Sports involvement can be both formal and informal at the same time: a comment on peretti‐watel <i>et  al</i>.

Sir—Peretti-Watel et al.'s (2002) study, conducted in France among 10 807 adolescents (age range 14–19 years), shows that the U-shaped curve between the intensity of physical activity and licit and illicit drug use is not systematic. According to the authors, the relationship between sport participation and the use of substances depends on many factors, such as the substance considered, the level of use, gender, age, whether or not the subject is registered with a club and the type of sport practised. The authors aimed ‘to go further than the U-curve by taking into account the context of sporting practice’. Thus, they distinguished between two types of context of practice: registration in a club (formal) and playing sports alone or with friends (informal). However, in a recent study performed on 1631 French adolescents (age range 12–22 years), L’Aoustet et al. (2002) revealed that 44.8% of the 1296 subjects who practised sport did so in a bimodal way—in both a formal (club, association) and an informal (alone, with friends and relatives) context. To our knowledge, no study describing the relationship between sporting practice and the use of licit and illicit substances has taken into account these three modes of practice context (i.e. formal, informal and bimodal). Therefore, it is our view that the approach used by Peretti-Watel et al. and others (e.g. Choquet & Hassler 1997; Pate et al. 2000; Okruhlica et al. 2001) disregards the real practice context of about half of the sporting population. Hence, it is likely that the relationship between the context of the sporting practice and substance use and abuse would be greatly clarified if the bimodal practice context was considered. In addition, a study conducted by the Canadian Center for Drug-Free Sport (1995) indicates that ‘26% of parents are keeping their children out of organized sport because of the issue of drugs in sport’. This leads us to think that the taking into account of the context of sporting practice is not sufficient. Studies in this area should also address the question of the declared preference of the form of sporting practice (formal, informal alone, informal with friends, informal with relatives). Indeed, when teenagers express their preferred form of sporting practice, they express their own feelings, and not those of their parents or other persons in their entourage. Hence, one may consider that practising a sport in an organized context chosen only by the parents (i.e. in conflict with the preference of the adolescent) could be felt by the adolescent as a powerful stressor and thus could influence their relationship with psychoactive drugs. All things considered, it would be interesting to observe whether sportsmen practising in a bimodal context are clearly distinguished from those practising only in formal or informal contexts with regard to substance use. FABRICE O. LORENTE Faculté des Sciences du Sport Université de la Méditerranée Marseille France E-mail: [email protected]

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