ABSTRACT
This chapter explains an overview of doping practices in athletics from the end of the nineteenth century until today without discussing in detail any individual doping cases and deals with anti-doping policy. The nineteenth-century optimism surrounding the use of drugs to improve the body, combat fatigue and aid social progress changed into health anxieties and moral panic in the course of the twentieth century. Amateurs, in contrast to supposedly doped professionals, were therefore expected to compete drug-free. The situation fundamentally changed during the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, when a growing number of sports organizations began to introduce more detailed rules and tests. As a compilation of basic human movements athletics comprises the core of the Olympic Games. Drug use in athletics has to be considered within a specific socio-cultural and political context: amateur sport has become increasingly professionalized and commercialized in the post-war period.
