John Hoberman

History and Prevalence of Doping in the Marathon

Anti-doping activism represents the mainstream of the current anti-doping campaign and includes both an ethical critique of doping and a call for the sharpening of sanctions. At the same time, evolving evidence indicates that systemic doping in some sports has existed on a larger scale than most observers thought possible. Doping has historical roots in the physiological demands of extreme endurance sport. The Victorian philosophy of sportsmanship and fair competition that emphasises the importance of a capacity for self-restraint and expresses a code of honour, once associated with the gentleman ideal, is the basis of the current anti-doping movement. The problem with this focus is the assumption that there is a contradiction between high-performance endurance sports and doping practices that is not found in the historical record. Compared with the hundreds of professional cyclists who have tested positive for banned substances in recent decades, the list of offenders in the marathon is very short. At the same time, the low number of positive tests is an inadequate basis for estimating the extent of doping among elite marathon runners today. A better understanding of this phenomenon would require something like anthropological fieldwork conducted in this subculture.

Amphetamine and the Four-Minute Mile

In June 1957 an American public health physician told his audience at a medical conference in New York that a stimulant drug such as amphetamine (‘Benzedrine’) might have enabled athletes to run the mile in less than four minutes, a feat first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister, who stated in 1957 that he had never heard of the use of stimulants by runners. The initial wave of denials and protests by athletes and sports officials was followed by a series of revelations about the use of such ‘pep pills’ by some elite athletes of this era. This short-lived controversy serves as an introduction to how the concept of doping developed during the 1950s. Ambivalence about the propriety of athletic doping at this time was exemplified by the provocative statements of the British sports physician Adolphe Abrahams, who combined concern about the medical effects of doping drugs with an open mind towards their use for the purpose of breaking records.

African athletic aptitude and the social sciences

Scientific investigation of racial athletic aptitude has been preceded by a century of pseudo- and quasi-scientific speculations on this topic. For this reason, physiological and anatomical research on African runners is performed in a social context that is still permeated by folkloric ideas about racial differences, some of which pertain to athletic performance. A powerful stereotype of ‘tropical nature’ and its ‘superabundant’ vitality has influenced non-African thinking about African athletic potential. The idea that evolutionary adaptation in Africa is a particularly severe version of natural selection has had a similar effect on Western thinking about African runners. Romantic ideas about African athletic aptitude may, therefore, be understood as modern versions of the doctrine of black ‘hardiness’ that survives in contemporary biomedicine in various forms.

The reunification of German sports medicine, 1989-1992.

A great deal of information about the doping practices of the former East German sports establishment has appeared since the collapse of the German Democratic Republic during the period 1989–1990. Long-standing suspicions about the hormonal manipulation of East German athletes have been amply confirmed. As important as they are, these revelations should not obscure important similarities between the high-performance sport cultures of West Germany and the former East German state. These common features include government funding of elite athletes and scientific research as well as a willingness to tolerate the use of illicit drugs by athletes. Both systems accepted and concealed the use of anabolic steroids by the athletes. The absorption by the West German sports establishment of many former East German sports physicians and trainers once involved in doping illustrates a shared mentality that views doping as an inevitable part of high-performance sport.

The Myth of the Nazi Steroid

The myth of the ‘Nazi steroid’ has persisted over the past four decades in the absence of any reliable evidence to support it. This essay traces the myth back to a short article that appeared in the respectable American journal Science. Our examination of the paper trail suggests that the myth was started by a rumour that the Science journalist converted into a hypothesis. Two factors account for the impressive career of this fantasy. First, it is striking how many writers were willing to transmit this claim to their readers in an uncritical manner on the undocumented assumption that it was a plausible idea. The second factor is how the world has imagined the Nazi regime. It has been credited with the capacity to commit virtually any perverse act, no matter how improbable or bizarre it may seem. In the last analysis, the myth of the ‘Nazi steroid’ confirms once again a widespread fascination with the Nazis that includes a masculine megalomania that is best represented by the legendary sadism of the Nazi criminal regime. It is, therefore, no accident that the ‘male hormone’ and its reputation as a catalyser of male aggression have become a symbol of the Nazi ethos.

Sports Physicians, Human Nature, and the Limits of Medical Enhancement

The purpose of this essay is to examine the elite sports physician as a medical and moral actor within the world of high-performance sport along with his or her relationship to medical ethics. High-performance sports medicine requires a concept of human nature that enables the medical practitioner to interpret the capacities and limitations of the athlete as a performing organism. This model of human nature enables the physician to administer “treatments” designed to boost athletic performance. At the same time, it should encourage the physician and other observers to think about the ethical limits to this sort of medical behavior. Thinking about human nature is an exercise in philosophical anthropology that can imagine two diametrically opposed interpretations of human limits in relation to athletic performance. A theological doctrine that regards the human being as the product of a Creator will regard the human body as endowed with divinely sanctioned limits that rule out the manipulation of the athletic body by means of drugs or other “doping” techniques. The Vatican has propounded such a doctrine since the 1950s. High-performance sport, in contrast, enlists every human faculty on behalf of producing an optimal athletic performance in defiance of perceived limits. The performance principle [Leistungsprinzip] that animates our technology-based civilization has created an anthropological model of human functioning that presupposes a human organism that must adapt itself, physiologically and psychologically, to the requirements of efficiency and productivity. Performance-enhancement is increasingly a way of life for large numbers of people. Elite athletes represent an extreme subset of this group, and there is a subculture of sports physicians who are willing to administer doping drugs and other unorthodox procedures to promote the repair and enhancement of these extreme performers.

Behind the mask

All is not as it seems in the racially integrated world of sport: harmony hides a world of exclusion and inequality