Amateurism, scientific control, and crime:
historical fluctuations in anti-doping
discourses in sport
Ian Ritchie and Kathryn Henne
Ian Ritchie is an Associate
Professor at the Department of
Kinesiology, Brock University,
St Catharines, Canada.
Kathryn Henne is an Associate
Professor at the Department of
Sociology and Legal Studies,
University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Canada; and is at the
School of Regulation and
Global Governance, The
Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia.
PAGE 18 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the institutional mechanisms for combating doping in high-level
sport, including the trend toward using legalistic frameworks, and how they contribute to notions of deviance.
Design/methodology/approach – A historical approach informed by recent criminological adaptations of
genealogy was utilized, using primary and secondary sources.
Findings – Three time periods involving distinct frameworks for combating doping were identified, each with
their own advantages and limitations: pre-1967, post-1967 up until the creation of the World Anti-Doping
Agency in 1999, and post-1999.
Originality/value – This study contextualizes the recent legalistic turn toward combating doping in sport,
bringing greater understanding to the limitations of present anti-doping practices.
Keywords Deviance, Anti-doping discourses, Combating doping, Criminological adaptations of genealogy,
Doping in sport, Limitations of anti-doping practices
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The use of a banned performance-enhancing substance, in the context of modern, high
performance sport, is often framed as a deviant act. To “dope” is considered cheating by most
sports fans, many athletes, and certainly by the highest anti-doping regulative bodies in the
world. Regulators have cast doping as much worse than cheating, characterizing it as a threat to
the very integrity, if not existence, of sport (see Henne, 2010). The highest anti-doping body
internationally, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) makes this clear in its World Anti-Doping
Code (hereafter “Code”), which sets out the standards and rationale for anti-doping programs
worldwide. The 2015 third version of the Code states, “Anti-doping programs seek to preserve
what is intrinsically valuable about sport. This intrinsic value is often referred to as ‘the spirit of
sport’” (WADA, 2015, p. 14). This purist justification for anti-doping regulation – that doping is
contrary to “essential” values of sport – has been in all three versions of the Code since the first
one created in 2003. In this paper, we ask: how did these judgments become embedded
in discourse?
The assertion that sport itself risks collapse because of the use of performance-enhancing
substances is hardly new. Writing in Olympic Review in 1967, the head of International Olympic
Committee (IOC) press and public relations (and soon to be IOC Director), Monique Berlioux
(1967) presented doping as “one of the greatest dangers that the Olympic Games have yet met”
and athletes who doped as the “enemy of sport” (p. 2). Moving much further back in time, IOC
president and Belgian aristocrat Henri de Baillet-Latour, in one of the first statements against
doping by a major sport administrator, claimed in a 1937 letter that “amateur sport is meant
to improve the soul and the body [and] therefore no stone must be left unturned as long as the
use of doping has not been stamped out” (cited in Gleaves and Llewellyn, 2014, p. 847).
j VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018, pp. 18-29, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2056-3841 DOI 10.1108/JCRPP-01-2018-0003
He continued stating, “Doping ruins the health and very likely implies an early death.”
His statement extends German pharmacologist Otto Riesser’s 1933 assertion that doping was
“wholly incompatible with the spirit of sport” (cited in Hoberman, 2012, p. 248).

Despite the seeming consistency of positions against the use of drugs in sport, historians have
shown that attitudes toward the use of performance-enhancing substances have varied greatly
over time, as have their perceptions of the importance of the issue. In the last (approximately)
150 years of modern sport, since the issue was first discussed, perspectives have varied from
absolute acceptance to complete intolerance, with various compromising positions in between.
Thus, the dominant regulatory attitude today – that drugs are anathema to sport – is an
exceptional one within the broader historical landscape (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006; Dimeo,
2007; Hoberman, 1992; Hunt, 2011). Riesser’s verbatim use of contemporary language in the
Code is in fact an historical coincidence; few such absolute claims were made in the 1930s
whereas today, the notion that drug use is contrary to sport’s “spirit” goes largely undisputed.
Indeed, it is important to recognize that even WADA’s use of this essentialist language has a very
specific historical context. The Code’s “spirit of sport” clause was borrowed from a program
developed within the Canadian anti-doping movement. It was based on the recommendations of
that country’s government inquiry after Jamaican-born Canadian Olympic sprinter Ben
Johnson’s positive test in 1988; the language was then used to meet the particular political
and legal needs of WADA when it was developing its first Code (Ritchie, 2015).

