The Anti Doping Crisis In Sport

The sense of crisis that pervades global sport suggests that the war on doping is still very far from being won. In this critical and provocative study of anti-doping regimes in global sport, Paul Dimeo and Verner Møller argue that the current system is at a critical historical juncture. Reviewing the recent history of anti-doping, this book highlights serious problems in the approach developed and implemented by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), including continued failure to accept responsibility for the ineffectiveness of the testing system, the growing number of dubious convictions, and damaging human-rights issues. Without a total rethink of how we deal with this critical issue in world sport, this book warns that we could be facing the collapse of anti-doping, both as a policy and as an ideology. The Anti-Doping Crisis in Sport: Causes, Consequences, Solutions is important reading for all students and scholars of sport studies, as well as researchers, coaches, doctors and policymakers interested in the politics and ethics of drug use in sport. It examines the reasons for the crisis, the consequences of policy strategies, and it explores potential solutions.

The temptation to enhance athletes' performance with substances is great when fame, money, and national pride are involved. From the early days of professional sports, both human and animal athletes have tried to improve their strength and endurance with a range of steroids, hormones, and other drugs. Antidoping regulations established by every conceivable sport seek to ensure fairness on the playing field. Yet deception occurs widely, whether from state-sponsored doping regimens or individual efforts. In this collection of articles, readers will gain a nuanced view of the issues and people involved in the most pivotal news about doping in the sports world.

The temptation to enhance athletes' performance with substances is great when fame, money, and national pride are involved. From the early days of professional sports, both human and animal athletes have tried to improve their strength and endurance with a range of steroids, hormones, and other drugs. Antidoping regulations established by every conceivable sport seek to ensure fairness on the playing field. Yet deception occurs widely, whether from state-sponsored doping regimens or individual efforts. In this collection of articles, readers will gain a nuanced view of the issues and people involved in the most pivotal news about doping in the sports world.

A gripping, provocative history of doping in sports—packed with examples—that proposes a new emphasis for modern anti-doping efforts. Why is doping a perennial problem for sports? Is this solely a contemporary phenomenon? And should doping always be regarded as cheating, or do today’s anti-doping measures go too far? Drawing on case studies from the early twentieth century to the present day, Doping: A Sporting History explores why the current anti-doping system looks as it does, charting its origins to the founding of the modern Olympic Games. From interwar notions of sporting purity to the postwar stimulant crisis, what seemed an easily resolvable problem soon became an impossible challenge as the pharmacology improved, the policy system stuttered, and Cold War politics allowed doping to flourish. The late twentieth century saw the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, but has the intensity of these global measures led to unintended harms? From the cyclist Tommy Simpson who died in 1967 on Mont Ventoux with amphetamines in his jersey to Team Russia’s expulsion from the 2018 Winter Olympics, Doping: A Sporting History is a gripping, provocative account that ultimately proposes a new approach: one for the inclusion and protection of athletes themselves.

This book offers a new history of drug use in sport. It argues that the idea of taking drugs to enhance performance has not always been the crisis or ‘evil’ we now think it is. Instead, the late nineteenth century was a time of some experimentation and innovation largely unhindered by talk of cheating or health risks. By the interwar period, experiments had been modernised in the new laboratories of exercise physiologists. Still there was very little sense that this was contrary to the ethics or spirit of sport. Sports, drugs and science were closely linked for over half a century. The Second World War provided the impetus for both increased use of drugs and the emergence of an anti-doping response. By the end of the 1950s a new framework of ethics was being imposed on the drugs question that constructed doping in highly emotive terms as an ‘evil’. Alongside this emerged the science and procedural bureaucracy of testing. The years up to 1976 laid the foundations for four decades of anti-doping. This book offers a detailed and critical understanding of who was involved, what they were trying to achieve, why they set about this task and the context in which they worked. By doing so, it reconsiders the classic dichotomy of ‘good anti-doping’ up against ‘evil doping’. Winner of the 2007 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the best book in British sports history.

This book is an innovative and compelling work that develops a modified moral panic model illustrated by the drugs in sport debate. Drawing on Max Weber’s work on moral authority and legitimacy, McDermott argues that doping scandals create a crisis of legitimacy for sport governing bodies and other elite groups. This crisis leads to a moral panic, where the issue at stake for elite groups is perceptions of their organizational legitimacy. The book highlights the role of the media as a site where claims to legitimacy are made, and contested, contributing to the social construction of a moral panic. The book explores the way regulatory responses, in this case anti-doping policies in sport, reflect the interests of elite groups and the impact of those responses on individuals, or "folk devils." The War on Drugs in Sport makes a key contribution to moral panic theory by adapting Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s moral panic model to capture the diversity of interests and complex relationships between elite groups. The difference between this book and others in the field is its application of a new theoretical perspective, supported by well-researched empirical evidence.

Incidents of doping in sports are common in news headlines, despite regulatory efforts. How did doping become a crisis? What does a doping violation actually entail? Who gets punished for breaking the rules of fair play? In Testing for Athlete Citizenship, Kathryn E. Henne, a former competitive athlete and an expert in the law and science of anti-doping regulations, examines the development of rules aimed at controlling performance enhancement in international sports. As international and celebrated figures, athletes are powerful symbols, yet few spectators realize that a global regulatory network is in place in an attempt to ensure ideals of fair play. The athletes caught and punished for doping are not always the ones using performance-enhancing drugs to cheat. In the case of female athletes, violations of fair play can stem from their inherent biological traits. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, Testing for Athlete Citizenship offers a compelling account of the origins and expansion of anti-doping regulation and gender-verification rules. Drawing on research conducted in Australasia, Europe, and North America, Henne provides a detailed account of how race, gender, class, and postcolonial formations of power shape these ideas and regulatory practices. Testing for Athlete Citizenship makes a convincing case to rethink the power of regulation in sports and how it separates athletes as a distinct class of citizens subject to a unique set of rules because of their physical attributes and abilities.

Drug abuse in sport has now become an acute international problem, which undermines the integrity of sport and is a real danger to the health of thousands of athletes. The second edition of this publication has been updated to take account of new forms of drug abuse in the sports world, as well as developments in genetic engineering and gene therapy. It also contains a list of useful internet sources. A key finding is that the control of doping, including the harmonisation of both practice and policy among the major world sports bodies, requires a re-evaluation of the direction of future anti-doping policy, particularly in the light of the recent establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency.