By Thomas Giles |
Research carried out by golfsupport.com has shown that 69 percent of fans say that drug cheats are most likely to be found in athletics.
The website analyzed findings reported by polling agency YouGov after 1,652 people responded to a survey about drugs in sport.
The question put to the respondents was “Would you say the following sports do have a problem with performance enhancing drugs?”
Participants were then given a multiple choice of sports to select.
Golfsupport.com found that athletics was the top-ranked sport with 69 percent, followed by weightlifting with 57 percent.
Cycling, which has recently been highly-scrutinized following a British Parliamentary Committee hearing’s conclusion that Team Sky and their former rider Sir Bradley Wiggins crossed an “ethical line” in their use of Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs), polled at 54 percent.
Tennis and swimming also ranked highly at 35 and 33 percent respectively.
Football, the world’s most popular sport, polled at 32 percent.
At the other end of the table, golf was seen as the cleanest sport with 10 percent of the vote.
In terms of who is responsible for the drug abuse, 39 percent of respondents said it was the athletes, followed by the coach and the team at 32 percent.
Nine per cent of people said it was the country the athletes represent, as highlighted by the Russian doping scandal, which saw the nation running a state-sponsored doping program.
With this being the case, Russia was unsurprisingly top of the poll as the country most likely to cheat with 76 percent.
The United States and China rounded off the top three with 45 and 39 percent respectively.
Kenya were seen as the “cleanest” country with 29 percent of the vote, despite the African nation being the center of a number of scandals in athletics, followed closely by France on 23 percent.
Nineteen percent of respondents felt Australia were least likely to cheat with performance enhancing drugs.
Interestingly, 32 per cent of fans said they do not care if athletes use performance enhancing drugs.
Republished with permission from insidethegames.biz.