‘Vitamins’, shortcuts, and athletic citizenship in Ethiopia and Cameroon: considering sporting ethics beyond biomedicine

This article argues that the current way of thinking about ethics in sport in primarily biomedical terms, and in particular in terms of the presence of particular pharmaceutical substances, fails to account for broader notions of sporting ethics and fairness in the Global South. Ethnographic material from Ethiopia and Cameroon on attitudes towards doping, ‘spiritual doping’, and age tampering demonstrates that athletes themselves are far more concerned with issues of global inequality and the fair distribution of resources. Current statements on sporting ethics are revealed as at once too narrow (focusing only on individual responsibility and biological factors) and too abstract (without accounting for specific social and economic realities). We extend the notion of ‘athletic citizenship’ to go beyond ‘biological citizenship’, and argue that the current biomedical model of sporting ethics works to obscure the structural and racialized inequalities that define global sports. Beyond sport, our analysis also demonstrates that the boundaries of citizenship are today often policed through hybridized formations that are not limited to the legal systems of individual countries or to straightforward processes of regulation, but which extend to quasi‐legal, transnational entities that police specific kinds of bodies.