Doping in elite sports - betweeen individual fault and collective guilt

Despite widespread violations, doping is attributed in public discourse almost exclusively to the inappropriate behavior of individual persons. Athletes, trainers, sports functionaries, doctors or pharmacists find themselves confronted with accusations of having performed, supported or accepted perfidious deceptions in order to increase athletic performance or to overcome real or even only putative disadvantages compared to competitors. The individuals are supposedly motivated by excessive success orientation, moral deficiencies, greed, motives of power or craving for fame. When sports federations, media, the law and pedagogics, and even the majority of critics themselves focus primarily on persons and their actions in doping and thus create a skewed reality, it is the task of sociology to oppose this widespread observation scheme and supplant it with a more complex version of reality. This would not relativize or excuse the inappropriate behavior of individual persons, but rather set it in a wider context, In a sociological perspective, one thing is certain: doping has not befallen high-performance sport as a sort of inexplicable sudden curse, nor it is a matter which can be easily deduced from the personality inventory of individual athletes. trainers. functionaries or doctors. Doping appears much more as a "normal accident", which occurs over and over due to precisely-identifiable social conditions. This idea will be presented below in three steps. First, the decisive constellation actors will be identified which provide the structural impetus for the tendency towards doping. Then doping will be discussed as an illegitimate innovation. And the final focus will draw conclusions under the motto "constellation management" aimed at future preventive work.