes of the athletes, overconformity is proof of their dedication and commitment; and in the eyes of fans and media people it is seen as exciting, a way to win games, and a wonderful boost to media ratings. Therefore, deviant overconformity usually goes unpunished, even though it often consists of dangerous actions that everyone sees as falling outside normative boundaries. For example, few directors of national sports federations, such as the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, will tell national team coaches that their athletes are too dedicated to their sports, too focused on achieving distinction, too willing to play in pain, or too concerned with overcoming obstacles to win medals for the United States.

They feel that the essetial purity and goodness of sports have been stained by performance-enhancing drugs and that any strategy that will purge them from sports should be supported. This approach also allows them to avoid critical questions, such as these: Number 6

Could the billions of dollars now spent on testing and police-like investigations of the urine, blood, and suspect actions of athletes be better spent on educating and working with athletes through their sport careers so they are fully informed and medically supported when they make choices about using available technologies to aid their training and competition?

Effective control requires both cultural and structural changes in sports so that athletes are formally encouraged to set limits on how far they will go in conforming to the norms of the sport ethic and are given the information they need to understand the consequences of overconformity. Here are suggestions on where to begin these processes: Number 1

Critically examine the deep hypocrisy involved in elite power and performance sports. It isn't possible to effectively control the use of performance-enhancing substances when sport federations and teams encourage overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic. It makes no sense for people in sports to accept performance-enhancing strategies, such as injecting painkilling drugs and massive doses of vitamin B12 and to use medical devices and technologies that enable athletes to play with broken bones and injured joints and then punish athletes for using other substances that enable them to train and compete. When accepted practices in sport culture already permit the use of performance enhancing substances and technologies that push the limits of safety and common sense, it is not surprising that athletes use banned substances that also push those limits.

Media reports of deviance in sports and by people connected with sports have become daily occurrences. This raises sociological questions:

Does deviance occur more regularly in sports than other spheres of life? What are the patterns of deviance in sports? Do athletes and people associated with sports have higher rates of deviance than others?

Does it make sense to condemn athletes for failing to be positive role models for children, when we expect them to put their bodies on the line for the sake of our entertainment?

Cyclists, like other athletes, begin their careers in the ordinary world as they discover cycling culture.

During the first phase of the socialization process, they are amateurs and not concerned with using performance-related technologies or performance-enhancing substances; and medical support is provided by a general practitioner during routine checkups and general health assessments. These cyclists might race in local events, but their lives involve school and family. Cycling during this phase is focused on personal experiences rather than training and tracking performance; the goal is primarily to enjoy and learn more about cycling.

Controlling narratives about sports can be tricky.

Elite athletes seldom give others a glimpse inside their extraordinary world. However, here are statements about drugs in which athletes do provide us with a brief look inside that world:

Establish a "harm reduction" approach in which athletes are not allowed to play until certified as "well" (not simply "able to compete") by two independent physicians or medical personnel. This approach differs from current practices in which trainers and medical personnel do what they can to return injured athletes to the game as quickly as possible. Trainers and physicians should be health advocates paid by someone other than team management. The focus of player health advocates would be protecting the long-term well-being of athletes. Therefore, instead of testing for drugs, athletes should be tested to certify that they are healthy enough to participate. If drugs damage their health or make it dangerous for them to play, they would not be certified. Only when their health improves and meets established guidelines would they be allowed back on the field. This would be a major step in creating a new sport culture (Henning, 2017).

Establish a system of transparency and accountability for medical staff and sport scientists who work for athletes, teams, and sport federations. Too many doctors, physiologists, psychologists, and trainers assist athletes as they overconform to the norms of the sport ethic, rather than helping them raise critical questions about the health risks that come with deviant overconformity. For example, sport psychology should be used to help athletes critically assess why they're doing what they're doing and what it means in their lives. Using science to enable athletes to give body and soul to their sports without asking these questions is to leave the door open for deviant overconformity, including the use of performance-enhancing substances.

Establish injury and health education programs for athletes. This is a first step in establishing a sport culture in which courage is defined as recognizing limits to conformity and accepting the discipline necessary to accurately and responsibly acknowledge the consequences of deviant overconformity and sports injuries. Learning to be in tune with one's body rather than to deny pain and injury is important in controlling the use of potentially dangerous performance-enhancing substances.

Establish rules clearly indicating that certain risks to health will not be tolerated in sports. When 16-year-old girls who compete with training-induced stress fractures in elite gymnastics are turned into national heroes and poster children for corporate sponsors, it promote deviant overconformity in sports. This sets up athletes for permanent injuries and disabilities. This is clearly a problem, and sport organizations should refocus on health over performance.

Over the past three decades cases of institutional corruption have been relatively common.

FIFA and the IOC appear to be organized in ways that lead to chronic cases of corruption.In the process, hundreds of millions of dollars have been banked by influential people in those organizations, a number of whom have recently been arrested and convicted of crimes, including fraud, money laundering, and bribery. Identifying institutional corruption is tedious and even dangerous, especially now that the financial stakes are so high, the incentives for self-policing are weak, and the opportunities for corruption are numerous and lucrative

Studying deviance in sports presents challenge 1

First, the types and causes of deviance in sports are so diverse that no single theory can explain them all

Complicating matters further is that neither money nor the desire to win is the primary reason that athletes push themselves beyond the normative limits. Instead, it is their desire to play their sport in a way that sustains the athlete identity around which their entire lives—their relationships, experiences, and everyday decisions and routines—have been organized. J.J. Watt (2016), a noted NFL player expressed this desire when he said this:

Football has been everything to me since I was 10 years old. ... the money, the fame, the awards, the people talking about me on TV, none of that matters. None of those things have any effect on why I love this game and why I give everything I have to it.

It's important for us to understand this approach because it helps us explain how people respond to deviance and why there are so many disagreements when people discuss deviance in sports.

For example, if you and I use an absolutist approach but hold different ideals, it becomes difficult for us to jointly study deviance. Let's say that my ideal is fair play, and your ideal is achieving excellence as demonstrated through winning. According to my ideal, all violations of game rules would be deviant, whereas you would say that a player was deviant if your team lost because she refused to commit a strategic foul (a "good" or "smart" foul) in the closing minutes of a game. If we don't share the same ideals, we identify deviance differently.

Cyclists enter the second phase of their sport careers if and when they decide to take racing more seriously and train with the goal of improving and possibly becoming a professional racer.

Health and recovery from training and competition now become important, as does the need to be more rational and scientific in monitoring and controlling their bodies.

How can people in the United States, for example, say that athletes using a performance-enhancing substance are morally corrupt and should be banned from their careers, when they are part of a society in which appearance-enhancing, cognitive-enhancing, and performance-enhancing substances are consumed at rates unprecedented in human history?

How can testing be justified by saying that it keeps athletes healthy and preserves fairness in sports, when it is clear that the sports most watched by fans are not good for a person's health and are not fair when some people have the resources to buy the best training and technology in the world and others don't even know it exists?

The four hypotheses in the overconforming of sport ethic

However, there are coaches who create a team environment in which athletes are kept in a perpetual state of adolescence by withholding acceptance. For some athletes, this creates identity insecurity and makes them dependent on the coach for approval as an athlete and team member. Challenging the masculinity of male athletes is also used as a strategy to encourage overconformity as athletes seek identity reaffirmation as a man. When this becomes a part of team culture, overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic will be common among team members. But research is needed on this topic.

One way to control deviant overconformity is to enable athletes to set limits when conforming to the norms of the sport ethic.

However, this would not be viewed favorably by most coaches in elite sports. For example, when a fourteen-year-old gymnast is late for practice, her coach immediately sanctions her for violating team norms—a form of deviant underconformity. But when the same gymnast loses weight and becomes dangerously thin as she strives for distinction and pursues her sport dream, many coaches, parents, and judges don't see deviance as much as they see a dedicated athlete willing to suck it up and pay the price—that is, until stress fractures or anorexia interfere with competition, threaten her life, and put her in the hospital.

