Last week, members of the wider KPE community came together at Innis College for the second annual Peter Donnelly Lecture in Sport Policy Studies, presented by the Centre for Sports Policy Studies.
Attendees both in person and online were welcomed by CSPS Director and KPE Professor Simon Darnell, who reflected on the current political climate. “We don’t take it lightly or for granted that we are able to freely gather here and take part in this tradition of discourse that lies at the heart of academia,” he said.
The Donnelly Lecture honours the contribution and legacy of Peter Donnelly, KPE Professor Emeritus and CSPS founding Director from 1999 through 2021. The lecture series aims to celebrate his legacy of teaching, contribution to the sociology of sport and commitment to social justice. The evening’s keynote, delivered by Professor Ian Ritchie of Brock University’s Department of Kinesiology, did just that.
Dr. Ritchie’s lecture, entitled Defining Fairness in Sport: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Anti-Doping Policy explored the twentieth-century history of Olympic-level sport and the multifaceted, often panic-laden policy decisions that dogged it. Dr. Ritchie, who co-authored the book Fastest, Highest, Strongest: A Critique of High-Performance Sport in 2006, has published and lectured extensively on the subject over the years, and his talk emphasized the importance of context when discussing anti-doping policy. “Anti-doping policy’s main purpose,” he said, “is to preserve Olympic exceptionalism—that myth of aspirational purity that was written into the Games at their inception.”
The emergence of anti-doping policy, Dr. Ritchie explained, coincided with a moral panic and widespread public disdain for athletes who chose to use performance-enhancing drugs. However, he continued, the panic had “never really been about athletics,” and, furthermore, failed to account for the overarching socio-political context that is crucial to understanding how the modern world viewed sport. Athletes suspected of doping were branded as “socially degenerate” for their sins even as the world around them urged competition to ever-increasing levels of performance. Dr. Ritchie, ultimately, considered the hypocrisy at the heart of the governing bodies that developed these anti-doping policies, the echoes of which still resonate to this day. In other words, "we must celebrate a return to the pure spirit of amateurism ... but don't forget to win at all costs."
It was appropriate, then, that in attendance was legendary Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who held the title of World’s Fastest Man in 1987–1988 after breaking both the 100m and 60m indoor World Records—a feat that Dr. Ritchie called “the greatest moment in Canadian sport history.” The doping controversy surrounding Johnson’s performance at the 1988 Seoul Olympics saw him stripped of his gold medal. Canadian sports journalist Mary Ormsby, whose recent biography of Johnson is entitled World’s Fastest Man*, was also in attendance. During the post-lecture conversation, she explained that situations like Johnson’s represented a “failure of Canadian sporting officials at the highest level,” where athletes alone suffered due a widespread systemic failure of anti-doping policy and sports culture as a whole. Johnson, for his part, certainly does not consider his to be an isolated incident. “I paid the price for many, many athletes,” he said.
Johnson and Ormsby’s contributions to the evening made for a lively conclusion, with Dr. Ritchie fielding questions from the live and online audience, moderated by Dr. Donnelly himself, who also attended with his family.
A recording of the second annual Peter Donnelly Lecture in Sport Policy Studies is available to watch online.