Why sports officials may choose not to fight performance-enhancing drugs

Peer-reviewed article not indexed in WoS or Scopus

en

In this article, we present further discussion provoking explanation, why the existing fight against doping in sport is not fully successful although widely presented in media. Our paper is based on economical arguments derived from discussions of practitioners due to lack of statistically valid data and their fundamental mathematical modeling. Hence, the maximization of a (two-variable) sports attendance demand function, depending on athletes’ performance and doping prevalence, may result in a positive optimal doping prevalence and explain the existing sport doping related situation. Given reasonable assumptions on relevant functional behavior, this result can be interpreted as an incentive for sports officials to allow (and even welcome) some doping. As a consequence, we conclude that one should not be surprised that doping exists and is widespread under the assumption of aggregated rational behavior that is common in economical research. Therefore, the needfor a global coordinated system of testing and sanctions decoupled from sport may be a necessary condition in order to meet these challenges and together with the proposed model should be the subject of further discussions.

Performance-enhancing drugs, optimal level of doping, performance, demand, modeling

2015-11-30

University of Palermo

Italy

2282-5673

European Journal of Sport Studies

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1–8

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