ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the debates in the contexts of the emerging field of sports medicine ethics in order to shed light on the ethics of genetic engineering and doping. It discusses a series of genetically related issues concerning medicine, medical research and medical technology. The coalescence of sports and medicine is doubtless a relationship that goes back to antiquity. During the growth of modern sport the physical differences between population norms and elite athletes was not so marked, yet as the twentieth century proceeded the notion of elite athlete became constructed as a distinct category or class of individual. The chapter provides a review of the salient points in the many debates over the therapy/enhancement distinction in order to shed further light on doping in sports. Ideology aside, sport has long been an arena where performance enhancement has been heavily regulated.