Is it reasonable to condemn the use of so-called doping and at the same time support the Olympic motto "Faster, Higher, Stronger" and demand more record-setting performances, when athletes are now pushing the limits of human potential and damaging their bodies as they do so?

Make drug and substance education a key part of health education programs. Parents, coaches, league administrators, managers, and trainers should participate with athletes in educational programs in which they consider and discuss the norms of the sport ethic and how to prevent deviant overconformity. Unless all these people understand their roles in reproducing a culture that supports substance use and abuse, the problems will continue.

After the game when you wake up, you feel like you got hit like a Mack truck because it hides everything. So what do you do? You go get another shot.2

Matt McChesney, former University of Colorado and NFL player, 2015 (in Halsne & Koeberl, 2015)

3. A constructionist approach: The establishment of normative boundaries is influenced by who has power

People with power and authority generally have the most influence in determining, changing, and enforcing norms and laws. In democracies these people can be challenged without violating norms, whereas challenging these people in a dictatorship or autocracy would be defined as deviance because there is no tolerance of dissent.

Drug testing is relatively new in sports

Prior to the mid-1980s, anti-doping policies existed largely to discourage athletes from dropping dead of overdoses, something that had become too common in certain sports as athletes experimented with a wide range of substances thought to boost training and performance.

The perception that deviance has increased on and around the field is partly due to a combination of three factors. Factor 2.

Second, the surveillance technologies used today increase detection of rule violations. For example, slow-motion instant replays enable referees to identify infractions they would have missed in the past. Even text messages, email evidence, photos, and videos from handheld devices have been used to identify deviance that previously would have remained undetected. Page

Corruption reportedly accounted for $30 billion of the $50 billion spent to host the winter Olympics in....

Sochi, Russia.

Sport Ethics: 2. Athletes strive for distinction

The Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger) captures the meaning of this norm. Athletes are expected to relentlessly strive for improvement by pushing limits and doing what it takes to maximize their potential. This norm is highlighted by Justin Wadsworth, a top US Nordic skier in the 30-kilometer race, who pushed his body so hard during the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City that he suffered internal bleeding. From his hospital bed he said, "It's pretty special to push yourself that hard," and his coaches and fellow athletes agreed with him (Berger, 2002).

The statements also tell us that using drugs to enhance performance is a normal occurrence in the extraordinary world of high-performance sports. This conclusion has been supported in research by Evdoki Pappa and Eileen Kennedy (2013), who interviewed elite track-and-field athletes. They summarize their findings this way:

The athletes give a clear indication that they see doping as a normalized phenomenon ... Although sporting authorities have banned the use of PEDs, the athletes consider them necessary for their career and for competition at a high level. (pp. 289, 290)

During this third phase, training is based on science and rationality.

The duration and intensity of training increases and fatigue becomes the body's enemy. Over time the athletes realize that to succeed at the professional level, they must do things that push the normative boundaries that they accepted in the ordinary world. But they also know that for their bodies to function at full capacity, they must use technologies to help them recover from the physical damage done by their training and competition. To ignore these technologies means not doing their job and not being fit for competition. Pharmacological products offer assistance—if the athletes are willing to work at the level of intensity needed to take advantage of them. At this point, cyclists go beyond normal boundaries and use technologies and substances that enable them remain a professional athlete, even if they are illegal or banned.

The danger of overconformity was explained by Alberto Salazar, a former marathoner and coach for Mary Decker Slaney, a legendary middle-distance runner during the 1970s and 1980s. After multiple injuries and nineteen sport-related surgeries, Slaney attempted a comeback while she lived in constant pain; she trained excessively, hoping to make the US Olympic team. Salazar understood Slaney's deviant overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic, but he also recognized its dangers with this comment:

The greatest athletes want it so much, they run themselves to death. You've got to have an obsession, but if unchecked, it's destructive. That's what it is with [Slaney]. She'll kill herself unless you pull the reins back (Longman, 1996, p. B11).

Absolutist approach

The unchanging, right or wrong perspective; o deviance assumes that social norms are based on essential principles that constitute an unchanging foundation for identifying good and evil and distinguishing right from wrong.

Of course, not every cyclist or elite athlete fits perfectly into this model.

There are differences by country, sport, gender, and the place of high-performance sports in specific cultures (Pitsch and Emrich, 2012). But Brissonneau's model is based on 20 years of collecting data on the parts of a sport career that few of us ever see. In fact, popular conceptions of sport careers are based more on myth and wishful thinking than reality.

These and dozens of other critical questions about the current approach to doping control in sports make many people uncomfortable, so they are seldom asked.

Therefore, the cat-and-mouse dynamics that have emerged with the current form of drug testing will continue. New technologies that improve vision, cognitive alertness, brain function, response time, strength, and speed are being developed at a record pace

Additionally, full explanations of drug use in sports must put the user and the drug in the context of high-performance sports, the specific sport in which it occurs, and the team culture and relationships involved

Therefore, we need different explanations to understand why athletes use "drugs." The explanations and methods of control used to deal with people who reject norms and use heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, cannabis, and other so-called recreational drugs are not relevant when trying to deal with the issue of PESs in sports.

Most people in society, me included, accept these four norms.

They are not unique to sports. I taught them to my children when I told them they should be dedicated to their goals, work hard to achieve them, suck it up when things get difficult, and persevere when obstacles are in the way. But I also taught them to set limits and avoid deviant overconformity: that is, be dedicated but not obsessive, work hard but know when to stop, suck it up but don't sacrifice your health, pursue your dreams but be realistic in the process. In other words, be sensible, don't engage in deviant overconformity.

The perception that deviance has increased on and around the field is partly due to a combination of three factors. Factor 3.

Third, personal stakes in the form of status and financial rewards associated with sports are so much higher today that players and others connected with sports have stronger incentives to cheat. This makes everyone concerned with sports more sensitive to the possibility that cheating will occur—and this leads to higher detection rates.

During the fourth phase, medical support focuses on performance rather than overall health and well-being.

This involves using various combinations of substances, legal and/or illegal, to continue training and preparing the body to compete at the highest level. Strategies for doing this are learned from other cyclists, sport scientists and sport medicine experts hired by teams and sport federations.

Anything that enables them to train more intensely becomes attractive. If they see a need for injections of iron and vitamins C, B6, and B12, or other substances they learn how this is done.

This marks the initiation of a pharmacological career that often is supported by sports medicine doctors, other athletes, and by many sources of technical and medical information in cycling culture.

But as they uncritically overconform to these norms, they often go too far and accept without question the idea of using performance-enhancing technologies.

This means that athletes don't use performance-enhancing substances (PESs) to escape reality as much as they use them to survive and succeed in elite sports.

Sports Ethics: Athletes accept no obstacles in the pursuit of success in sports

This norm stresses "the dream" and the obligation to pursue it at all costs. Athletes don't accept obstacles, they work to overcome them. Dreams, they say, are achievable only if you work hard and never quit. Champion boxer Lucia Rijker (who starred in the film Million Dollar Baby) stated this norm succinctly as she trained for a bout: "I use obstacles as wood on a fire" (Blades, 2005, p. 96).

Sport Ethics: 1. Athletes are dedicated to "the game" above all other things.

This norm stresses that athletes are expected to love "the game" and prove it by giving it top priority in their lives, making sacrifices to stay in their sport, and facing the demands of training and competition without backing down. Pre-game pep talks and locker-room slogans proclaim the importance of this norm. It was explained in these terms by NFL player Brandon Stokley, who said, "I just love it. I can't see myself giving up football because I think I might have something (bad) happen to me or my brain. ... I am going to live in the here and now and have fun at what I am doing" (Brennan, 2012).

