Abstract
BackgroundThe motives for elite athletes to dope are related primarily to maintaining and improving their physical performance. Especially, elite athletes training to compete in the Olympics may feel unique situational pressure, which may in turn induce powerful motivation for doping and predict doping behavior. This study aimed to investigate possible factors associated with attitudes towards doping in Korean national athletes who competed in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.MethodsA total of 198 athletes (95 female, 103 male) completed the questionnaire, which covered demographic information, doping-related experiences, Performance Enhancement Attitude Scale (PEAS), Perfectionism in Sports Scale (PSS; coach’s criticism, concern over mistakes, and personal standards), and Perceived Motivational Climate in Sport Questionnaire-2 (PMCSQ-2; ego-involving and task-involving climates). Pearson’s correlation coefficients were used to identify correlations among PEAS, PSS, and PMCSQ-2 scores, and stepwise multiple linear regression was performed to investigate possible factors significantly associated with attitudes towards doping.ResultsThe coach’s criticism of PSS was slightly or weakly related to the concern over mistakes of PSS and the ego-involving climate of PMCSQ-2, respectively. And the concern over mistakes sub-scale of perfectionism was related to attitudes towards doping, but weakly.ConclusionsEffective anti-doping policy should meet athletes’ perfectionism, and more studies that identify other factors that influence athletes’ doping attitudes are needed.
Highlights
The motives for elite athletes to dope are related primarily to maintaining and improving their physical performance
Because winning a medal at the Olympic Games is often considered to be the most important event in an athletes’ life and the highest goal to which athletes can strive [3], elite athletes training to compete in the Olympics may feel unique situational pressure [40], which may in turn induce powerful motivation for doping and predict doping behavior [2, 41, 42]
This study aims to investigate possible factors associated with attitudes towards doping, leading to doping behaviors, among Korean national athletes who competed in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and to provide useful information that will facilitate anti-doping strategies for Korean national athletes
Summary
The motives for elite athletes to dope are related primarily to maintaining and improving their physical performance. Doping formally refers to any violation of anti-doping rules set forth in the Code of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) [1]. It hurts the image of sports, is considered unsportsmanlike, and poses potentially irreversible health consequences to users [2, 3]. In 2015, “Anti-Doping Testing Figures” published by WADA reported that of a total of 303,369 samples analyzed, 5912 positive results (1.95%) were found [1]. In the South Korean context in 2015, the Korean Anti-Doping Agency (KADA) analyzed 3782 samples and found 35 positive results, accounting for 0.9% of total samples [8]
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