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Values-based education seeks to cultivate personal responsibility, empathy, and integrity to encourage critical reflection on the (anticipated or actual) consequences of one’s choices and behaviours. To comply with the World Anti-Doping Agency's International Standard for Education, anti-doping education programmes must incorporate values-based components. To facilitate this development, we explored how elite athletes interpret and apply their values in various situations throughout their athletic careers. Adopting a qualitative description design, 13 focus groups were conducted with 60 elite athletes from 13 countries participating in 27 sports at national or international levels. Audio recordings were transcribed/translated and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Athletes noted that their values guide their actions but struggled to articulate how these values influence their behaviour. Three overarching themes were created to capture: (1) value consciousness and clarity, (2) intrapersonal value continuity, and (3) value conflict and management. Dynamic relationships between athletes’ values, priorities, and decision-making processes were evident. Specifically, the results illustrate shifts in value priorities as athletes matured and progressed in their careers, and across situations to meet situational demands whilst making behaviour personally permissible. To live up to the fundamental principles of values-based education, anti-doping programmes must incorporate activities that facilitate conceptually sound discussions and provide athletes with time and support to unpack the behavioural meaning of their values. Developing athletes’ decision-making abilities through conscious sense-making activities to anticipate the pain of a value transgression and the value of value fulfilment is key to this process.

Studies investigating competitive bodybuilding have primarily done so from a pathologizing perspective, and have often considered aspects of the competitive bodybuilding lifestyle in isolation, therefore overlooking the broader motivations underlying individuals’ engagement in the sport. The current study addressed these limitations by using a meta-ethnographic approach to review the existing competitive bodybuilding literature as a collective. Synthesis of 20 published studies relating to competitive bodybuilders’ motivations, behaviours, and experiences resulted in the construction of five third-order constructs: a journey of self-discovery and improvement, gaining a new identity, enacting control, conditional and unconditional social support, and decisional balance. Encapsulated as a ‘perfect storm’, the results offer novel conceptual understanding of how the interplay of personality traits, life experiences, and situational factors drive competitors to begin and maintain their participation in competitive bodybuilding, the social support they experience, and the role of control in competitors’ motivations, harm management, and justificatory processes. From an applied perspective, the study has implications in terms of both support provision and harm management.

Agents, race-organisers, and sponsors have a key influence in shaping the world of elite professional distance running. Yet to date this important but hard-to-reach stakeholder group has been omitted from the global research landscape of doping and anti-doping. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in the literature and explore the systematic contributors to doping in elite long-distance running, along with potential solutions to this issue, from this influential perspective. Thirteen in-depth interviews were conducted with agents (n = 8) of world-class long-distance runners, major race organisers (n = 3), and sports marketing managers for global brands (n = 2). The interviews were conducted via the phone, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Reflexive thematic analysis generated three themes which focused on: 1) The framework of professional distance running and the contextual aspects which may contribute to doping risk, 2) the impact of various recruitment strategies on doping and anti-doping, and 3) the lessons that can be learnt from the participants’ first-hand experiences with doping cases and/or managing anti-doping requirements. Reflecting on the sector rather than the sample, the results highlighted that not all commercial stakeholders feel responsible for anti-doping. Collective responsibility from all stakeholders, which is currently borne by some and not others, is necessary to minimise doping in distance running. The challenge is how to convince all stakeholders of their share of the responsibility.

In the past decade, a body of evidence has reported that dietary supplement use is related to prohibited performance enhancing substance use (i.e., doping). To help international and national sport organisations understand the degree to which dietary supplement use is related to doping, the objectives of this systematic review and meta-analysis were to 1) compare the prevalence of doping between dietary supplement users and non-users and 2) identify whether supplement use is related to doping social cognitive factors. We searched for studies sampling athletes and that measured both dietary supplement use and doping in EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsychINFO, CINAHL and SPORTDiscus from database creation to May 2022. Risk of bias was assessed using JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist for cross-sectional studies and the STROBE checklist. Twenty-six cross-sectional studies, involving 13,296 athletes were included. Random-effect models revealed that doping was 2.74 (95% CI=2.10 to 3.57) times more prevalent in dietary supplement users (pooled prevalence = 14.7%) than non-users (6.7%), and that users reported stronger doping intentions (r=0.26, 0.18 to 0.34) and attitudes (r=0.21, 0.13 to 0.28) compared to non-users. Preliminary evidence also suggests that dietary supplement users were less likely to dope if they were more task oriented and had a stronger sense of morality. Results of the review are limited by the cross-sectional design used in all studies and lack of consistency in measurement of dietary supplement use and doping. Data indicate that athletes using dietary supplements are more likely to self-report doping Anti-doping policy should, therefore, target dietary supplement use in anti-doping education programmes by providing alternative strategies for performance enhancement or highlighting the safest ways they can be consumed. Similarly, as a large proportion of athletes use dietary supplements without doping, further research is needed to understand the factors that pro