Constructionist approach 1: People create norms and laws

This occurs as they interact with each other and use their values to determine a range of acceptable ideas, traits, and actions. The vertical hash marks crossing the horizontal line represent the boundaries that separate what is accepted from what is considered deviant. Of course, the range of acceptance may be very narrow in authoritarian social worlds such as high security prisons, military combat training, and systems of slavery where no deviations are tolerated.

A constructionist approach: 2 Norms and laws can be changed

This occurs when people agree to temporarily or permanently shift the boundaries that define the range of acceptance. Deviance is socially constructed as people negotiate the boundaries of their acceptance. The ideas, traits, and actions that fall outside the range of acceptance are defined as deviant. However, boundary negotiation occurs continuously, and the vertical lines that represent normative boundaries move one way or the other over time as norms change.

In fact, the stated rationale for the World Anti-Doping Code that guides Olympic sports and is enforced by the IOC, WADA, and USADA is that "doping is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport" (WADA, 2009).

This rationale is grounded in an absolutist approach in which it is assumed that any use of banned performance-enhancing substances violates the ideals represented by sport and is therefore deviant.

Gene modification is close to being possible, if it has not already been done.

This suggests that the most reasonable question to ask is this: How can these technologies (including drugs) be integrated into the lives of athletes (and the rest of us) without destroying our health and well-being?

These individuals and organizations [connected with FIFA] engaged in bribery to decide who would televise games, where the games would be held, and who would run the organization overseeing organized soccer worldwide.

US Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch (in Clifford and Apuzzo, 2015)

Do athletes cheat more often because the stakes associated with making particular grades are higher for them than for other students, or do athletes cheat less because they are watched more closely and have more to lose if they are caught?

We don't know the answer to this question, and we need studies comparing athletes with other students generally, with other students who would lose their scholarships or job opportunities if they did not maintain minimum grade point averages, and with other students who are members of tightly knit groups organized around nonacademic activities and identities. Only then will we be able to make definitive statements about academic cheating and sport participation.

Mean that deviance in sports is an economic issue as well as a health and cultural issue.

What counts as deviance in sports is determined by what will sustain its popularity and support. This also shapes the sanctions and punishments handed out by sport leaders and rules committees. When athletes or low-level employees in sports do or say things that tarnish the perceived integrity of "the game" or allow people to see clearly into the extraordinary world of high-performance sports, they will be sanctioned.

Why does drug testing focus on individual athletes rather than the culture of high-performance sports and the complex system in which people other than athletes develop, purchase, supply, administer, and study banned substances to determine how they can be taken without testing positive?

During this fourth phase cycling is not something they do—it is who they are.

Winning is important because it enables them to remain in elite sports, which at this point is the foundation of their lives and identities. To not win is to lose the basis for their primary identity, their relationships, experiences, and everyday routines. Therefore, when overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic is explained only in terms of a "win at all costs" mentality, it obscures the deeper personal meanings that are linked to being a cyclist at a time when that requires total dedication and commitment.

This study was published over 35 years ago, but athletes today are just as likely, to ignore normative limits and do anything it takes to train and participate in sports. Former NFL player Matt Millen explained it this way:

You have to be selfish, getting ready for a game that only a handful of people understand. It's tough on the people around you. ... It's the most unspoken but powerful part of the game, that deep-seated desire to be better at all costs, even if it means alienating your family or friends. [Athletes] will do anything to [stay in the game], even if it means sacrificing their own physical or mental well being

Research shows that deviant overconformity is....

a significant problem in sports. When sociologists Ewald and Jiobu (1985) studied men who were seriously involved in bodybuilding or competitive distance running, they found that some of the men engaged in unquestioned overconformity to norms related to training and competition. The men trained so intensely and so often that their family relationships, job performance, and/or physical health deteriorated, yet they never questioned their actions or the norms of their sport cultures.

Elite athletes and coaches use

a sport ethic to guide and evaluate attitudes and actions in the social world of power and performance sports. This ethic is formed around four general norms 1. Athletes are dedicated to "the game" above all other things. 2. Athletes strive for distinction 3. Athletes accept risks and play through pain 4. Athletes accept no obstacles in the pursuit of success in sports.

Ingesting substances though to enhance performance is a taken-for-granted part of being an athlete today-...

a strategy for living up to the time-honored motto of the Olympics: Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger."

However, supranormal attitude and actions also are...

abnormal and deviant. when people don't distinguish between these different forms of deviance, they often define athletes as role models, even though much of what they do is dangerous to health and well-being and beyond the limits of acceptance in other spheres of life.

Challenge of deviance 2

actions accepted in sports may be defined as deviant in other spheres of society, and actions accepted in society may be defined as deviant in sports. Athletes are allowed and even encouraged to do things outlawed or defined as criminal in other settings. Some things that athletes do in contact sports would be classified as felony assault on the streets. Ice hockey players would be arrested for actions defined as normal during their games. Racecar drivers would be ticketed for speeding and careless driving. Speed sking and motocross racing would be defined as criminally negligent in everyday life. Even when serious injuries or deaths occur in sports, criminal charges are seldom filed, and civil lawsuits asking for financial compensation are rare and generally unsuccessful when they go to court

Research on high school students shows that delinquency rates (i.e. crime rates for juveniles-under 18 years old)

among athletes often are lower than rates for other students from similar backgrounds. With a few exceptions, this finding applies for athletes in all sports, athletes in different societies, and both boys and girls from various racial and social-class backgrounds.

When studying deviance in sports, it's important to distinguish between actions based on indifference to or rejecting norms...

and actions based on a blind, uncritical acceptance of norms to a point that most people define as unacceptable. Such a distinction is identified only by examining the organization and dynamics of sport cultures and the meanings that athletes give to their sport participation.

The dynamics leading to hubris among athletes...

are clear. First, they bond together in ways that encourage and normalize deviant overconformity. Second, collective overconformity creates a sense of specialness that separates athletes from the rest of the community at the same time that it inspires awe and admiration from fans. Third, the unique experiences associated with team membership leads athletes to feel a sense of entitlement. Fourth, athletes see people outside their sport culture as incapable of understanding them and their lives, and therefore undeserving of their concern or, in some cases, their respect.

Of course, winning, money, and fame are important to athletes, but they

are secondary to reaffirming the identity that has been at the core of their existence ever since they focused on becoming an elite athlete.

Being an athlete is a social experience as well....

as a physical one. At elite levels of competition, athletes form special bonds with each other, due in part to their collective overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic.

The most extreme deviations from the ideal are often described

as evil or perverse ideas, traits, or actions. For example, if obedience to the coach is a team norm, any form of disobedience is deviant. The greater and more frequent the disobedience, the more serious the deviance; chronic or consistent deviance would eventually be seen by absolutists, including most coaches, as evil or a sign of perverted character.

In the culture of high-performance sports,...

athletes are expected to live by a code that stresses dedication, sacrifice, and a willingness to put their bodies on the line for the sake of their sport and their teammates. Conforming to this code is seen as a mark of a true athlete. However, when athletes do not set limits on how far they will go with their conformity, they are likely to engage in deviance, and this especially likely in contemporary power and performance sports.

Another problem with studies of felony rates is that data on arrest rates for...

athletes are seldom compared with arrest rates in the general population or in populations comparable to the athletes in age, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic background.

Off-the-field deviance among...

athletes attracts widespread media attention. When athletes are arrested or linked to criminal activity, they make headlines and become lead stories on the evening news. However, research doesn't tell us if the rates of off-the-field deviance have gone up or down over time or if general rates are higher among athletes than their peers in the general population. The studies that deal with this have focused primarily on three topics: (1) crime rates and sport participation among high school students; (2) academic cheating and excessive alcohol use among high school and college athletes; and (3) particular felony rates among athletes.

