Ethical committees and professional sports – ‘bioethicalization’ of sports as a need

The main goal of this paper is to consider the necessity of founding ethical committees in professional sports. In the first part of the paper the authors consider the emergence of the first ethical committee in medicine, and the emergence of bioethics as a social movement and academic discipline. In the second part of the paper, the authors examine few examples of ethical committees in contemporary professional sport and the need to set up ethical committees within sports associations to consider numerous ethical problems: doping, match fixing, referee errors, racism, injuries, sex/gender and body issues, sexual abuse in sports etc. These topics are also an inevitable field studied within bioethics, so the following question arises: ‘Is the official establishment of ethical committees in professional sports as an aspect of ‘bioethicalization’ of sport a real need that is imposed due to the growing ethical problems that are present in modern sports?’