ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 provides a genealogy of sports medicine since the mid-twentieth century to show how sports physicians used their positions as medical experts to insert themselves into the sports world. Central to this process was the construction of ‘health’ and ‘doping’ by sports physicians. Through a close study of medical and sports literature, we show the long-term social and political process through which doctors debated and defined these concepts in medical literature and international medical conferences. This process was deeply ambiguous because by integrating themselves into elite sport, doctors brought medical ethics (to heal) into conflict with sporting ethics (to win). The result of this long-term social process has been a medicalisation of elite sports where sports doctors claim scientific expertise to justify their increasingly powerful position within this social world.
