History and Prevalence of Doping in the Marathon

Abstract

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.