This study traces historical developments in anti-doping regulation to glean insight into how
changes in both rhetoric and practice have informed regulation’s tacit embrace of doping as a
form of deviance. By focusing on constructions of deviance, our aim here is not to unpack how
doping behaviors transgress social norms; instead, it is to examine how regulatory efforts frame
them as such, attending to how they have changed over time. To do so, we draw on
criminological adaptations of genealogical analysis (see Shah, 2017) to examine the varying
means by which the use of performance-enhancing substances emerged as “deviant,” including
its increasing criminalization in recent years. Historical accounts informed by textual and
discourse analysis enable the scrutiny of the diverse meanings of taken-for-granted crime control
concepts (Shah, 2017), thus addressing longstanding critiques of criminology’s lack of reflexive
historical engagement (see Lynch, 2000; Shammas, 2017). Recognizing the growing
criminological interest in sport more generally (e.g. Groombridge, 2016), our aim is to affirm
the importance of critical historical inquiry, a clear strength in the existing research on doping in
sport. In this case, although WADA’s formal position presents doping as universally contrary to
the nature of sport, our findings reveal that institutional mechanisms and public discourses
regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs have shifted significantly over time.
This paper draws out changes in meaning as they crystallize around policy-related developments,
illuminating what organizations and personnel have influenced these changes, and what
discourses have legitimized anti-doping regulation.

Our central thesis is that regulatory attitudes toward, and policies against, the use of
performance-enhancing substances involve shifting institutional mechanisms and discourses to
construct, in very different ways over time, doping as a “deviant” category. Through a textual
analysis of primary and secondary sources, we identify three major shifts. First, before 1967 – when
the IOC formally banned drugs and applied sanctions – doping was gradually constructed as
deviant because of its presumed threat to the principles and ethos of amateurism. Top-level
administrators and the organizations they represented – the IOC being the most important – were
the primary advocates of this construction. Second, after 1967 until the end of the twentieth
century, scientific discourses and practices dominated anti-doping efforts, doing so in ways that,
at least on their surface, rendered ethical discussions as largely superfluous. Finally, since the
creation of WADA in 1999, doping is increasingly subject to legalistic framings and approaches,
lending to more criminalising characterizations of offending athletes. Although we frame them in
distinct periods, we recognize that they maintain an interrelated relationship in which latter changes
do not displace historical values; rather, new regulations subsume and rearticulate them. During
each of the three phases, the discourses and tools used for combating drug use not only created
possibilities to combat a perceived major problem in sport, but they also generated conflicts,
limitations, and contradictions. We discuss their implications in the final section.

VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE j PAGE 19
 Anti-doping before 1967: mixed signals and early amateur condemnations
During the early days of the modernization of sport – the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries – performance-enhancing substances were not collectively condemned. Dimeo (2007,
pp. 17-50) has demonstrated that this long period saw mixed reactions to athletes using various
concoctions to push their bodies through the, at times, arduous extremes of competition.
During the period from, approximately, the 1870s to the 1920s, many popular events such as
long-distance pedestrianism (walking), running, or cycling races lasted several days and were
extremely taxing on athletes’ bodies. Coca kola, “purified” oxygen, cocaine, strychnine, and
alcohol (often used as a tincture for other products like strychnine) were fairly common “one-offs”
used to push competitors through their exhaustion. Wider social attitudes toward these situations
were a cross between open curiosity and support, combined with some attempts to control such
behavior, often based on religious temperance (pp. 31-2).
From the mid-nineteenth century on, bio-medical scientists were increasingly curious about the
exploits of athletes and often encouraged experimentation, but not because they were impressed
with the sportive accomplishments themselves (Hoberman, 1992). They were more curious
about what the feats would reveal about the natural or scientific “truths” of the human body.
In addition, during the early industrial era, concerns arose as to how to rationalize human movement
and avoid fatigue in the workplace (Rabinbach, 1990). The scientific doctrine of the conservation of
energy, which emerged out of simultaneous discoveries in a number of countries between the
1820s and 1850s, played a crucial role in the ways scientists and others, including the general
public to a significant degree, thought about the body’s energy production (Kuhn, 1962). As the
doctrine was applied to the human body, energy was considered finite and so the notion of creating
energy was largely unthinkable. Reflecting these beliefs, early coaching manuals, assuming stable,
and finite levels of energy production concentrated on refining technique through repetition and drill
to create greater efficiencies (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006, pp. 52-9).