Over-the-top-deviance is often dangerous, but...

athletes learn to accept it as part of the game they love to play and as the basis for being accepted into the culture of high-performance sports.

Understanding deviance in sports is a challenge because....

athletes often do things that are not accepted in other settings. Many actions of mixed martial arts fighters, boxers, football and hockey players, racecar drivers, and wrestlers would be criminal acts off the field.

To refuse performance-enhancing substances under these conditions is especially difficult...

because now they represent teams, sport organizations, sponsors, and their communities or nations. Additionally, cyclists begin to shift their priorities so that competitive success is more important than their long-term health. They also learn to hide their fatigue and injuries because they fear being replaced by younger and more durable teammates, and they want to avoid exposing weaknesses to opponents who will exploit them. In fact, cyclists who show weakness in a high-performance sport put in jeopardy their contract, endorsements, sponsorships, and even fan support.

However, when a regular student is caught turning in a bogus paper, the

case does not make national news, the student is not rebuked by people around the nation, and the reputation of the university is not questioned in the national media—as might occur if the cheater were an athlete.

Sport-related deviance includes cheating,...

certain forms of gambling, fixing games or matches, harassment and abuse, hazing, institutional corruption, taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs, and other actions that violate criminal laws or rules in sports.

Historical research indicates that....

cheating, dirty play, fighting, and the use of violence are less common today than in the days before television coverage and mega-salaries

Due to its deviance and danger, hazing creates bonds and a form of vulnerability that....

coaches can use to control team members. This is why some coaches covertly approve of hazing—it gives them information that can be used to assert power over a team and to demand obedience without destroying team bonds.

Race also must to be taken into account when discussing arrest rates for

college and professional athletes.An investigation by USA Today (Schrotenboer, 2013) reports that when compared to white NFL players, black players are up to ten times more likely to be stopped by police while they are driving, and when they are stopped they are more likely to have their vehicles searched.

The key factor is not so much the sport participation as the culture and social dynamics that

come along with membership on a particular team. Research on this topic is important because alcohol use and abuse is related to other forms of deviance. For example, we don't know if deviant overconformity that leads to cohesion and group dynamics among athletes contributes to alcohol use and binge drinking. Research is needed to see why, when, and how often this occurs.

Officials in sport organizations have generally been "groomed" for their position in "good old boy" networks that have never been....

concerned about transparency and accountability in what they do. This applies to rule enforcement as well as budgets, travel expenses, hiring procedures, and the everyday business and personnel matters of an organization.

bullying

consists of aggressive acts that are meant to intimidate, exploit, or harm another person

Many studies may not have valid measures of criminal actions by athletes and, as a results, underestimate their juvenile...

delinquency rates. The point in this section is that some studies on sport participation and delinquency rates may overlook patterns of deviance among athletes or analyze data out of context so they can't explain why certain patterns exist.

Third challenge of deviance

deviance in sports often involves over conformity to norms, rather than rejecting or not conforming to them.

Despite these problems with an absolutist approach, many people use it when they discuss...

deviance in sports. For example, when the actions of athletes don't match people's ideals, they define the athletes as deviant. They argue that the only way to control deviance is to "get tough" and eliminate the "bad apples" that lack moral character. In the process, they don't ask critical questions about justice, about the ways that laws and rules are created and who creates them for what reasons.

When norms are viewed as representing absolute, unchanging "truths" about right and wrong and good and evil,...

deviance is identified differently than when norms are viewed as social constructions that people create as they interact with each other and organize their social worlds to meet individual and collective needs.

According to this approach, all norms represent ideals, and whenever an idea, trait, or action departs from an ideal, it is

deviant; he greater the departure from the ideal, the more serious the deviance. This approach is illustrated in Figure 5.1, where the broad vertical line signifies a particular ideal, and the horizontal hash line represents increasing deviations from the ideal.

However, comparing rates of on-the-field deviance among athletes from one time period to another is...

difficult because rules and enforcement standards change over time. Research shows that athletes in most sports interpret rules very loosely during games, and they create informal norms, which stretch or bend official rules. As one veteran athlete explains, "We players have our own justice system" (Player X, 2009). But this is not new.

Tracking money trails in sports and sports events is...

difficult. Those who control sports organizations are able to hide and disguise financial transactions because they have not been investigated in the same ways that traditional businesses are investigated. Additionally, there is no global enforcement agency that has the power to fully investigate and hold accountable the people in these organizations when they engage in corrupt practices.

Additionally, elite cyclists and their peers in others know that if they...

disclosed everything that they experienced as they moved through the phases of their careers, people would be shocked and disappointed, other elite athletes would no longer support them, and their contracts might not be renewed. Therefore, they stick with a narrative that describes the first and second phases of the sport career model. This narrative stresses a connection between sports and health and the importance of values, hard work, and the purity and goodness of sports.

Athletes often go overboard in their dedication to sport and their willingness to do whatever it takes to perform at a level that allows them to stay on the field,

do what they love to do, and gain acceptance from teammates and coaches. Their attitudes and actions in these cases are supranormal. Instead of setting limits on what they are willing do as athletes, they evaluate themselves and their peers in terms of their unqualified willingness to go over-the-top and exceed normative limits, even if they jeopardize health and well-being in the process.

Hubris

driven arrogance and an inflated sense of self-importance that leads one to feel separate from and superior to others.

The use of performance-enhancing substances and future forms of cognitive performance enhancement and gene modification cannot be

effectively controlled in elite sport cultures as they are now organized.

Most cyclists (and other athletes) never move out of the second phase of a sport career, that is, they don't

enter the extraordinary world of professional cycling. But for those who have the opportunity to move into the third phase and begin working as a cyclist—usually as a member of a team—there are significant qualitative changes in their lives.

Institutional corruption

established, widespread, and taken-for-granted processes and practices that, if publicly known, would be seen as immoral, unethical, or illegal to the point of destroying public trust in the organization and its leaders.

Sport federations and other sport governing bodies such as the NFL, NCAA, and FIFA have....

explicit rules that prohibit athletes from betting on sports, especially their own sports and their own games or matches. Violating these rules brings severe sanctions, including lifetime bans on playing, coaching, or being formally connected with their sport in the future. This is to safeguard the legitimacy of competitive outcomes which must be trusted by players and spectators alike.

The training strategies during the fourth phase are...

extraordinary. To endure them and maximize the chances of winning, cyclists control everything that affects their ability to perform. This is when doping often becomes normalized as a training strategy. It enables them to train harder and longer than their opponents, and it becomes an integral part of the culture that is organized around achieving competitive success.

When this normative overconformity takes the form of...

extreme dedication, commitment, and self-sacrifice, it brings praise rather than punishment from coaches and fans. It's even used to reaffirm cultural values related to hard work, competition, achievement, and manliness. In the process, people overlook its negative consequences for health, relationships with family and friends, and overall well-being.

The perception that deviance has increased on and around the field is partly due to a combination of three factors. Factor 1

first, the constant addition of new rules creates new ways to be "deviant." Rulebooks in sport organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, international sport federations, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have hundreds of rules and regulations today that didn't exist in the past, and every year more rules are added.

Two forms of deviance

formal and informal

Fourth, training and performance in sports are based on such new....

forms of science and technology that people have not yet developed norms to guide and evaluate much of what occurs today in sports.

Although many people see sports as sites for supranormal achievements, this now requires that athletes train at a

frequency and intensity that harms their bodies and requires dependence on technologies to keep them on the field and performing at optimum levels. Transforming high-performance sports into healthy activities is incompatible with how they are organized today, but it could happen if there were the will to do it. Without the will, many athletes will continue doing whatever it takes to stay in their sport and maintain their identity as an athlete.

