ABSTRACT
The new Millennium, with its promise of new opportunities and technologies, lays witness to recurring ‘social problems’ including what many consider the scourge of modern sport: drug-taking for athletic enhancement. The clandestine use of biochemical resources in the risk oriented world of late modernity (Beck 1992, Giddens 1991) is one of the few issues which shifts the focus on sport to the front pages of newspapers (Bromley 1997: 112). As sports become increasingly capital intensive, it isunsurprising that someathletescompeting in the 2000OlympicGames have been discredited for taking banned/hazardous drugs such as anabolicandrogenic steroids (hereafter abbreviated to steroids). However, as evidenced in the British press during previous Olympic Games, it is not only elite athletes who risk drug side effects and social stigmatisation. Bodybuilders, in particular, have been negatively characterised as (among other things) illicit steroid ‘abusers’ (The Guardian 6 August 1992). Here risks to the Olympic ethic of ‘fair play’ are substituted by concerns of self-other health risks, including drug induced violence.