In this context of late nineteenth century society then, experimentation, including at high levels of
bio-medical research, was generally accepted. Dimeo (2007, pp. 19-21) cites the work of the
prestigious physician Sir Robert Christison (1876), Professor of Medicine at the University of
Edinburgh and the Head of the British Medical Association, who in the 1870s set out to prove the
restorative qualities of Peruvian coca-leaf (“cuca”) extracts. Christison’s experiments involved his
own and his subjects’ long bouts of hiking combined with ingestion of extracts and yielding
positive results. Following the dictates of human energy conservation theory, fatigue avoidance
was the key factor. Christison reported, “The chewing of Cuca removes extreme fatigue,
and prevents it. […] It has no effect on the mental faculties […] except liberating them from the
dulness [sic] and drowsiness which follow great bodily fatigue” (p. 530). Results such as
Christison’s were generally embraced in the context of late nineteenth century experimentation
into the rational production of efficient bodies, which only increased as the end of the century
neared (Dimeo, 2007, pp. 18-23).

The original condemnation of doping took place in the context of the emergence of amateur
sport – the Olympic movement, in particular – during the first few decades of the twentieth century.
“True” sportsmen, embodied by amateur athletes, were increasingly separated from professional and
working-class athletes who, it was assumed, represented a separate set of values and practices.
Gleaves (2011, p. 241) explains: “Anti-doping rules predicated on amateurism’s ideals would
become another tool for excluding or otherwise marginalizing working-class professionals.” It was
generally accepted that working-class athletes would take substances to help them through the
extremes of competition; “we run on dynamite” one Tour de France Cyclist phrased it in 1924 (cited in
Gleaves and Llewellyn, 2014, p. 844). But for “true” sportsmen in the Olympic movement, the idea of
competing for cash or under the influence of an enhancer was anathema. In short, the early “ethical”
position on doping was very much framed in terms of the class politics that determined sporting
practices and the attempts to police both upper and working-class athletes’ behavior.

Against this political backdrop, the first major organization to create a rule against doping was the
International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), an organization formed in 1912 after the IOC’s
Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm. IAAF President Swedish industrialist Sigfrid Edström, an
ardent defender of amateurism, spearheaded the first rule, which was premised on the same

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amateur principles upheld by the IOC. In fact, several top administrators held positions in both
organizations. During the IAAF’s 1928 Congress, the main purpose of which was to stop the
encroachment of professionalism, attendees voted unanimously to create a rule and then
adopted that rule in its handbook, stating that doping constituted “the use of any stimulant
employed to increase the power of action in athletic competition above the average” and that
violation of the rules would result in suspension “from participation in amateur athletics”
(cited in Gleaves and Llewellyn, 2014, p. 846).
The IOC quickly followed with its own rule. Edström was Vice President of the IOC, and he
suggested to President Baillet-Latour that a committee be struck to look into the issue.
Baillet-Latour agreed that doping was one of the most serious threats to amateurism, stating in a
letter (described earlier) to Edström that “amateur sport is meant to improve the soul and the
body [and] therefore no stone must be left unturned as long as the use of doping has not been
stamped out” (cited in Gleaves and Llewellyn, 2014, p. 847). The IOC subsequently created a
special commission to study doping alongside several other issues pertaining to amateurism
leading up to its meetings in Cairo in 1938. The commission included Edström and also a new
IOC member, US building magnate and ex-Olympic athlete Avery Brundage, who would later
become IOC President and, like Edström, was a staunch defender of amateurism.
The commission’s report was accepted at the Cairo meeting, and the IOC published its official
statement against doping soon after in its Bulletin. Replicating virtually verbatim a note
handwritten by Brundage just before the Cairo meeting, the IOC’s Bulletin stated, “The use of
drugs or artificial stimulants of any kind must be condemned most strongly, and everyone who
accepts or offers dope, no matter in what form, should not be allowed to participate in amateur
meetings or in the Olympic Games” (IOC, 1938, p. 30).
As the Second World War stalled most IOC committee work and communication, the IOC added
the 1938 statement to its 1946 Charter. The Charter, then entitled Olympic rules, included the
section, “Resolutions Regarding the Amateur Status” and subsection 6, “Doping of Athletes” (IOC,
1946, p. 28). Amateurism, then, very much dictated the early stance on doping, and this stance
would continue during the post-1945 period. But before the war, there was hardly a generalized
moral condemnation of doping: the concerns that arose out of the class-based defense of amateur
values concentrated efforts against doping mainly at the elite amateur levels. The general moral
condemnation of doping would come later, and under a very specific set of social circumstances.

