Introduction

Although the public outcry around match fixing is recent (Hill, 2011), the phenomenon of sport integrity long predates it. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the zealously competitive ancient Greeks, it appears that the first documented case of match fixing dates back to 388 BC. The boxer Eupolos paid three of his opponents to let him win the tournament (Maening, 2005). Moreover, match fixing did not limit itself to athletes: it was committed by emperors too. The Roman Emperor Nero paid his fellow competitors not to turn up at the qualifying chariot races for the Olympic Games in 67 AC, as well as bribing the organizers to allow him to compete (Maening, 2005). Yet there is a problem, which I shall call conceptual reductionism, with considering sport integrity and match fixing as synonyms (Cleret et al 2015). Match fixing, or event manipulation as it is properly described (McNamee, 2016; UNODC 2016), is just one species of the genus sport integrity. In this short essay, therefore, I shall focus on some important philosophical questions about the nature of sport integrity. I shall make several important conceptual distinctions that will allow us to be in a position as administrators, coaches, officials and teachers of sports to better understand the concept in order to develop strategies that will preserve and promote the integrity of sport. The Cambridge philosopher Prof. Simon Blackburn has invoked a beautiful description for this which avoids the term “philosophy” because of the connotations that often—though wrongly—attach to philosophical work. He calls it instead “conceptual engineering”:

I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering. For just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involves seeing how the parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes were made. This is what we aim at when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures that we have built. Or we may believe that they may need dismantling and start afresh. But first we have to know what they are. (1999: 1–2)

So what I will undertake in this short paper is an example of conceptual engineering in relation to the concept of “sport integrity”.

What is this thing called sport integrity?

Despite gaining common currency in sports journalism in recent years, the term sport integrity is still in its infancy. It is no surprise then that it seems to mean all things to all people. Moreover, the very notion of restoring sport integrity presupposes that there was a time when sport had integrity. There is only one serious review of the literature on integrity in sport, but it is besieged by conceptual problems. Treagus, Cover and Beasley (2011) catalogue a range of values that they see as constitutive of the concept. However, their list includes actions and issues as diverse as doping and recreational drug use, fraud, illegal gambling, match fixing, racism, sexism, violence and unethical practices surrounding coaching, management and procurement. This kind of conceptual inflation is not helpful to administrators attempting to gain a clear focus on specific objects of concern, though it does give an indication of the variety of ethical problems facing sports. What is problematic here is a conceptual issue: the many senses of integrity, from personal integrity to moral integrity and beyond, are conflated.

One of the difficulties for scholars, administrators and policy makers is the sheer variety of ways in which the concept of integrity has been employed. At one level, it is taken to represent the most general kind of ethical approval, such as when one says of a person: “She was a politician of unusual integrity”. At another level, it seems applicable to any whole or ideal that may be fractured in some way: “The integrity of my computer hard drive has been corrupted”. It is often the case that integrity is preceded by a modifier, usually a noun. This is the way I shall approach my discussion of “sport integrity”. Ascertaining the senses of integrity as applied to sports is not a straightforward matter.

In the only published conceptual analysis in the literature of the philosophy of sport, Archer (2016) analyzes sport integrity into three varieties of virtue: personal virtue, institutional virtue and political integrity. For present purposes I shall loosely follow that scheme, but will focus more on the institutional context of sport integrity since it is the institutions of sport, such as the IOC, that are responsible for promoting and preserving the integrity of sport and restoring it where it has been corrupted.

Sports Practices, Sports Institutions, and Sport Integrity

The work of the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has become widely used in discussions of sports and their ethical nature. MacIntyre (1984) set out a distinction between practices and institutions that is cited extensively in the philosophy of sport and sports ethics literature (Arnold 1997; Brown 1990; McNamee 1995; Steenbergen and Tamboer 1998; Schneider and Butcher 1998). The distinction between the two is roughly that between the social practice itself (e.g. athletics, football, rugby, tennis) and the organizational and bureaucratic institutions that structure them. In a sense, MacIntyre is asking his readers to suspend their ordinary understanding of the terms.

The marking of the distinction opened up a space for philosophical debate that sociologists found it difficult to agree with: how can one talk about a social practice in abstraction from the contexts in which it emerged without talking about the concrete entities themselves? Well, in sociological terms, MacIntyre’s idea was close to that of an ideal type: an abstraction of the thing in itself. Imagine the following thought experiment: consider tennis itself, irrespective of the pronouncements of the ITF or the ATP, the WTP and so on. What are you left with but the sport itself: the activity. And this is constituted by its rules and objectives, techniques and skills, tactics and strategies and so on. Then, of course, there is the conception, the narratives, the ideals of what tennis stands for: baseline versus serve and volley; aggression versus prudent passive stroke play; taking risks or extending the rally; and so forth. For reasons that will become clear, the notion of sports as practices is crucially important, since it is the integrity of these practices that sports institutions must promote, protect and— yes—restore.

