ABSTRACT
The evolution of drug control for sport is contextualised next to drug control in broader society. This approach assumes a hierarchy where drug control for sport is a subset of the broader effort to manage drugs. That is, the issue is fundamentally one of drug control first and sport second, suggesting that sports managers could learn a great deal about drug control by extrapolating the lessons learned from other market sectors (e.g. the government sector). Instead, the development of drug control unique to sport saw twentieth-century sports managers engaging in symbolic actions creating opportunities for other stakeholders to seize the initiative. Sports managers regained some of the initiative in the early twenty-first century with the anti-doping policy. It remains to be seen whether sports managers have learned the lessons of the past relative to emerging questions of drug control for sport.