Anti-doping efforts post-1967: administrative and scientific control

Following the war, anti-doping efforts accelerated for several interrelated reasons. First, the Olympic
Games now provided a central stage upon which to wage Cold War symbolic battles, and doping
became a central part of nations’ attempts to win medals (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006; Dimeo,
2007). Second, by the 1950s, there was a rising interest in the performance potential of anabolic
steroids ( first synthesized in the 1930s) especially in the sport of weightlifting (Todd, 1987).
There was also a general interest in their use for fatigue avoidance, as well as their energy- and
strength-producing capabilities, exemplified perhaps best by Paul de Kruif’s (1945) book The Male
Hormone, which, in addition to being a top seller, touted in the book’s subtitle the drug’s ability to
do no less than “prolonging man’s prime of life.” Finally, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the use of
over-the-counter amphetamine derivatives – “pep pills” such as Benzedrine – became fairly
common in not only high performance and lower levels of competitive sport, but also more broadly.
Indeed, amphetamines to produce energy and avoid fatigue were as Dimeo (2007, p. 62) puts it,
regarded as “acceptable and legitimate public medicine.”
These general trends, combined with international sport administrators’ reactions to what policy
analysts refer to as “focusing events,” informed more systematic discussions of the doping
“problem” in top-level sport (Hunt, 2011). The tragic death of Danish Cyclist Knud Enemark
Jensen during the 1960 Rome Summer Olympic Games was the central catalyst. Although today
we know that Jensen likely did not die from amphetamine use, at the time of his death it was
rumored that the drug had played a role (Møller, 2005). Avery Brundage, who since 1952 had
held the position of IOC President, created a doping subcommittee with New Zealand surgeon
Arthur Porritt as its head. The new subcommittee had significant cross-over membership with the

VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE j PAGE 21
 Fédération Internationale de Médecine du Sport, which had been created during the 1928 Winter
Olympic Games in St Moritz as a platform for medical personnel to share information pertaining to
the care and treatment of athletes. While not directly concerned with doping matters, cross-over
membership included, most importantly, Giuseppe La Cava, who was a member of the
Fédération and then its President from 1968 on. He also became a member of the IOC’s newly
created Medical Commission in 1967 and regularly corresponded with Brundage on the doping
issue (Krieger, 2016a). However, in general, the doping subcommittee languished in the few
years following its creation: it recommended a banned list in 1966 but offered no attendant
recommendations for controlling drug use (IOC, 1966).

Members of the subcommittee were IOC members, some of whom had medical backgrounds
but no pharmaceutical qualifications specific to anti-doping. There was, however, a strong desire
to defend amateur sport, particularly the values that the ideals of amateurism were thought to
uphold. Committee members who made public or private statements against doping did so
primarily on moral grounds, specifically linking the problem to the character flaws of athletes,
which it was assumed were contrary to the principles of “true” sport (Wrynn, 2004). This rationale
followed a trend already created before the Second World War. Porritt (1965) himself made a
classic statement of this sort in 1965 when in Olympic Review he referred to dopers as having
“weakness of character” and an “inferiority complex” (p. 48).

The year 1967 was a watershed one in anti-doping regulation. IOC member and Belgian
aristocrat Alexandre de Mérode replaced Porritt, resulting in the reconstitution of the
subcommittee as the formal IOC Medical Commission. Importantly, Mérode included non-IOC
members on the Commission with specific medical and pharmaceutical training to guide policy
and practice. The Commission worked quickly, instilling doping controls for the 1968 Winter and
Summer Games with attendant guidelines for testing, a greater list of banned substances,
recommendations for securing suitable laboratories for conducting tests, and other “scientific
machinery” for test implementation (IOC, 1967).

The most important sea change from 1967 on was the increasing reliance on scientific and technical
knowledge. Under Mérode’s direction, pharmaceutical experts, biochemists, newly recognized
laboratories and their personnel, and other medical experts became increasingly important to
international anti-doping efforts. Experts’ ability to leverage their knowledge and experience to
greater positions of power within an increasingly complex international infrastructure guided much
anti-doping work until the end of the twentieth century (Henne, 2014; Krieger, 2016a; Wrynn, 2004).
In what Henne (2014) refers to as the emerging environment of “moral technopreneurialism,”
matters of technical and scientific detail became central to efforts to enforce normative changes
around the condemnation of doping. Like traditional notions of moral entrepreneurship, elite actors
promoted a negative label for a particular behavior (in this case, doping). The role of scientific testing,
however, is distinct: detecting banned substances was essential to providing evidence of doping as
a problem and thus justifying efforts to condemn it. The embrace of testing would give way to a
broader “scientific turn” in anti-doping regulation (Krieger, 2016a).