Personal Integrity of Sports Leaders

Much journalistic discussion of sports integrity has focused on the aspect that concerns the behaviours of sports leaders: personal integrity. Every day, it seems that the media reveals a new story concerning the misconduct of the global institutions of sport. Take football, for instance, and the machinations of the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) between 2008 and 2015, during which period its President, Sepp Blatter, was regarded as one of the world’s leading sports administrators and as someone who had made very significant contributions to the globalization of the game. His reputation has been badly tarnished, however, despite the FIFA’s evident commercial success, by a series of scandals which include the “selling” of commercial rights for the World Cup for minuscule amounts. During his seven year reign, he instituted a number of governance reforms that were intended to protect the commercial value of FIFA’s product: the game of football. And it is noteworthy that the 2015 independent report on the global governance of sport by the group “Play the game” listed FIFA as the second best international sports federation in terms of good governance in sport. It is a matter of no small irony, then, that Blatter had himself approved a suggestion from the German Football Federation to establish integrity checks on potential candidates for senior football posts. Quite what those “integrity checks” might look like was not explicitly articulated; Blatter himself only referred to more detailed investigations by the FIFA Ethics Committee (BBC 2015b).

One reasonably uncontentious aspect of personal integrity is the idea that what one says and what one does are unified, or at least integrated. Journalistically, we often hear the phrase “If you talk the talk, you have to walk the walk”. This is part of what is meant when we say someone is genuinely or sincerely committed to a given purpose or ideal. And there is a requirement that leaders of organizations will exhibit positive behaviours (what moral philosophers would call “virtues”) consistent with the stated aims and values of their organizations, as set out in mission statements, codes of conduct and other governance tools.

Given what was discovered, it is reasonable to assume that Blatter’s public persona and role in a not-for-profit company had become a vehicle for the aggrandizement of himself and an intimate circle of insiders, who were often the heads of national sports federations. In addition to a relatively unified personal identity (by which I mean something like the integration of his commitments and values), questions arise about the conduct of officials like Blatter in private not merely in their public words and deeds. Politicians are often criticized for a lack of consistency in their public and private behaviour, and often seem to use the holding of public office for private gains. It is certainly not accidental that this is how Transparency International defines “corruption”.

The idea that sports leaders have failed to live up to certain ideals seems often to be part of integrity talk. In statistics, scientists often talk about “outliers” for data points that do not converge around a set of results that are expected. They are often unexplained exceptions to the rule. But it is clear that Mr Blatter is no outlier among senior sports administrators in his lack of integrity. The events preceding the 2016 Olympic Games and the chicanery of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) serve as chastening reminders of the poor governance record in sports (BBC 2015a; King 2016). And even in the wake of Rio, there are ongoing investigations into illicit payments made to IAAF officials and their business associates, not least to the son of the former President of the IAAF (Fonseca, 2017).

A commitment to coherence and consistency in what we do and say is not enough, of course. One can say one is committed to using one’s office to amass as much wealth as possible (and plenty of sports administrators have surely said this in private). Yet that is not what is meant by personal integrity; it is not merely about these things. Both individuals and institutions must thus be committed to ethically admirable, or at least ethically defensible, sporting goals. Second, the Latin integritas suggests wholeness, as noted by Robert Audi and Patrick Murphy (2006): integrity is something that must be revealed in action, and most clearly when one’s ideals (whether personal or institutional) are at stake. What more can be said of sport integrity beyond the leadership of sport?

Integrity and sports institutions

We might say that for an institution to have integrity, its ends and procedures should be shared by everyone from an office worker to the office of the chief executive or the chair of the governing Board. As such, integrity is an essential ideal for models of good governance (King 2016). Of course, sharedness is a matter of degree. On the one hand, it might mean, minimally, observing the rules and policies of one’s institutions, while in other cases it might mean aspiring to best practices in such matters as dealing with conflicts of interest. And this might require a strong and organization-wide commitment to transparency. Moreover, the integrity of an institution requires that its ends are not usurped, or at least not undermined, by an overriding commitment to, for example, the accumulation of wealth by individuals or the institution as a whole, and that the institution does not become inured to corruption (economic or ethical).

MacIntyre (1984) remarked that, at a general level, social practices are always vulnerable to the acquisitive power of sports institutions. But the influence of such organizations is not always malignant. Indeed, the institutions of sport simultaneously corrupt and support sports practices (Brown 1990; McNamee 1995; Morgan 2006). They codify rules, organize competitions, and educate and licence players and officials. No complex social practice can survive long without such institutions. Yet with new crises emerging almost weekly, one may wonder whether many sports organizations have the structures and cultures they need to develop good governance and maintain their integrity. This is a critical task, since any sports institution that fails to stand up to, say, organized doping or illegal gambling syndicates may properly be said to have lost its integrity. The leading officers in particular of sports institutions must have executive virtues (the kind of admirable character traits that get things done), and courage is likely to be principle among them. Institutional failure is often discussed in the philosophy of sport literature in relation to the tension between the internal and external goods of sport—that is, loosely, those goods definitive of the activity (skilful movement, nuanced coordination, agility, tactical awareness and so on) and those that are extrinsic to it and which may be achieved through an indefinite number of activities (status and wealth being the usual candidates).

