INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

marketability, attract sponsors, and sell TV rights at a higher price,
leads to significant ethical issues.
To ease the ethical concerns that the sports media creates, and to
uphold the integrity of the Olympic Games, we suggest that the IOC
provide mandatory education for all accredited journalists on
Olympism, the Olympic ideals, and values in sport. The IOC should
actively recruit interested and well-known athletes to participate in the
education sessions in order to increase the attractiveness of the
sessions to journalists and associate Olympism with respected
athletes. Education on dealing with the media and being a role model
should also be made available to all athletes competing at the Games,
through their respective NOCs, prior to the opening ceremonies. This
will help prepare the athletes for the spectacle of the Olympic Games
and the media coverage they will face. In addition, the IOC could
consider negotiating into future TV contracts a minimum number of
hours of programming a network would have to devote to educational
matter such as Olympism and values in sport.
3. Doping
The presentations and lectures on doping stressed not only the
ethical problems that doping creates, but also the difficulty in
justifying the current bans on drugs and performance enhancing
procedures in sport. However we should keep on trying to design
future sport so that it actually does test for those advantages that we
think it should be testing for. The prevalence of doping in the general
society and in recreational sport shows that doping is not just a
problem in elite sport. There are numerous reasons why athletes
choose to take drugs to enhance their athletic performances, including
the demands of society to perform well, the Olympic motto of citius,
altius, fortius that stresses the need for continued improvement, the
social acceptability of many drugs on the banned list, and the
difficulty involved in improving performance at the elite level. Doping
creates a huge market due to its inherent and complex links to politics,
business, and the pharmaceutical industry. The result of this is the
present scenario where athletes are manipulated and persuaded to be
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