The details of the scientific turn are complex (Krieger, 2016a); however, two figures stand out in
the history of it. First, Mérode included British Pharmacologist Arnold Beckett on the 1967
Commission. Beckett pioneered analytical techniques for detecting substances in urine, he had
implemented early tests in Great Britain in cycling races and in the 1966 World Cup, and he
developed the first protocols for the Medical Commission for the 1968 Games’ tests (Krieger,
2016a, pp. 49-71). Eventually Beckett would come to play a critical role in anti-doping testing and
policy development, one that lasted for several years.

Second, leading up to the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic Games, Manfred Donike from the
Federal Republic of Germany was installed as the head of doping controls. A former national
cyclist in Germany before going into chemistry, he, like Beckett, had developed important
techniques for doping detection in the late-1960s. Alongside Beckett (who oversaw the Medical
Commission), Donike worked painstakingly during the lead up to the Munich Games, and he
established a technically advanced testing laboratory (Krüger et al., 2012). After the completion of
the 1972 Games, the Medical Commission’s Pamphlet summarized doping procedures,
boasting the high number of tests completed – 2,079, a high number by even twenty-first century

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standards – and the efficiency of testing. Interestingly, however, the rationale for the tests goes
literally unmentioned in the Pamphlet (IOC Medical Commission, 1972). Beckett and Donike
quickly established themselves as leaders in Olympic anti-doping efforts, taking up prominent
positions in the IAAF’s newly created anti-doping infrastructure by the early 1970s.
Through the remainder of the 1970s and in to the 1980s, both Beckett and Donike further
solidified their influence on anti-doping efforts, persuading authorities in both the IOC’s Medical
Commission and IAAF’s Medical Committee to install an official laboratory accreditation system in
which only those recognized labs could formally oversee and conduct testing. The two scientists’
labs, in London and Cologne, quite naturally played prominent roles. Furthermore, in 1980
Mérode set up an IOC Subcommission on Doping and Biochemistry of Sport to oversee all
aspects of doping control. The Subcommission gradually sought virtually complete control over
international anti-doping: it took over the international laboratory accreditation system and
expanded the number of labs; introduced increasingly stringent quality controls; and importantly,
reduced virtually all discussions of “anti-doping” to matters of the technical and scientific
conditions of testing. In addition, from 1983 onwards, Donike gathered all members of
international anti-doping laboratories in Cologne to meet in his central lab in order to review the
latest technical developments and research results (Krieger, 2016b).
Donike’s status was further solidified in 1983 for two reasons. First, he successfully developed an
analytical method for detecting exogenous testosterone. The use of the substance had plagued
anti-doping because it was produced naturally in both men and women, and only a relative
quantitative determination could suggest abuse. He introduced a screening method to reveal a
relative ratio of six-to-one testosterone to epitestosterone (Donike et al., 1983). Second, Donike
applied this test and other advanced techniques for detection as the head of doping control for
the Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, that same year. This was considered a great
success for Donike, as 19 athletes had positive tests and several others, including 12 athletes
from the US track and field team, feigned injuries or fabricated excuses to leave the Games once
they realized they might get caught (Todd and Rosenke, 2016).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, scientists like Donike had a stronghold on the international
anti-doping infrastructure. Since 1967, the media had increasingly published alarmist stories of
impending threats to sport, which fed what would become a larger moral panic around the issue
(McDermott, 2016). The widespread acceptance of doping as a threat to the integrity of sport
enhanced the perceived legitimacy of scientists, technicians, and their laboratories as important
actors working to catch suspected transgressors. In doing so, though, efforts came to focus
primarily on athletes, holding them individually culpable, rather than developing strategies for
preventing broader or systematic cases (Henne, 2015). Indeed, detection techniques developed by
Donike played an important role in arguably the most important drug detection case – Ben
Johnson’s positive test at the 1988 Seoul Summer Games (IOC Medical Commission, 1988),
which would lead to both stricter anti-doping protocols and regulation in Canada and ultimately
impact regulations internationally, including WADA’s (Ritchie, 2015).
Just as was the case leading up to the creation of rules and sanctions in the 1960s, “focusing
events” once again shifted the trajectory of anti-doping efforts toward the end of the 1990s. It
became clear that as advanced as detection techniques had become, scientists and existing
sporting bodies could not keep up with the rising tide of new substances and methods, in particular
blood doping, which had become common since its inception in the 1980s (Gleaves, 2015). A crisis
in the 1998 Tour de France – combined with a series of other scandals that same year, including the
IOC being embroiled in a bribery scandal – drew attention to concerns of widespread corruption
and formally illegal activities. As a result, national governments began to advocate for legal reforms
and even criminal punishments, pushing the IOC to hold a major public review of its policies and
organization (Henne, 2010). The result was the first World Conference on Doping in Sport, held in
Lausanne in February 1999, which led to the establishment of WADA later that year.

