Marcel Reinold

Performance Enhancement and Politicisation of High-Performance Sport: The West German ‘air clyster’ Affair of 1976

While the politicisation of high-performance sport is perceived to represent one of the driving forces behind doping, we know not much how exactly the cold war in sports has affected sporting misconduct in western societies. Therefore, we propose here to distinguish between ideological and institutional politicisation and explicit and implicit acceptance of dubious practices. We apply our framework to analyse the West German ‘air clyster’ affair of 1976 in order to examine to what extent the politicisation of high-performance sport during the cold war affected the search for innovation in performance enhancement. We find that political pressure for improved competitiveness in West German sport had served to create a semi-autonomous high-performance sport sector in West Germany where blurred lines of accountability allowed questionable practices to prosper. While the public despised the use of questionable methods, sportive nationalism served to eclipse dubious practices. West German sport leaders adopted insofar a permissive attitude towards questionable practices as sporting misconduct was not sanctioned. Thus, our results strongly suggest that sports politicisation during the cold war facilitated the search for performance-increasing methods in western societies.

Difficult Adaptations to Innovations in Performance Enhancement: ‘Dr Brustmann's Power Pills’ and Anti-doping in German Post-war Sport

The paper emphasizes the idea that in order to avoid present-minded moralizing research on doping history we should consider doping as a socially constructed phenomenon. By examining the most spectacular West German doping scandal of the 1950s, the so-called Brustmann affair, the paper illustrates the difficulties sport physicians as well as sport functionaries faced when it came to deal with innovations in pharmacological performance enhancement. The complexities and ambiguities surrounding doping in the 1950s make evident why turning sport physicians into sport health guardians was a logical option for the sport associations in post war Germany even though ‘doctors dilemmas’ typical for sport medicine soon emerged.

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.

Immunizing Inefficient Field Frames for Mitigating Social Problems: The Institutional Work Behind the Technocratic Antidoping System

Although the heavily expanded technocratic doping test system has failed to detect the most spectacular cases of performance enhancement and to eradicate doping as social problem, it enjoys social fact quality. Research presented here argues that the taken-for-granted character of the technocratic test system represents a prime example of institutional work. The technocratic test system became institutionalized and maintained because the agendas of field actors converged around a field frame, enjoying cultural resonance and, at first, strong pragmatic viability. The specific methods of frame stabilization employed by actors interested in institutional maintenance served to stabilize unrealistic policy expectations. The article aims to support these ideas by analyzing the trajectory of antidoping in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) based on rich archival sources.