ABSTRACT
The introduction of doping testing was a message to athletes that medical shortcuts in pursuit of sporting glory were unacceptable. But the message did not have its intended impact and there is much to suggest that doping continued to grow concurrently with advances in medical science and the commercialization of sport. This chapter focuses on the reliability problem in sociological research into doping in sport. It deals with a brief examination of different work on the subject, followed by a critical assessment of the influence of literature on doping that was published prior to 1998. The chapter shows how myth on doping promoted in books and interviews by anti-doping crusaders has uncritically been adopted by academic researchers and to some extent biased their work. Barrie Houlihan and Ivan Waddington focus on athletes’ incentives to dope and the Germans Karl-Heinrich Bette and Uwe Schimank who viewed doping as a result of the structural dynamics of elite sport.
