How to Influence National Pride? The Olympic Medal Index as a Unifying Narrative

Elite sport is often regarded as one of the main vehicles for articulating national pride and stimulating national cohesion. In this article, we explore a variety of different notions of pride and nationality as related to success in elite sport. We present the results of a public survey, which measured some of the effects on national pride in the Netherlands, related to the men's European Football Championships, the Tour de France, Wimbledon and the Olympic Games in Beijing (all in the summer of 2008). The results suggest that a sense of belonging is a necessary condition that precedes rather than results from sport-related pride. This supports the notion of national pride being a rather stable characteristic of countries, notwithstanding specific situations (such as sport success) that may lead to minor and temporary fluctuations. There seems to be no empirical evidence for the - primarily quantitatively understood - concept of pride (as a 'bucket-notion'), which is often implicit to the political rhetoric used to increase sport funding with the aim of winning more medals to generate an increase in national pride. © The Author(s) 2010

MORAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND DOPING CULTURES IN SPORT

Summary In this article, the fight against doping has been analyzed as an ongoing process of social definition. It is dependent on the development of power relations within and outside the world of sport. To analyze these dependencies, I identified a variety of important doping cultures in sport and studied the development of the power relations between the supporters of these cultures during the second half of the twentieth century. Doping culture is defined as the typical attitudes and practices relating to doping within a sector of the world of sport. I distinguish an official Olympic doping culture and more secret cultures in cycling, weightlifting, track and field and American professional team sports. I analyzed how the Olympic battle against doping became integrated in the American "War on Drugs". The relevance of discussing doping in terms of doping cultures is that drug use should not be considered simply as an act of individual cheating, but as an institutionalized activity in certain sectors of sport. The existence of a culture presupposes a certain degree of organization of its participants. Those who wish to fight doping in sports should try to attack this organization. They should not just test individual athletes for doping. On top of this they should look for those who produce and distribute the drugs and those who teach the athletes to use them. Ruud Stokvis (1943) teaches sociology in the department of sociology/anthropology of th