Online promotions push protein drinks, amino acids, testosterone boosters, human growth hormone boosters, insulin growth factor, vitamins, energy drinks, and hundred of other supplements that supposedly will help athletes get the most from their workouts, recover more quickly...

from injuries, and build a body that can adjust to overtraining and become stronger in the process.

Recent media coverage of scandals in high school and college sports....

generally involve coaches, and in professional and international sports they involve high profile members of organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, National Olympic Committees (NOCs), and professional leagues and teams. This reminds us that deviance in sports is more common than most people want to admit because they generally see sports as a model of purity and goodness.

The separation between athletes and the rest of the community makes the...

group dynamics associated with participation in high-performance sports very powerful. Other selective and exclusive groups, usually groups of men, experience similar dynamics. Examples are found in the military, especially among Special Forces units. Former soldiers sometimes talk about these dynamics and the powerful social bonds formed while they faced danger and death with their "teams." These bonds and the desire to remain connected with the select men that share these unique and intense experiences can be so strong that group members support increasingly extreme behaviors among themselves.

The Penn State case is one of many cases of illegal harassment and criminal abuse that...

have occurred in sport organizations, with administrators and coaches usually the perpetrators. The number of these cases being reported has increased dramatically since 2016 as current and former gymnasts associated with USA Gymnastics described how they were abused by the team doctor and various coaches. This was followed by over a thousand other reported cases in other NGBs in the US, and at Michigan State University and the University of Southern California.

In US culture such taboos often are related to sex, so there is a tendency in...

hazing processes to force people to engage in sexual activity defined as immoral, so they will keep it private.

Studying the careers of athletes and the contexts in which they train and compete has been a long-term project of French sociologist Christophe Brissonneau. As a former elite cyclist,

he has used his contacts in sports to collect data from athletes, trainers, coaches, and sport medicine professionals.

Those unwilling to meet this expectation are seen as letting others down and violating the code that governs the lives of professional cyclists (and other pro athletes).

herefore, they train more obsessively and follow year-round training programs designed by personal trainers, nutritionists, and sport scientists. But to remain in their sport and continue to perform at the highest level, they must push their bodies beyond normal limits every day. When this is done for more than fifteen hours per week, their muscles begin to break down. Recovering from this, and from the injuries that are inevitable in training and competition, requires the use of various therapies, technologies, and substances. The harder cyclists train, the more they need these things to be competition ready and to sustain their careers.

Athletes use substances like HGH for reasons that differ greatly from the reasons that an alienated 25-year-old shoots

heroin to get high and escape reality. The alienated 25-year-old rejects society's norms, whereas athletes using performance-enhancing substances accept society's norms about dedication, working hard, ignoring pain, and overcoming obstacles to reach goals.

Match-fixing example

if an NBA team is favored to win a game by ten points, one or more players on the favored team could purposely miss shots or allow opponents to score points that cause the other team to win the game or lose by less than ten points. In this case, certain gamblers would win bets placed on the underdog team.

statements are about a legal drug, and they come mostly from football players. Players seldom talk candidly in public about

illegal or banned substances, but football players felt free to talk more openly about Toradol in 2011 after many had filed a class action suit against the NFL for allowing teams to administer it without following the warnings for the drug or discussing the side effects with players.

Black players interviewed in the investigation said that when they are driving an expensive car...

in an area where an officer might think they don't belong, they are likely to be pulled over. If they object or give the impression that they are not fully cooperative, they are more likely than whites to be treated as a possible criminal. This investigation does not prove that police are racist, but it certainly raises questions about the data on arrest rates among players when it comes to certain situations and possible crimes.

Overconforming to the norms of the sport ethic is a significant form of deviance....

in high-performance sports, but not all athletes overconform.

This conclusion does not mean that all elite athletes use illegal substances. But it does mean that using such substances

in the extraordinary world of high-performance sports is not seen by most athletes as an indication of moral corruption and weak character.

When this occurs in an organization, it becomes a context....

in which harassment and exploitation are especially likely—again, without consequences for perpetrators.

Widely publicized cases of assault, hard-drug use, and driving under the influence (DUI)

in which male athletes are the offenders have made it important to study these forms of deviance. At this point, research is scarce, and existing studies report mixed findings.

A second problem is that officials in sport governing bodies often face...

inherent conflicts of interest in the process of policing themselves. So they create rules that make them look pure and good to outsiders, but they are ineffective when it comes to enforcement policies and procedures.

Athletes often refer to their desire to win when they are...

interviewed or when they talk with fans, but for most of them, winning is important because it enables them to continue playing the sport they love to play and to receive identity affirmation from other athletes. These dynamics encourage overconformity to the norms of the sport ethic, and they affect athletes at various levels of sports—from local gyms, where high school players work out, to the locker rooms of professional sport teams; they affect both women and men across many sports, from the 100 meter sprint to the marathon and from tennis to football.

The lack of transparency and accountability creates problems that often escalate....

into long-term disasters now that billions of dollars flow through governing bodies such as the IOC and FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the governing body of world soccer/football since 1904). This was recently seen in connection with sport mega-events such as the men's World Cup and the Olympic Games. Cost overruns, inside deals, bribes, kickbacks, and blatant corruption left large public debts in their wake.

Formal deviance

involves a violation of an official rule or law, and is punished by official sanctions administered by people in positions of authority.

Hazing

is a secret, private, interpersonal process that reaffirms a hierarchical status difference between incoming and existing group members.

Norm

is a shared expectation that people use to identify what is acceptable and unacceptable in a social world. Norms exist in all social worlds and serve as the standards that people use to identify deviance.

An initiation

is an expected, public, and formal ceremony that marks entry into a group or organization.

A rite of passage

is an institutionalized cultural ritual that marks a transition from one status to another

Ethic

is an interrelated set of norms that a collection of people use to guide and evaluate ideas, traits, and actions in a social world.

Fascism

is the condition that exists when there is widespread deviant overconformity based on unlimited obedience to norms or to the commands of an autocratic leader.

Research also suggests that substance use is not caused by defective socialization or a lack of moral character among athletes, in fact

it usually occurs among the most dedicated, committed, and hard-working athletes in sports. At this point, it appears that most substance use and abuse is tied to an athlete's uncritical acceptance of the norms of the sport ethic. Therefore, it is grounded in overconformity—the same type of overconformity that occurs when distance runners continue training with serious stress fractures; when female gymnasts control weight by cutting their food consumption to dangerous levels; and when NFL players take injections of painkilling drugs so they can put their already injured bodies on the line week after painful week.

When a softball player punches an umpire after a disputed call, it's a deviant act because

it violates a norm. Similarly, when a college football coach hires prostitutes for high school recruits or when an Olympic judge alters scores to ensure a victory for a particular figure skater, we know that deviance has occurred. In each case, norms have been violated.

Of the four processes, hazing has been studied the least, mostly because it is private and secretive and involves experiences that people

keep private because they are embarrassing.

Even when sport programs are designed as "interventions" for "at-risk youth," we

lack a clear theory to explain how and why we might expect sport-based intervention programs to be effective in reducing criminal actions or producing other positive effects. Most of these programs have little effect because they do nothing to change the unemployment, poverty, racism, poor schools, and other delinquency-related factors that exist in most neighborhoods where sports for at-risk youth are offered.

A central point in this chapter is that athletes use performance-enhancing substances not because they

lack character or are victims of evil or exploitive coaches, but because they (1) uncritically accept and overconform to the norms of the sport ethic and (2) are part of a sport system in which therapies and supplements are needed to recover from intense training and competition schedules over which they have little control. This is why tougher rules and increased testing have not been effective.

