An Introduction to Drugs in Sport: Addicted to Winning?

Why do many athletes risk their careers by taking performance-enhancing drugs? Do the highly competitive pressures of elite sports teach athletes to win at any cost?

An Introduction to Drugs in Sport provides a detailed and systematic examination of drug use in sport and attempts to explain why athletes have, over the last four decades, increasingly used performance-enhancing drugs. It offers a critical overview of the major theories of drug use in sport, and provides a detailed analysis of the involvement of sports physicians in the development and use of performance-enhancing drugs. Focusing on drug use within elite sport, the book offers an in-depth examination of important contemporary themes and issues, including:

• the history of drugs in sport and changing patterns of use
• fair play, cheating and the ‘spirit of sport’
• WADA and the future of anti-doping policy
• drug use in professional football and cycling
• sociological enquiry and the problems of researching drugs in sport.

Designed to help students explore and understand this problematic area of research in sport studies, and richly illustrated throughout with case studies and empirical data, An Introduction to Drugs in Sport is an invaluable addition to the literature. It is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the relationship between drugs, sport and society.

Ivan Waddington is Visiting Professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Oslo and the University of Chester, UK. He is the author of Sport, Health and Drugs (Routledge, 2000) and Drugs in Sport (BMJ Books, 2002), and co-editor of Sport Histories (Routledge, 2004) and Pain and Injury in Sport (Routledge, 2006).

Andy Smith is Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport and Exercise and Co-Director of the Chester Centre for Research into Sport and Society at the University of Chester, UK. He is co-editor of the International Journal of Sport Policy and is co-author of Sports Development and Sports Policy in Society (Routledge, 2009) and Disability, Sport and Society (Routledge, 2009).