ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 shows how new stronger anti-doping policies emerged in France following the Festina affair. The Youth and Sport Ministry created stricter laws to control cyclists’ use of banned products and used the combined forces of the French police to enforce the new laws. With tremendous negative media coverage, public opinion turned strongly against doping by sportspeople. As a result, sponsors began to intervene in their teams in order to help manage the image of professional cycling. In response, French team managers created a new type of stricter supervision based on anti-doping socialisation. The goal was to promote an ethical discourse and to strongly manage young future champions. Younger riders’ interactions with older riders who encouraged pharmacological acts decreased in comparison to the riders discussed in Chapter 4. Further, professional cyclists received daily supervision by the team managers and the team physician. The result was that newer riders who became professionals under this hard socialisation were less likely to ‘dope’. Socialised in the new structural context, many of these younger riders perceive the very meaning of pharmacology differently than did the riders of the generation before them when the use of powerful pharmacological products was the norm. At the same time, the new hard socialisation emerged out of a reformist initiative and so the fundamental contradictions described in previous chapters remain and set limits upon the effectiveness of the reforms.
