Commitment

Abstract

This chapter explores the ‘commitment stage’ of disgraced athletes’ self-narratives — this phase centres upon the active choice to start, and then persist, doping. We see the deployment of neutralisation techniques that seek to minimise the athletes’ agency, displacing responsibility onto a combination of compelling circumstances, peer pressures and inducements, and manipulation by other, more powerfully placed actors. The ‘denial of responsibility’ and the ‘appeal to higher loyalties’ are used to insulate the narrators from stigma.