Come si diventa dopati: Il doping tra normalità e devianza

[Machine translation] Doping is often represented as a phenomenon that mainly concerns “some bad apples” who have chosen to break the rules to gain an undue advantage over their opponents. In this perspective, doping is the result of a choice by an actor conceived as isolated from the social context. However, in the last twenty years? The sociological literature on doping has highlighted how the metaphor of “bad apples” is a simplification because individual choices must be understood by referring both to the more general influence of the social and cultural context and to the more specific one of the social networks in which athletes are placed., In this essay we present the results of a qualitative study that integrated an online survey on the consumption (legal and illegal) of drugs and supplements to improve sports performance, by a champion of competitive, non-professional athletes. The qualitative study aimed to describe the paths through which athletes come to use performance-enhancing drugs. In particular, we were interested in understanding if, and through which mechanisms, doping can be configured as a behavior in balance between normality and deviance. The results of the study highlight how some processes that characterize contemporary society (such as medicalization, pharmacologization, emphasis on performance), to which macro-sociological analyses refer to explain the development of doping in modern sport, also shape the motivational vocabularies of those who dope, helping to keep doping in a delicate balance between deviance and convention.