ABSTRACT
The use of performance-enhancing substances has been endemic in elite sports since the very beginnings. In the first half of the twentieth century, sports organisations such as the IOC and the IAAF responded little to doping practices among athletes, probably because of the limited pressure from public opinion and the limited means available at that time to impose a ban and to control athletes for the use of doping. In the second half of the twentieth century, increasingly powerful biomedical inventions with potential performance-enhancing effects were quickly adapted to and adopted by elite sports (for example, recombinant human EPO 1 in the 1980s and 1990s). Following a series of widely publicized doping scandals and public outrage, in the last decades of the twentieth century an increasingly strong movement advocating doping-free sports has developed. One probable reason for the increasingly negative public opinion of athletes who dope is the similarity between the image of the doped athlete and the negative image of the illicit psychotropic drug user. Anti-doping accelerated with the inception of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which celebrated its 10-year anniversary at the end of 2009. WADA aims at harmonizing anti-doping practices worldwide and is helped by the fact that an increasing number of UN member states now have signed a UNESCO anti-doping convention (UNESCO 2005).
