A Study on Causes of Elite Athletes' Tendency to Doping

Considering importance and role of sport in the international level inparticular the presence of clean and doping-free athletes in sporting events, it seems that achieving this is crucial in identifying the causes of this unpleasant phenomenon in sport. The research is to study the causes of elite athletes' tendency to doping which was done by qualitative research method. The statistical population was the board of federations, coaches and athletes of the national teams of cycling, running, weightlifting, wrestling and basketball which according to the report of the Medical Federation of December 2016 had the highest doping rates in Iran and participated in the Jakarta Asian Games. The Samples were selected by purposeful sampling and snowball technique. Semi-structured interviews were used for data collection and MAXQDA 2018 software was used for data coding and data analysis.  According to the findings, 13 factors were identified as causes of doping tendency among Iranian national athletes, including personal, psychological, financial, legal, managerial, coaching, functional, individual, attitude, social and cultural, control, structural factors. Finally, in line with the results, some suggestions were pesented.