Prop bets don't usually involve

large amounts of money and a clever player and gambler could work together to win them regularly, although bet-tracking software can aid in detecting such bets.

Another problem with an absolutist approach is that it leads

many people to see deviance as caused by the character weaknesses of individuals. Therefore they think that controlling deviance always requires more rules, better rule enforcement, and increasingly severe penalties for deviations from the ideal. However, this approach ignores that people with strong moral character have engaged in civil disobedience, violated unjust laws, and challenged unfair and biased norms to produce important changes and innovations in all social worlds, from classrooms to entire societies. It also overlooks that a rigid system of rules and rule enforcement creates fear and guilt to a point that people avoid being spontaneous, self-expressive, and creative.

The use of performance-enhancing substances remain a persistent issue in...

many sports. Media stories about athletes using performance-enhancing substances are no longer shocking. However, most people don't know that drug and substance use in sports had a long history. For centuries athletes have taken a wide variety of everyday and exotic substances to aid their performances, and this has occurred at all levels of competition.

Hazing has long been an accepted practice as new members enter an established group or organization in which...

membership increases a person's status in a social world. It is more common in groups of males than groups of females, partly because men are more likely to assume that their groups are linked with high status.

Match-fixing scams often involve large bets and may involve....

multiple players and gamblers. They tend to occur in competitions where the players don't have multi-million-dollar contracts to risk if they are caught. This occurs mostly in lower division soccer matches, minor league hockey games, or any NCAA competition.

A shot [of Toradol] in your butt cheek before a game (and you) feel like frickin' Superman when you walk on the field. Everything is numb. You feel great!.

no author

One way to make sense of these findings is to say that hazing has become...

normalized for most athletes, at least those who become members of high status teams. Additionally, certain hazing practices have become so normalized that those who experience them don't see them as "out of the ordinary," even though people in the larger community would disagree.

Despite highly publicized cases of college athletes having their coursework completed by "academic tutors," the charge that college athletes generally engage in academic cheating more often than other students, has....

not been studied systematically. If we compared athletes with other students, we might find comparable rates but different methods of cheating. An athlete may be more likely to hand in a paper written by an "academic tutor," whereas other students would obtain papers from files maintained at a fraternity house, from an online site, or from a professional writer hired by a parent.

Gambling, once defined as a crime in many countries, is...

now among the top sports businesses in the world. When and where it was illegal, criminals became rich running betting operations, and where it is legal, it generates significant revenues for organizations that manage it and governments that tax it. The major sports leagues in the US have long opposed sports betting for fear that it would damage the integrity of competitive events by undermining faith in the validity of their outcomes. However, now that sports betting has become legal in a number of states, the leagues are trying to cash in on the revenues it generates

The use of performance-enhancing substances predates commercial sports and television, and it...

occurred regular when so-called traditional values were widely accepted. Therefore, we must look beyond these factors to explain why athletes use performance-enhancing substances.

Deviance

occurs when a person's ideas, traits, or actions are perceived by others to fall outside the normal range of acceptance in a society.

5. Deviant underconformity

occurs when ideas, traits, and actions go beyond expectations in ways that are defined by most people as unacceptable. For example, when an athlete obeys without question a coach's command to continue running in the heat until he collapses from heat exhaustion and faces possible death is an example of deviant overconformity (Hruby, 2018). Fascism!!

Match-fixing

occurs when one or more gamblers secretly pay athletes, referees, coaches or team officials to take actions that influence the final score of a match or game so the gamblers win their bets. These actions could lead to an intentional loss or to a win in which the betting point spread is not covered by the favored athlete or team.

Prop-fixing

occurs when players are paid by a gambler to do something during a game or match that enables a gambler to win a proposition, or prop, bet. Rather than focusing on the final score, a prop bet focuses on something happening during a game or match, such as which player or team will score first in an NBA game, who will win the second game in the third set of a tennis match, or will receive the first yellow card in a soccer match, and on and on. In some cases, one player can intentionally do something that would determine the winner of a prop bet without having an impact on the outcome of a game or match.

The fourth phase of the cyclist's career involves an intensification...

of everything from the third phase. This involves a shift from doing the job to reaching the podium, winning stages in long races, and working with teammates to improve the team's record. At this point, a cyclist feels compelled to use all the performance-enhancing strategies provided by the biotechnologists who provide medical support and control most of their training.

The absolutist approach has not contributed to a sociological understanding of deviance in sports, but it is...

often used by fans, media people, and the general public as they discuss rule violations and crimes by athletes and coaches.

Informal deviance

on the other hand, involves a violation of an unwritten custom or shared understanding, and is punished by informal sanctions administered by observers or peers.

Players also commit strategic fouls on the field to obtain an advantage over....

opponents, and players learn what rule violations are likely to be undetected by referees. But these actions are defined by players and fans alike as strategy rather than cheating.

Cyclists in this fourth phase of a sport career learn that

overconforming to the norms of the sport ethic is normal—doing whatever it takes to continue performing at a supranormal level is the standard expectation that they have for themselves and that others have for them (Smith, 2017).

Sports provide powerful and memorable experiences, and many athletes are willing to "set no limits" in their quest to maintain

participation and gain reaffirmation of their identities as members of a select group sharing lives characterized by intensity, challenge, and excitement (Smith, 2015).

However, when crime rates are compared it must be remembered that professional athletes may be treated differently than their...

peers in the general population. In some cases, their actions may be so visible that they are held more accountable than others engaging in the same actions. But in other cases, athletes may receive preferential treatment and avoid arrests for actions that would lead to an arrest of others.

The war on doping now being waged by WADA and USADA is supported by most

people even if they are not sport fans.

Striving to be normal involves renegotiating relationships with family and friends, if they are still available and willing to re-engage. But re-engaging is difficult when

pre-sport identities are irrelevant and new identities don't yet exist. Feeling detached and seeing the ordinary world as boring compared to the extraordinary world of elite cycling can lead to the use of drugs and alcohol to get through the long days and nights. Seeking medical support from an addiction specialist, psychiatrist, or clinical psychologist often occurs at some point.

most athletes avoid asking critical questions and setting limits on their conformity to the norms of the sport ethic, even though it creates...

problems, causes pain, disrupts family life, jeopardizes health and safety, and may even shorten their life expectancy. This illustrates how powerful the sport ethic can be when athletes internalize it and use their own overconformity as a basis for evaluating themselves and sustaining their identity among peers.

Athletes may appreciate fan approval, but they don't look to fans for....

reaffirmation of their identity as athletes because they know that fans don't really understand what it takes to perform at the level that they perform. Only other athletes understand this, and this makes everyone else peripheral to an athlete's life in sports, even spouses and family members.

Sponsors embrace and promote this narrative because it

reaffirms their business model as well as the beliefs of its executives, who often claim that their characters were shaped in positive ways back when they played sports. Media people who cover sports and those who work in sport organizations use this narrative to sustain the beliefs on which the popularity of sports has come to depend.

Moral panics over drug use and oversimplified solutions will not change the...

reality of training and competition or the culture of high-performance sports, nor will it stop athletes from using substances that they see as necessary to maintain their identities and continue experiencing the joy and excitement of being an athlete.

There are times when hazing in sport teams involves clear cases of deviance, but....

research indicates that hazing processes are difficult to classify as deviant or as acceptable for the following reasons: a. High school and college athletes are aware of hazing and often expect it when they become new members of a team. b. Most athletes who are hazed perceive their own hazing in positive terms or they are ambivalent about their experience and may not conclude that they have been hazed as others define it. c. Hazing often involves forms of humiliation, alcohol consumption, isolation, sleep deprivation, and sex acts that athletes keep private.

Confusion about hazing often occurs because people don't distinguish between hazing and related process such as...

rites of passage, initiations, and bullying.