From 1999 on: WADA and the rise of the global regulatory regime
Participants at the first World Conference on Doping in Sport, which involved both sport and
government representatives, agreed to create WADA with the aim of establishing it as a separate,

VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE j PAGE 23
 administrative agency. In doing so, calls for reform did not result in governments taking the lead in
the global fight against doping, ensuring that governing sport organizations would retain an active
role in regulation. Instead, the resulting apparatus would become a “hard/soft hybrid”; that is, it
brings together and leverages “synergies between binding and non-binding mechanisms”
enabled by the involvement of sport-specific and governmental actors (Trubek and Trubek, 2005,
p. 344). Anti-doping regulation would, in turn, blur traditional distinctions between
non-governmental and governmental domains in problematic ways: while regulation is
transnational in reach and can result in stiff sanctions for rule violators, mechanisms do not
provide the same checks and balances or formal protections for the accused that are foundational to
many legal traditions. As discussed in this section, these developments are the outgrowth of WADA’s
founding arrangements and its institutionalization of previous developments in regulatory efforts.

The aftermath of WADA’s establishment resulted in a push for a stronger, more legalistic
framework to support already established scientific practices and to standardize anti-doping
rules and procedures. Specifically, efforts were made to build upon and expand the scope of the
first multilateral agreement in the field, the 1989 Anti-Doping Convention of the Council of Europe,
which had set out some common standards but did not articulate a holistic or harmonized
approach to anti-doping efforts. By the mid-2000s, two key documents would come to anchor
WADA’s regulatory regime: the Code, a non-governmental instrument that came into force in
2004 and has since been accepted by over 660 sport organizations, and the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Convention Against
Doping in Sport, which was adopted in 2005 and now has 186 State Parties. A key reason for the
widespread endorsement of the Convention is that the Code prohibits non-signatory countries
from accessing certain sport-related privileges, such as hosting mega events like the Olympic
Games, and receiving sport-specific forms of funding. Working in tandem to shore up support for
WADA’s agenda, the Code and the Convention are there to ensure that sport authorities and
signatory governments “have complimentary responsibilities to prevent and combat doping in
sport” (UNESCO, 2005).

Under these arrangements, WADA has refined its definition of doping and established an
elaborate set of guidelines to support the standardized implementation of procedures, both of
which are outlined in the Code. The formal definition of doping encompasses behaviors not
limited to the use of artificial performance-enhancing methods. A substance can be prohibited in
sport if it satisfies two of the following criteria: it is performance enhancing and it is a risk to the
health of the athlete, or it violates “the spirit of sport,” which, as discussed previously, reflects
earlier amateur values (WADA, 2015, p. 30). As a result, the ingestion of a broad range of
substances (including some recreational drugs), regardless of motive, can constitute doping – a
trend that began during the previous period. Anti-doping rules require the application of a strict
liability standard in cases of a positive drug test, which means intention is not a mediating factor;
the detection of the banned substance is enough to sanction an athlete for an anti-doping rule
violation. Furthermore, regulatory tactics have expanded to include other kinds of surveillance
and enforcement strategies in addition to the scientific testing of athletes’ urine and blood
samples for banned substances. Among them are the whereabouts programs, which require
athletes to notify authorities where they are one hour per day so that samples can be collected
without notice, and the biological passport, an electronic record of biological profiles that is used
to document and track abnormalities that may serve as indicators of doping substances. Thus,
the push toward a more legalistic framework has institutionalized – and expanded – practices
developed during the scientific turn in anti-doping regulation (Henne, 2015).

After formalizing the technocratic nature of anti-doping rules and the backing of sport
government partnerships, WADA sought collaboration with police and law enforcement
agencies. This move was an explicit concern of the 2007 World Conference on Doping in Sport
(Henne, 2010), paving the way for more investigative and intelligence-led policing in anti-doping
regulation. Although authorities had hesitated to embrace law enforcement tactics in 1999, the
criminal charges brought against US athletes associated with the Bay Area Laboratory
Cooperative (BALCO) steroid ring between 2005 and 2008 crystallized how state-based law
offered investigative and sanctioning powers that WADA lacked. For example, former track and
field gold medalist Marion Jones admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during the

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BALCO investigations, eventually confessing to perjury before two grand juries ( for making false
statements about her steroid use). Although anti-doping authorities collected 160 samples from
Jones during her athletic career, she had never tested positive. In contrast, Jones served a
six-month prison sentence, a portion of which was in solitary confinement, followed by a two-year
probationary period for perjury, and she was stripped of her five Olympic medals from the 2000
Sydney Olympic Games for the subsequent anti-doping violation. Discrepancies in punishment,
too, came with this approach: not only were some other athletes acquitted, including baseball
player Barry Bonds, but Victor Conte, the Founder of BALCO, pled guilty and served only four
months in prison (plus four months of house arrest) for providing information about 27 athletes he
allegedly supplied with performance-enhancing drugs.

