It is November 15, 2007, and I am in the Palacio Municipal de Congresos in Madrid, Spain, observing the Third World Conference on Doping in Sport. One of over 1,500 participants in attendance, I am listening to Richard Pound, then-president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), deliver his opening remarks. In a characteristically impassioned speech about the need to preserve the integrity of sport, Pound appeals to stakeholders’ concerns about doping in sport: “We do have—and I emphasize this, we do have—the hope of prevailing over doping, but only if we persevere and continue to look to the...

The contemporary contours of anti-doping regulation are the outgrowth of a history that took shape primarily during the latter half of the twentieth century. That history reveals how earlier forms of technocratic regulation aided in instilling and institutionalizing suspicions of athletes’ bodies. As I will explain further in chapter 3, suspicion has become codified in the World Anti-Doping Code. To illuminate how such values took hold, this chapter explores how formal anti-doping regulation began as technocratic rules that later gave way to a biomedicalized form under the World Anti-Doping Agency. In particular, I examine the historical development of drug testing...

Moral underpinnings of the global campaign remain relevant today, albeit articulated in different ways than earlier efforts that condemned professionalism. Society, argues Richard Pound, the first chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, “is built on an ethical platform, as is sport.” The foundations of both, he says, “should be sturdy.”¹ WADA, he explained, is a necessary partner in work aimed at counteracting what he refers to as the “wave of misconduct at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium.”² In essence, his words suggest that doping in sport is symptomatic of a broader moral...

The emergence of anti-doping regulation marks an instance whereby technocratic and legalistic mechanisms are used to police longstanding ideologies about sport and embodiment as if they are tangible truths. Athlete citizenship is not about regulation alone; it is a constitutive process of belonging and exclusion in which regulation plays an important role. Citizenship is gendered, and athlete citizenship is no exception in this regard.¹ According to Anne McClintock, there is an “uneven gendering of national citizenship” that draws upon accepted cultural values to justify and naturalize the subordinate position of women.² Scholarly analyses of sport and nation provide many examples...

Thus far in this book I have described how contradictions underpinning antidoping regulation and athlete citizenship surface in embodied, national, and international ways by using examples from international sport. As sport contributes significantly to “meanings and symbols associated with national life,” this chapter examines how the conditions of the anti-doping regime impact and mediate athlete citizenship at the national level.¹ As many athlete citizens compete in international competitions their respective nations have a vested interest in regulating their bodies. If athletes fail to live up to regulatory expectations of their own volition, national anti-doping systems can punish them or help...

I began the research for this book with the hopes of gleaning insight into hybrid governance arrangements by understanding anti-doping regulation. It was a response to John MacAloon’s invitation to study sport:

the exploration of cultural conceptions will reveal connections to other institutions and contexts that may be quite surprising or unexpected, that is, concealed or suppressed by cultural commonsense, everyday speech, disciplinary, and professional boundaries. In this way inquiry into sport can broaden toward the very general social morphologies that cultural studies researchers are most interested in, not by theoretical reduction but by demonstrated relationships among widening circles of...