Juju: Africa doping

Age tampering

Another form of “cheating”, a public secret in the world of international football, is players lying about their age. Athletes from different parts of the world produce documents to their future clubs that state they are no older than 19 years of age.

In Cameroon, preparation for trials in European football clubs often involves finding ways to obtain documents that show the player to be younger than he actually is.

While the football clubs and sporting bodies seek to catch and sanction the players, West African footballers do not consider the practice as cheating.

Athletes tamper with their age as a way of equalising the playing field. They attempt to compensate for the fact that aspiring athletes in the Global North, who from a young age have better access to good sports infrastructure and equipment, are in a privileged position to transform their athletic talent into a long-term career.

While international sporting bodies talk about athletes needing to take individual responsibility for different forms of “cheating”, young African footballers address large-scale power relations that they see as being turned against them.

By adjusting their age, the footballers challenge the moral high ground on which international sports institutions claim to stand, and demonstrate how “cheating” is not always cheating, but instead a challenge to unequal power relations.

What is ‘cheating’ and who defines it?

WADA’s anti-doping strategies are based on the separation of the body and the mind, the biological and the psychological, the physical and the spiritual. It consistently prioritises the physical, assuming that being a “clean” athlete means being free from prohibited chemicals.

While the kind of regulation that WADA seeks to apply on a global level is useful, it is at odds with the ideas of West African athletes, for whom the spiritual and the physical are deeply entangled.

Is “jars” a form of doping that WADA should attempt to regulate then? Should international sporting bodies clamp down on footballers’ age tampering? Absolutely not.

The importance of spirituality in sport is not exclusive to Africa. The Thai owner of Leicester City famously flew buddhist monks in from Thailand to bless the players during the team’s miraculous 2015-2016 season.

The African game gives us a different insight into what “performance-enhancing” and “cheating” really mean. The shift in perspective allows us to avoid taking WADA’s and the IOC’s definitions for granted and stop regarding them as a universal truth.

Instead, we should see them for what they are – hegemonic notions constructed in a certain historical period, developed from a specific philosophical standpoint, and applied from a position of power.

This piece was written in collaboration with the GLOBALSPORT team, a research project funded by the European Research Council.

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Source: theconversation