Introduction

During the course of the twentieth century, science made huge strides in the field of medicine. The consumption of medicine increased immensely during the same period, and nothing points to any alteration in that trend in the twenty-first century. Quite the contrary, on top of the steady increase in the number of prescription drugs available and their potential users, there are also increasing numbers of people who look to medication as a means to overcome some physiological weakness or shortcoming. While doping as a modern phenomenon – in other words, since the mid-nineteenth century – has been narrowly related to sporting competition, it has today taken on an additional meaning. Body-builders who train solely with a view to becoming larger and stronger use anabolic steroids to promote muscle growth. Ever larger numbers of students suffering from exam anxiety have begun to use Betablockers to calm their nerves. Others take stimulants to fight jetlag or to enable them to study for longer periods without sinking into the arms of sleep (Sahakian and Morein-Zamir 2007). Such forms of ‘doping’, although now widely discussed, are outside the

scope of this book, which focuses on the use of doping in elite sport. Examples from cycling will take a prominent place, since cases of doping have been most frequent among athletes in this field – or at least most frequently reported – and where the pressure to put an end to the problem has been at its most extreme. Examples of the sport’s determination to tackle doping include proposals for DNA sampling and – in advance of the Tour de France 2007 – the demand that riders should sign up to accepting a fine of one year’s salary for a doping infringement, in addition to the two-year quarantine penalty already in place (Associated Press 2007). Although, cycling offers many examples that are relevant to this book’s line of discussion, the book is not exclusively dedicated to the analysis of the use of doping in cycling. Its aim is, rather, to pave the way for a greater understanding of the mechanisms at work behind the use of doping in elite sport in general and in so doing to reveal problems in the way the issue has so far been tackled. My working hypothesis is that the fight against doping – promoted as an

initiative to cleanse sport of cheats – is at heart an attempt to redeem sport from itself. At the heart of this book runs a fault-line between the will to

purity and the will to win. I have been fortunate both as a PhD supervisor and as the head of a research project funded by the Danish Ministry for Culture on athletes’ attitudes to the doping issue, to be able to generate a wealth of interview material with top athletes from home and abroad. This material provides the sounding board for my analysis and discussion explicitly in the final chapters of the book. Overall, this book aims to analyse and discuss the philosophical, social

and political issues raised in equal measure by the use of and the fight against doping. My aim is to develop a coherent understanding of the complex problem by drawing on a variety of disciplines and sources. The idea has not been to write a textbook. Therefore, references to other scholars’ works have been kept to a minimum. In the few instances where I address specific arguments, the purpose is not to counter certain authors but to show by concrete examples the problems and shortcomings of the various common and not so common arguments presented. With these aims in mind, Chapter 1 leads with the question of ‘What is

doping?’. The discussion that follows shows that finding an answer to this question is not as easy as the everyday use of the term might lead us to believe. Consideration is then given to the advantages and disadvantages of having a lexical definition of doping as a basis for anti-doping work. From this opening discussion on the meaning of doping, Chapter 2 attempts to address the question of ‘what is sport?’ and goes on to develop a perception of the nature of sport that lays the foundation for the book. Drawing on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Chapter 3 examines more closely the motives for engaging in sport as defined in the previous chapter. Accordingly, this chapter provides the background for a deeper understanding of athletes’ incentives to use doping. Chapter 4 shows how the doping problem has been constructed as a form of narrative blurring fact and fiction, and discusses the way in which the outlawing of performance-enhancing measures has resulted in athletes constructing their doping use as taboo. Although it has become an issue athletes are now frequently confronted with, the norm is to express a strong anti-doping attitude. Only in very rare cases have athletes questioned the wisdom inherent in the actual anti-doping policy, and when it has happened they have been strongly opposed by sports’ leaders and fellow-athletes. Chapter 5 analyses new methods employed by athletes for managing truth since doping revelations have become so widespread that it is no longer possible for them to keep their counsel and retain credibility if they come under suspicion of doping or indeed test positive for doping. In Chapter 6, the focus is on the ‘fight against doping’. Here the discussion turns to how the well-intentioned, for all their enthusiasm, sacrifice law and logic and make anti-doping work resemble a modern crusade, whose moral base is undermined by a fixation on ends. That is, in the pursuit of clean sport, ad hoc alterations and proscriptions are presented about which athletes have no prior knowledge. Chapter 7 continues this line of argument, showing how the fight against

doping has its roots in a more general scepticism of modernity. This prepares the way for a discussion of the rationale behind the prohibition of doping. Intellectual adherents of modernity have increasingly spoken in favour of the deregulation of doping. Examples of these arguments are analysed in Chapter 8, and this is followed by a presentation of athletes’ viewpoints in Chapter 9. In the concluding chapter of the book, I sketch an alternative strategy for combating doping that would be at least as effective as that which is currently being pursued, and which shows greater respect for the situation and viewpoints of athletes.