‘‘I have never taken performance enhancing drugs and I never will’’: drug discourse in the Shane Warne case A. Lamont-Mills, S. Christensen Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Qld, Australia Corresponding author: Andrea Lamont-Mills, Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health – Faculty of Sciences, University of Southern Queensland, PO Darling Heights, Qld 4350 Australia. Tel: 161 7 4631 1703, Fax: 61 7 46 31 2721, E-mail: lamontm@usq.edu.au Accepted for publication 20 December 2006 This study investigates the discursive management of taking prohibited substances in sport. In particular, it explores how one high-profile athlete, Australian cricketer Shane Warne, accounted for his drug-taking behavior when talking to the media. Discursive psychology (DP) is used as the theoretical and methodological framework to study drug discourses in sport. Emphasis in DP is on making explicit how psycholo- gical concepts (e.g., drug explanations) are used in everyday talk to perform certain actions. The research data is Warne’s first public press statement concerning his 2003 positive test for hydrochlorothiazide and amiloride. Analy- sis reveals that Warne constructed his drug taking as not being related to performance enhancement and substan- tiated this with a history of negative test results. Warne worked up his taking as the result of ignorance rather than deliberate deception. Further, he presented this as a one-off event and not reflective of systematic drug usage. It is argued in this study that to better understand drug taking in sport, sport researchers need to understand how athletes talk about drugs. For it is through talk that most sporting activities are conducted and maintained, and it is this talk that needs to be understood and analyzed. Despite random drug tests, competition sanctions, and drug education programs, athletes continue to use prohibited substances and methods (DuRant et al., 1995; Laure et al., 2004). Understanding why athletes continue this behavior in spite of the above deterrents has been hampered by the relative absence of sport psychology research that has specifically focused on prohibited substance use (Anshel, 2003). That is, substance use in sport does not appear to be a major research focus for the discipline. As a result, there is limited empirical knowledge concerning the psychological aspects of drug taking in sport. The sport psychology research that has been undertaken has tended to concentrate on the cogni- tive or behavioral aspects of drug taking (e.g., Anshel & Russell, 1997; Laure et al., 2004; Peretti-Watel et al., 2004). While other disciplines such as sociology and sport economics have examined doping in sport using interactionist approaches such as the game theoretical perspective (e.g., Breivik, 1992; Berentsen & Lengwiler, 2004), sport psychology has not. Hence, interactionist approaches are noticeably ab- sent from the sport psychology drug literature. Sport psychology drug research, therefore, typi- cally uses surveys or semi-structured interviews and asks athletes about their behaviors, attitudes, or motives toward taking illegal and performance-en- hancing drugs (PEDs). The results from this research suggest that athletes have negative attitudes toward drug use in sport (e.g., Peretti-Watel et al., 2004), take prohibited substances for predominantly per- formance-enhancing reasons (e.g., Anshel, 1991), and that usage is generally not widespread (e.g., Laure et al., 2004). However this research is problematic methodolo- gically and conceptually. Methodologically, Mona- ghan (2001) has argued that when athletes are asked about their own drug behaviors, motives, and atti- tudes, they often underreport or downgrade their responses because of a reluctance to talk about these issues. Thus, what athletes say and what they do may be incongruent. When considering that it is a felony to engage in some recreational drug usage and that the admission of recreational and prohibited drug usage can lead to competition sanctions, the reluctance of athletes to talk about such issues is understandable. Further, most of this research has used predomi- nantly North American, intervarsity, or adolescent athletes cohorts (e.g., Wechsler & Davenport, 1997; Naylor et al., 2001; Peretti-Watel et al., 2004). Be- sides the issue of result generalization, it is often Scand J Med Sci Sports 2008: 18: 250–258 Copyright & 2007 The Authors Journal compilation & 2007 Blackwell Munksgaard Printed in Singapore . All rights reserved DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0838.2007.00639.x 250