Book Review Essay: Beyond the Boundary: Drugs, the Body and Sport: The Scapegoat: About the Expulsion of Michael Rasmussen from the 2007 Tour De France and Beyond: Elite Sport, Doping and Public Health: Sport, Technology and the Body: The Nature of Performance

Abstract

Beyond the boundary: Drugs, the body and sportThe Scapegoat: About the Expulsion of Michael Rasmussen from the 2007 Tour de France and Beyond by Verner M0ller (Aarhus: Akaprint, 2011)Elite Sport, Doping and Public Health Edited by Verner M0ller, Mike McNamee and Paul Dimeo (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009)Sport, Technology and the Body: The Nature of Performance by Tara Magdalinski (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009)Sport is a realm punctuated by boundaries, whether those boundaries appear in the form of physical spaces and delineated areas of play, or other boundaries, such as those that appear between players and teams, team officials, competitors and spectators. Sport is also an arrangement through which a range of other boundaries-in the form of binary pairs-are enacted: these include, for instance, divisions between fit/active subjects and inactive ones, but also nature and culture, mind and body, male and female. Academic research on sport is also characterized by certain boundaries. In preparing for this review essay, for example, I was surprised to discover that very few articles on the question of drug and alcohol use in sport have ever been published in Contemporary Drug Problems, a jour- nal that publishes almost exclusively on alcohol and other drug use. Curiously, this separation is not a phenomenon confined to this journal, and reflects a broader trend within some academic research, whereby alcohol and other drugs (AOD) and drugs in sport (DIS) research tend to operate as largely distinct fields, with little crossover of personnel, theoretical and methodological tools or ideas. This apparent polarization is, by my estimation, a great shame, not in the least because AOD and DIS research shares many common interests and concerns. Academics in both areas are grappling, for instance, with questions about the way drugs are classified and categorized, the assumptions made about different classes of drugs and their effects, the ethics and politics of drug policies, the stigmatization and marginalization of people who use drugs, the development and implementation of methods for the surveillance and treatment of individuals who use drugs, the criminalization of drug use in sporting and other contexts, arguments for and against decriminalization, and the operation of harm-reduction policies. There are, as well, many other areas of shared interest. One can only speculate as to why AOD and DIS have tended, to a large extent, to function separately. It may be something to do with a belief that the subjects and objects of interest to both fields are distinct, or that the issues that concern them are so specific and localized that researchers in these two spheres felt they have little, if anything, to offer one another. There may also be an assumption that the context within which sports doping is framed and sanctioned (which includes the very specific process of cordoning off' sport from broader society and developing and applying special rules to drug management) is much too narrow to generate anything of meaning to AOD researchers, and vice versa.Whatever the reasons may be, these divisions undoubtedly operate to produce and reproduce a set of problematic dualisms and assumptions that academics in both fields have sought to deconstruct and challenge in recent years. The tendency to separate out drug use in sport from drug use in broader society may function, for instance, to enact a distinction between sportspersons and laypersons, or between the fit/muscular bodies of elite athletes and the less fit bodies of people who use drugs outside the context of elite sport. Insofar as DIS research might assume its object to differ from that of AOD, there is also the possibility that problematic assumptions will be brought into the research environment. If, for example, DIS researchers assume that their work is fundamentally different to that concerning AOD researchers because it involves the take-up of different kinds of substances (steroids) with certain kinds of properties (performance enhancement) by unique kinds of subjects (elite bodies), then we already have a problem. …