Introduction

We briefly elaborate on the two aspects that have underpinned the motives for this book: the intertwinement between doping and cycling, and the added value of interdisciplinary perspectives to analyse this relation. First, there is good evidence that the history of cycling is intertwined with that of performance-enhancing drugs. Given such a history, we hypothesised that cycling could provide a benchmark allowing scholars to better measure and analyse the development of doping culture, its use and supply among athletes, and the effects of anti-doping policies in other sports. Second, the repeated doping scandals that occurred in cycling, first in the 1960s and more intensely since the late 1990s, have generated significant scholarly interest in sports doping. However, given the cross-disciplinary nature of doping and anti-doping, such scholarship often existed isolated from work developed in other disciplines or published in other fields. Until now, no book has systematically examined doping and anti-doping issues in cycling from various disciplines ranging from sports sociology, history, philosophy, psychology and criminology, and even beyond human and social sciences. This book thus aims at documenting the changes and the challenging issues related to doping and anti-doping in cycling.