ABSTRACT
The use of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) or doping is a pervasive phenomenon in sport; doping examples are numerous in elite sport with Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, and Tyler Hamilton constituting just a few of the many high-profile cases of athletes who have admitted to, or have been found guilty of, doping. Doping constitutes one of the dark sides of sport with potentially important negative consequences not only for athletes’ health but also for the integrity of sport. It is a behavior which breaks the rules of sport participation; given that athletes do not openly admit to doping when taking part in sport, doping is cheating, thus it is a moral issue. Its study, like the study of morality, has inherent challenges not present in other areas of inquiry. Specifically, researchers ask people who cheat to tell the truth about cheating. Despite its challenges, this is an important area of research, and understanding why some athletes dope and what enables them to act in this way has received considerable attention in recent years (see Ntoumanis et al. 2014).
