Sport, Drugs and Amateurism: Tracing the Real Cultural Origins of Anti-Doping Rules in International Sport.

The historiography of doping has focused primarily on anti-doping efforts that followed in the wake of Knud Enemark Jensen's death in 1960 and culminated in the first Olympic anti-doping tests in 1968. Such focus has often led to the mistaken claim that prior to 1960, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had not banned doping, and, more importantly, ignores the cultural origins of anti-doping that took hold prior to the Second World War and which shaped the IOC's response to doping following Jensen's demise. By tracing early doping practices through turn-of-the-century horse racing and its concerns over gambling and the interwar efforts to ban doping in Olympic sports through the amateurism code, the authors examine the influences behind the IOC's decision to first ban doping in 1938. More importantly, it roots the post-Jensen anti-doping rhetoric and legislation in the early twentieth-century push to defend amateurism against the perceived nefarious forces of gambling, commercialism, professionalism and totalitarianism that were supposedly overrunning amateur sport in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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