The embrace of investigative strategies set the stage for what would become a landmark
anti-doping case: that of cyclist Lance Armstrong. Following the US Department of Justice’s
two-year investigation of Armstrong in 2012, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) was ultimately
able to prove that Lance Armstrong had violated anti-doping rules (see Dimeo, 2014). In the
absence of physical evidence, USADA secured testimonies from other athletes describing his
offenses, striking plea bargains for reduced anti-doping rule sanctions with some athletes. On the
heels of the Armstrong case, the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), an agency that was
established to help provide intelligence for investigations into serious and organized crime, used
its special coercive investigative powers to conduct a year-long investigation. The findings,
announced in February 2013, indicated that doping was “widespread” in elite and sub-elite
Australian sport (ACC, 2013). The ACC, however, could not release evidence to support its
findings, instead encouraging the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency to conduct further
investigations. This process led to protracted speculation, drawn-out proceedings, and athlete
appeals that lasted between 2013 and 2016, many of which were oriented around one professional
Australian Rules Football organization, the Essendon Football Club. Specifically, 34 athletes who
claimed to have unknowingly committed doping offenses as a result of participating in the Club’s
supplements program received anti-doping sanctions. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS)
review panel ruled that the athletes’ actions demonstrated a “lack of due diligence and curiosity”
and being of a “secretive nature” (Duncan, 2017, p. 1), even though state regulators found
Essendon Football Club in violation of health and safety legislation for failing to provide a safe
workplace (Windholz, 2015). Like the Armstrong case, the ruling pointed to systematic doping, yet
neither resulted in serious reforms for the affected professional sports or their management.

The mixed results of investigations into doping continued through the 2016 Summer Olympic
Games. Following the 2014 release of a German documentary that claimed to uncover a Russian
cover-up of systemic doping, WADA commissioned an investigation, led by Canadian Law
Professor Richard McLaren. The first set of findings, delivered in July 2016, provided evidence of
state-sponsored efforts to undermine testing practices and tamper with collected samples in
order to evade detection (WADA, 2016a). The immediate aftermath of the report gave way to a
flurry of speculation regarding whether the entire Russian team would be banned from competing
in the Summer Olympics, which WADA recommended. Amidst these developments, Russian
President Vladimir Putin argued that the allegations were politically motivated, even conspiratorial,
suggesting that the aim was to weaken Russia’s international position – even though the reports
presented their findings as beyond a reasonable doubt. In response, the IOC decided to allow
individual sport federations to assess and determine which athletes could compete, requiring the
approval of a CAS arbitrator in the event an athlete was permitted. In August 2016, 278 Russian
athletes received clearance to compete in the Olympic Games, resulting in disqualification of
111 competitors. Additionally, the International Paralympic Committee would ban all Russian
competitors from the 2016 Summer Paralympics. McLaren’s second report, released in
December 2016, would detail that over 1,000 Russian athletes from a range of sports were
beneficiaries of the coordinated cover-up of positive tests (WADA, 2016b).

Beyond the questions of whether this new “investigative turn” in anti-doping regulation is
effective, it is important to note that the shift is not without other consequences. These tactics,
combined with anti-doping regulation’s institutionalization of mass surveillance, can encourage
athletes to use potentially more dangerous drugs to avoid detection (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006;
Henne, 2015), operating in much the same way that other wars on drugs have proven to push

VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE j PAGE 25
 drug behaviors and markets underground. Furthermore, by “framing individuals as cheats and
holding individuals accountable,” anti-doping regulation “obscures the organizational dimensions
of performance enhancement” (Reichman and Sefiha, 2013, p. 116). Media portrayals of sporting
scandals, according to McDermott (2016), perpetuate this issue by rendering individuals as folk
devils deserving of criminal punishment while protecting the interests of elite groups. Specifically,
the punitive focus on individual sanctions, which is reinforced by technocratic rules preoccupied
with athletes and their bodies, tends to direct the regulatory gaze away from more powerful
actors, as perhaps best demonstrated by the Essendon case in Australia. Even in the case of
Russia, where the role of authorities was called into question, sanctions failed to affect them in a
significant way. In sum, the investigative turn has led to more athletes, especially high-profile
athletes, being punished, but it has yet to hold organizational actors accountable or to support
institutional reform.

