Sporting Integrity,Coherence, and Being True to the Spirit of a Game

Abstract

The term ‘sporting integrity’ is widely used in the normative assessment of sports. The term, however, suffers from a lack of conceptual precision. Alfred Archer’s ‘coherence-view’ of sporting integrity goes a long way to help clarify what ‘sporting integrity’ actually means and the specific institutional and individual obligations that it generates. Archer argues that ‘sporting integrity’ essentially means that the constraints athletes face ‘cohere’, in the sense of applying consistent inefficiencies between athletic competitors. For example, those who use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are less constrained than those who do not use PEDs, and thus PED use undermines sporting integrity. This paper presents the argument that over and above competitive coherence, sporting integrity means living up to the ‘spirit’ or ‘ethos’ of a game. The implications of this view are that a sport could have ‘coherent’ competitive constraints and still lack sporting integrity; additionally, a sport could have ‘incoherent’ competitive constraints and still demonstrate sporting integrity. These implications are drawn out relative to the three specific cases that Archer uses to illustrate his coherence view; namely, PED use in professional cycling, ‘tanking’ in Olympic badminton, and the prospect of allowing the Rangers Football Club entrance into the Scottish Premier League without playing through and first winning/qualifying in the lesser leagues.