Sports practices and competition integrity

We have discussed some of the features of sports integrity in relation to sports institutions and compared and contrasted them with personal virtues. But what sense, if any, can be made of the integrity of sports as practices. For the sake of clarity, we will invent a new term: competition integrity.

A good sports competition must embody a number of features. First, it should have a clearly delineated test that is shared (Kretchmar 1975). That test is a challenge concerning the range of physical and psychological abilities and skills. Every sports institution develops over time a rules-based structure that articulates the defining goals and the permissible means of achieving them. The sporting contest that the institution arranges must allow individuals or teams to be measured, evaluated and ranked against an agreed-upon goal, using only means that are allowed by the rules of the activity (Loland, 2002).

When sports institutions develop these regulatory structures, they create a formal framework for drawing distinctions between contestants in a variety of ways. It allows distinctions between and within athletic forms. Running is essential in football, but is distinguished from it by the range of additional motor skills that football requires and which are enshrined in the rules. But within athletics we can contrast race walking with marathon running, even though they may be said to be members of the same sporting family: athletics. Thus one may meaningfully compare and contrast association football (soccer) with rugby football or American football. In order to preserve the integrity of sports, we must preserve and promote the integrity of the constituent parts of the test and contest. In doing so, one will find much that is shared: territory invasion, notions of ball possession, rules determining which body parts may or may not come into contact with an opponent or when manipulating the ball, and so on. One may also find key differences: the direction of permissible passing, whether hands can be used to catch the ball, the number of players that are allowed to form a scrimmage or scrum, etc. Good sports competitions are the product of historical—but often dimly articulated—excellences that are shared to a given degree across sports (Devine 2011). And maintaining or restoring sport integrity as competition integrity will involve considerable skill, insight and experience both in the activity and in the construction of good rules.

This broad set of philosophical remarks draws attention to the logic of sporting activities: competition integrity requires that the test demands of players and athletes what it is supposed to and that the formats chosen have sufficient consistency for meaningful comparison to be made with activities that go by the same name in various places around the world and over an extended period of time. So that javelin throwers did not kill or maim runners on the athletics track, for example, the physical structure of javelins was biomechanically altered so they would fall to earth more steeply and within the limits of the inner portion of the athletics track. Although the equipment and therefore the rules changed, the same capacities were tested. As with personal integrity, notions of coherence and consistency are a large part of what is meant by competition integrity. What this meant, though, is that differences between historical epochs of javelin throwing compromised this integrity. We can say then that the integrity of the sport of javelin throwing was challenged, albeit for good reasons: to preserve the physical integrity of athletes.

A more general point can be made here. When competition formats are revised, whether for the purpose of maximizing the number of paying spectators or for the sake of televised performances, what may be at stake is the integrity of the competition. International cricket matches were traditionally held over five days. More recent innovations, such as One Day Internationals between competing nations, are thought by traditionalists to diminish the quality of the sporting contest. Not only are they less a test of endurance because they are of shorter duration, the compression also occludes some traditional skills (defence) and privileges new ones (new run-scoring techniques).

Whether or not the integrity of the game is compromised by promoting or downplaying different skills and virtues is thus a moot point. How does one answer the question of who was the better bowler (pitcher) or batter when competition formats are altered and the game takes different forms at different times? Presuming the coherence of the tests involved, are the competitions of sufficient constancy to be said to have maintained competition integrity? Questions like these have proved to be a major headache for sports administrators and sports media entrepreneurs. It is therefore surprising, given the explicitly conceptual nature of these problems, that philosophers are rarely invited to help understand them.

Conclusion

I have tried in this short essay to give an indication of the need for philosophers of sport to engage in practical activities that shape and define the activities we love. I have shown how the task of restoring sports integrity is first and foremost a philosophical one, whether we like it or not, since one cannot proceed very far in this exercise without properly understanding what sports and integrity actually mean. And when we look closely at the concept of integrity, we can see that there is more than one conception of it. Analysing sport integrity requires us to articulate this double vision or double character of sport (Steenbergen and Tambooer, 1998) as both practice and institution, and to distinguish the personal integrity of sports leaders from the integrity of sports competitions. This is a first step, but only a first step, towards understanding what it is that we should be promoting, preserving and restoring in terms of sport integrity, both as players and administrators, but above all as lovers of sport.¹

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1. This essay is a revised and greatly shortened version of an earlier paper: Cleret, Page and McNamee, 2017.

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McNAMEE Mike,"Restoring Sport Integrity: some conceptual engineering",in:K. Georgiadis(ed.), Ethics,Education and Governance in the OlympicMovement, 57thInternational Session for Young Participants (AncientOlympia,17/6-1/7/2017),International Olympic Academy, Athens, 2018,pp.108-118.

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