Moral, health and aesthetic risks: performance-enhancing drug use and the culture of silence in the UK strongwoman community

Strength- and muscularity-based sports have a long and enduring association with performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), most notably anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS). Strongwoman is a strength and power-based sport with its own attendant subculture around training, nutrition, and shared values. Although extant literature has examined PED use in mainstream sports, there is a gap relating to its use in niche, subcultural sports such as strongwoman, and the voices of those choosing to use PEDs are rarely heard. Based on data from a wider auto/ethnographic study exploring strongwoman’s subculture, and primarily drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with 23 strongwoman competitors of various stages and levels of involvement in the sport, this article examines the attitudes, values, and practices surrounding PED use in the unregulated sport of strongwoman. In comparing novice, intermediate, and elite strongwoman experiences, the findings demonstrate shifting attitudes, perceptions and practices. The analysis indicates that the temporality and intensity of involvement in a sport is crucial to understanding changes relating to perceptions about moral, health, and aesthetic risks and, further, that a ‘culture of silence’ within a given sporting subculture is perpetuated by complex individual negotiations of risk and reward. The insights from this study have implications for other non-regulated and uncommercialised sports, particularly regarding the development of harm reduction strategies, and how these can be most effective.