Conclusion
The history of anti-doping regulation in sport presents a distinct case for the study of the
sociology of deviance, one in which historical values become embedded into contemporary
practices of social control and punishment. Regulatory construction of doping as a deviant
category and practice has a long historical trajectory involving organizations, as well as agents
within those organizations who have, through their interactions, negotiated and debated the
issue, ultimately constructing doping as a “problem” requiring increasing policing and formal
regulation (see also Critcher, 2014). The condemnation of doping on moral grounds, as this
analysis has demonstrated, has never been universal, nor have the institutional and organizational
mechanisms for combating doping been consistent. The original rules came from the highest
levels of amateur sport, with the IOC and IAAF playing the most important roles. The specific
value system and elite social background of leaders within both organizations led to the original
construction of doping as “deviant” but only within a fairly limited institutional setting and scope.
Additionally, the original movement against doping within those organizations led to statements
of principle, but without real sanctioning powers.
It was the crisis moment of Danish cyclist Jensen’s death in 1960 alongside the Cold War drive to
push athletic bodies to increasingly rarified heights, in contravention of cherished amateur beliefs, that
led the IOC and IAAF to pursue much more intensive and stringent anti-doping policies and practices
in the 1960s: formal prohibitions, an expanded list of banned substances, and testing protocols.
Coincidentally, the original impetus for anti-doping from the pre-war period – amateurism – died
as formal prohibitions and policies strengthened. Just as anti-doping was becoming much
more institutionalized and generally condemned, the IOC gave up on the principles of amateurism
and removed restrictions from its Charter (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006, pp. 11-30). The almost
immediate institutional control over testing by scientists in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside a rising
chorus of public voices – from the media in particular – against drugs during that same period,
perpetuated a wider, moral condemnation of doping. This gave way to standardized testing
protocols, as well as greater surveillance over athletes’ lives. In doing so, classist values became
embedded in regulation, with preoccupations with the prospect of cheating superseding concerns
for competitors’ health. In short, this move institutionalized suspicion of athletes’ bodies enabling the
continued expansion of more intrusive measures of detection, monitoring, and tracking. Many
athletes are now subject to regular sample collection, surveillance, and investigative measures, and
more names are likely to join the list of doping athletes. As testing can take place retroactively for up to
eight years after a sample has been collected, regulation may be able to catch someone doping after
their sporting career.
Developments at the end of the twentieth century enabled the growth and subsequent
hybridization of anti-doping regulation. The changes to anti-doping regulation – as well as their
effects – reflect a broader shift in governance, one that points to the increased and globalized role
of private and non-governmental regulators and the changing dynamics of the state. These
concerns pose distinct challenges for criminologists who focus on street crimes, criminal justice
institutions, and courts, all of which are important to the study of crime control but may not
capture the nuanced practices and relationships that underpin governance (Braithwaite, 2000).
Anti-doping regulation in sport is a space in which such developments cannot be ignored.

PAGE 26 j JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE j VOL. 4 NO. 1 2018
Although it has roots in private medical rules, it has since expanded to have global influence – and
not simply in relation to sport, especially as countries incorporate anti-doping strategies in
their efforts to regulate performance and image-enhancing drug (PIED) use more generally
(Van de Ven, 2016). In fact, research to date shows that the law enforcement-backed strategies
advocated for anti-doping regulation can exacerbate health risks and prevent the exploration of
alternative regulatory frameworks for PIED use, including harm reduction and prevention
approaches (Van de Ven and Mulrooney, 2017). Practices created and refined in the context of
sport now target a much wider range of participants, including amateur athletes, weekend
warriors, and even the general health enthusiast (Henning and Dimeo, 2018; Van de Ven and
Mulrooney, 2017). These developments not only point to a “new front on the war on drugs”
(Henning and Dimeo, 2018, p. 128), but they also reiterate the need for broadening the scope of
traditional criminological inquiry to scrutinize mechanisms beyond criminal justice systems and
formal state apparatuses. As this historical account attests, modes of labeling and policing
deviance can emerge in private, medical, and public health domains. In doing so, it illuminates the
range of actors that can operate as rule makers, agents of social control, and moral entrepreneurs
in the complex and globalized regulatory environments that shape contemporary governance.

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Corresponding author
Ian Ritchie can be contacted at: iritchie@brocku.ca

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