People who run sport organization lack the experience that would prepare them to administer the systems of...

rule enforcement needed in today's high-stakes sport cultures. Like people in other spheres of life, people in sports have developed complex ways to cheat and skirt the rules. But the investigators don't have police powers and other investigative resources needed to consistently prove that cheating has occurred. This leads to bungled investigations and inconsistent and capricious punishments that weaken the legitimacy of the organizations themselves.

When team members collectively dedicate themselves to a goal and willingly makes...

sacrifices and endure pain in the face of significant challenges, they create a social world in which overconformity is "normalized," even as it is defined as deviant in society as a whole (Smith, 2017). As they push the envelope together, the bonds between athletes become extraordinarily powerful. Their overconformity sets them apart culturally and physically from the rest of the community, and this leads them to assume that people outside of their sport cannot understand who they are and why they do what they do.

My review of the evidence on hazing leads me to conclude that for high school and college students it....

should be replaced by initiation ceremonies in which new team members have public experiences that mark entry onto the team and signal their right to claim a new identity. In the case of professional teams, information about hazing suggests that it is more controlled and more focused on initiating rookies into a culture of respect for the players that have already "paid their dues" and shown that they deserve to be identified as athletes in this elite context.

Media stories about drug use, on-the-field rule violations, and off-the-field criminal actions are

so common today that deviance is seen by many as out of control in sports. For those who accept the great sport myth these stories create a dilemma: Either they must admit that their belief in the purity and goodness of sports is wrong or they must conclude that sports are being undermined by money, greed, undisciplined athletes, and corrupt management.

A constructionist approach

sociologists reject an absolutist approach

Research on institutional corruption is scarce given the extent to which it occurs in...

sports. Funding for such research is practically nonexistent, and there are career risks for any academic researcher who publishes evidence of corruption. The researcher will almost certainly be subjected to a smear campaign by representatives of any organizations implicated in the study, and these representatives often are influential and have more power than any scholars in the sociology of sport.

Coaches treat players in ways that would be dined as deviant if teachers treated

students or employers treated employees similarly. Team owners in North American professional sports don't abide by antitrust laws that apply to other business owners. Fans act in ways that would quickly alienate friends and family members in other settings or lead people to define them as out of control.

Research on hazing is scarce, but

studies by Jennifer Waldron, Vicki Krane, and their colleagues (Waldron and Kowalski, 2009; Waldron et al., 2011) indicate that hazing contains dynamics that easily get out of hand and can seriously harm people. These dynamics exist largely because hazing is a private, secretive process that reproduces a hierarchical status and power distinction between senior and junior group members. For example, one of the ways to ensure secrecy is to force people to violate important social taboos in ways that they could not admit without being defined as deviant themselves.

A constructionist approach is useful when...

studying deviance in sports because athletes are just as likely to go overboard in their conformity to expectations as they are to reject expectations when they participate in their sports, even though deviant overconformity is often dangerous or harmful to themselves or others.

So unless courageous investigative journalists backed by....

supportive media organizations do such investigations, corruption persists without consequences in certain sport organizations where people have consolidated power and use it to their advantage

Spectators express awe when they hear these stories, even though they realize that athletes have...

surpassed the normative limits that they use to define what is deviant. But people seldom object to deviant overconformity in sports because it is entertaining to watch and it reaffirms the importance of the sport and values such as dedication, hard work, and achievement. However, they condemn deviant underconformity because it threatens the sport and their values.

Because there are very few winners in high-performance sports means...

that deviant overconformity also occurs on teams and among athletes who will never win Olympic or World Cup medals, be ranked number 1, play in televised games, achieve public fame, receive college scholarships, or sign professional contracts.

Most research focuses only on deviant underconformity among athletes

that is, deviance grounded in rejecting or ignoring team rules or civil and criminal laws. Deviant overconformity is ignored because it is seen as being entertaining and consistent with team cultures. Additionally, deviance among coaches, managers, team owners, and others in sports has seldom been studied because it is difficult to collect data from and about people in positions of power. These people have reasons and resources to keep secret the information needed to explain—or, in legal terms, prove—what they do. However, that does not mean that people in positions of power do not engage in deviance.

A United States Supreme Court decision in 2018 struck down....

the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) that outlawed sports betting nationwide with exceptions for Nevada and four other states that already allowed it in 1992. This decision made it possible for other US states to join most countries of the world where sports betting is legal and regulated (Maese, 2018).

After analyzing data collected mostly through in-depth interviews with athletes in cycling, track and field, wrestling, weightlifting, and bodybuilding, Christophe and his colleagues at

the University of Paris created a model that describes participation in elite sport as a three-part process in a multiphase sport career

Using the Internet to obtain various substances has occurred since....

the early 1990s, and this makes it difficult to determine just what actions are deviant and what actions are accepted parts of athletic training; in fact, "normal training" is now an oxymoron because high-performance training involves exceeding boundaries accepted as normal in society as a whole.

When a cyclist can no longer meet the expectations of sponsors, coaches, and team members it is time to exit

the extraordinary world of professional cycling and rejoin the ordinary world. But this move from the fourth to the fifth phase in a sport career is often the toughest of all. Returning to normal after years of living an abnormal life in an extraordinary world requires serious social, psychological, and economic adjustments (Tinley, 2015, 2019). Routines are out of sync, and reasons for living seem fuzzy and uncertain. The pleasures of pushing the body to its limits are gone, as is the excitement of competition. The cyclists who have been sources of daily support are no longer there, and people in the ordinary world can't understand the difficulty involved in losing an identity as an elite athlete.

To reduce deviant overconformity, sports would have to be organized primarily around....

the health and well-being of athletes, with limits set on the extent to which athletes conform to the norms of the sport ethic.

Fans also want athletes to exceed normative limits and put their bodies on...

the line. They see this as exciting and entertaining because it heightens the stakes associated with competition. When athletes do overconform to the norms of the sport ethic and play with concussions, broken bones, and torn ligaments, and refuse to quit, fans know that such actions are outside the limits off their acceptance. However, they often praise those athletes as heroes, especially if they play on their favorite team or for "their country."

Expectations, demands, and personal perspectives change dramatically. The cyclists' social world becomes increasingly exclusive and separated from

the ordinary world, and their lives revolve around relationships with elite athletes, coaches, trainers, performance physiologists, team managers, and sponsors. All of these support people are concerned with the cyclist's performance above all else.

It also shows that sports today are more rule-governed than in...

the past and that on-the-field deviance is more likely to be punished and publicly criticized.

For cyclists to ignore these experts usually ends their professional careers, along with their team membership, sponsorships, income, relationships with elite peers, and

their identity as an athlete. For those who have dedicated most of their lives to reaching this point in cycling, refusing to do whatever it takes is seldom a viable option. Some athletes refuse, but we seldom hear about them, because their careers languish or end quickly.

After this litany of deviance in sports, the following conclusion may seen suprising:

there are no historical studies showing that deviant under conformity on and around the field is more common now than in the past. However, cases of institutional corruption and the match-fixing side of gambling constitute significant problems that could jeopardize the future of some sports.

Through their interaction with other cyclists,

they discover legal supplements that can enhance their training and race performances. As they train, they begin to track and measure their physical attributes, from strength and muscle growth to endurance and the oxygen-carrying capacity of their circulatory systems (heart and lungs).

Few people are willing to abandon the great sport myth, so...

they express outrage at offending individuals and insist that they be banned from sports to preserve their essential purity and goodness. In the face of this outrage and the extent to which it is expressed in mainstream media, it is difficult to have a research-based sociological discussion of deviance in sports. But that is the purpose of this chapter.

On the other hand, if athletes take the same drugs or nutritional supplements used by millions of normal citizens,..

they may be banned from their sports and defined as deviant, even by the people using the same products to enhance performance in their non-sport jobs.

