ICS Occasional Paper Series Volume 1, Number 4 Doping as Technology: A Re-Reading of the History of Performance-Enhancing Substance Use Dr Bernat López Department of Communication Studies, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain November 2010 Editors: Professor David Rowe and Dr Reena Dobson Publisher: Institute for Culture and Society University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2790, Australia Tel: +61 2 9685 9600 Fax: +61 2 9685 9610 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.uws.edu.au/ics Doping as Technology: A Re-Reading of the History of Performance- Enhancing Substance Use Bernat López Department of Communication Studies, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain As a society we are schizophrenic about machines. On the one hand, although perhaps with an increasingly jaundiced eye, we still believe in the inevitability of progress. On the other hand we control every advance by conforming it so that it ‘fits’ to pre-existing social patterns (Winston, 1998: 11). Introduction The former French professional cyclist Christophe Bassons, who garnered notoriety in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an outspoken critic of the doping culture in cycling, provides the following definition of the concept of doping in his book Positif: ‘Doping is any exogenous input contributing to an artificial development of the physical capacities. It is not doping that is required to contribute to a natural improvement of the body’ (Bassons, 2000: 247).1 This is a classical approach to the concept insofar as many definitions – explicit as well as implicit – used by anti-doping and sports organisations as well as its officials and supporters, revolve around the dichotomies of natural vs.