As high-performance athletes strive to maintain their identities and membership in their elite in-group, they...

they often develop the sense that they are unique and extraordinary people. They often hear this day after day from coaches to fans and people on the street. They read it in newspapers and social media, and they see it on TV and the Internet. And when this sense of being unique and extraordinary becomes extreme, as it often does among high-profile athletes, it can take the form of hubris

When athletes overconform to the norms of the sport ethic by enduring repeated head trauma,....

they risk permanent brain damage, chronic memory loss, and early-onset dementia that can affect them long before old age. This is in addition to the arthritis and joint injuries that result from intense daily training that pushes their bodies beyond normal limits. This suggests that deviant overconformity is more dangerous than deviant underconformity and is a central problem in sports today. Without critically assessing the culture of high-performance sport, this form of deviance will remain common.

When basketball players foul an opponent or shove a referee in anger over a foul call,...

they violate formal norms that are written in the official rule book. These norms are enforced by "officials" given the authority to sanction or punish violators.

When two college basketball players don't face the US flag during the national anthem or don't participate in a pregame team ritual,...

they violate unwritten, informal norms.

If athletes-male or female, high school or college-create a culture in which weekend parties are frequent,...

they will be more likely to drink and binge-drink than other athletes and students generally. Therefore, if being an athlete positions a young person in a culture where party attendance is encouraged or expected, drinking is more likely. However, some sports and teams may have cultures in which weekend social activities do not include parties and other social events at which alcohol may be present.

Another guarantee of secrecy is to force people to drink so much that....

they will not clearly remember what they did or will not be believed if they tell someone about it. This is why hazing often involves forms drinking that put people in danger.

Studying deviance in sports presents challenge 1 example

think of the types of deviance that occur just among male college athletes: failing to show up for a scheduled practice, violating rules or committing fouls on the playing field during a match or game, taking performance-enhancing substances, hazing rookie team members by demeaning them and forcing them to do illegal things, binge drinking, fighting in bars, harassing women, engaging in group sex, sexual assault, turning in coursework prepared by others, betting on college sports, using painkillers to stay on the field, destroying hotel property during a road trip, taking money from boosters, and going home over a holiday to meet an agent who gives money to their parents.

The only way to break this potential cycle of cheating, corruption, harassment, and abuse is for sport organizations....

to abandon the practice of self-enforcement and voluntarily turn all enforcement matters over to an independent outside agency. This transfer would not be without problems, but it would make rule enforcement the job of people who don't have the conflicts of interest that exist when enforcement is handled internally.

Underage and excessive alcohol consumption in high school and college is not limited...

to athletes. After reviewing dozens of studies on athletes and alcohol use, it is clear that the relationship between sport participation and patterns of use among athletes depends on factors such as team culture and the social activities that are a part of that culture.

Youth league players may be benched for a game if they miss practice....

to attend a family picnic, despite the value given to the family outside sports. The fact that norms are applied and enforced differently in sports makes it difficult to use studies of deviance in other contexts to understand what occurs in sports.

We cannot make generalizations about athletes because experiences vary from one sports program...

to the next and because sport participation constitutes only one part of a person's experiences. Therefore, when someone says that "playing sports kept me out of trouble," we should investigate what that statement means in that person's life and then identify aspects of sport experiences that enable young people to see positive alternatives and make good choices in their lives. Until this research is done, our conclusion is that sport participation creates neither "saints nor sinners," although both may play sports.

Of course, the independent agency would require adequate funding, and its actions would have to be....

transparent and competent to establish trust. Additionally, specific forms of training are needed by most management-level people working in sport organizations to make them aware of their responsibilities to athletes and co-workers. Again, this training becomes increasingly effective when athletes and employees have independent authorities to whom they can go with questions and reports about harassment and abuse.

Athletes in organized sports have traditionally "played to the level" permitted by...

umpires and referees-that is, they adjust their actions according to the way that referees enforce rules during a game. This means they will push the limits of rules as far as particular referees allow them to do so.

Of course, deviant underconformity also is a problem in sports, but when athletes....

underconform, they are punished immediately. As a result, underconformers are usually pushed out of high-performance sport cultures, whereas overconformers are praised. Additionally, media stories glorify overconforming athletes as role models—as warriors who play with broken bones and torn ligaments, endure surgery after surgery, and willingly submit to injections of painkilling drugs to stay in games.

Practice of overconformity among athletes makes it difficult to....

understand certain cases of deviance because they contradict the assumption that deviance always involves subnormal or underconforming attitudes and actions based on a rejection of norms.

Research has identified man forms of deviant overconformity, including self-injurious overtraining, extreme weight-control strategies, taking...

untested or dangerous performance-enhancing substances, and playing while injured

Studying deviance is often tricky because norms take different forms,...

vary in importance, change over time, and differ from one social world to another.

Example felony charges in sports

were shocked when a study of arrest rates from 2000-2013 indicated that rates for NFL players were lower than rates in the general US population for property crimes and public disturbance crimes, although they were higher for violent crimes in six of the 14 years covered in the study (Leal, Gertz & Piquero, 2015). A more recent study done by USA Today showed that the number of NFL player arrests and citations was cut in half between 2006 and 2018

Science and medicine once used only to treat people who....

were sick are now used regularly in sports. The everyday challenge of training and competition in sports often pushes bodies to such extremes that continued participation and the achievement of performance goals requires the use of new medical treatments and technologies.

The perception that deviance has increased on and around the field is partly due to a combination of three factors have led to

what seems to be an endless stream of cheating scandals in sports. The NCAA and its high-stakes Division I athletic programs provide classic examples of this. Most sport governing bodies, such as the NCAA, are self-policing. But the leaders of those organizations have always accepted the great sport myth to the point that they have not created effective rule enforcement divisions. They felt they didn't need them. Sports, they assumed, were essentially pure and good, and people in sports would regulate themselves because they shared in that purity and goodness. But this assumption is flawed, and it undermines the willingness of leaders to enforce rules and investigate suspected or reported infractions.

A constructionist approach to deviance: Deviance occurs...

when ideas, traits, or actions are determined to fall outside the limit of acceptance on either side of the range of conformity. Therefore, deviance can involve underconformity or overconformity to a norm or law

In the United States, the case of the athletic department at Penn State University,

where a former assistant football coach was able to sexually abuse multiple boys for over a decade as he used the department's facilities without triggering any serious or sustained investigation. Other coaches, including the legendary football coach Joe Paterno, and athletic department and university officials were so concerned with maintaining the money- and status-generating football program that they shirked their legal obligations and overlooked the seriousness of the abuse occurring in their midst. It wasn't until investigative journalists exposed this situation that there was an official response to the deviance of the former coach

In response, fans may deride players...

who don't conform to flag-related customs, and teammates may refuse to talk with players that don't meet their expectations for togetherness.

It's normal. You drop your pants ... they give you a shot [of the painkiller Toradol], put the Band-Aid on, you go out and play. It may be stupid, it may be dumb, call me dumb and stupid then, because I want to be on the football field.

—Brian Urlacher, a thirteen-year NFL veteran (NFL Brief, 2012)

There's a certain point in your career where you're going through the pounding of the season and getting through that week of practice and trying to get to that next game day. Toradol is part of what gets you back to playing the way you normally can.

—Jim Kleinsasser, thirteen-year NFL veteran (Wiederer, 2012)

My body was perpetually feeling bad, as were those of my teammates. Our training staff knew this and would encourage us to get a shot. We were told it would make us feel better. So we lined up for the needle.

—Nate Jackson, five-year NFL veteran (Jackson, 2011)

It's professional sports. You do what you need to do to play and, at the end of the season, you get cleaned up [from all the drugs].

—Ryan Zimmerman, MLB player (in White, 2012)

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