Doping as technology : a re-reading of the history of performance-enhancing substance use

The stance concerning doping proposed in this paper is, that it is a form of technology. Performance-enhancing techniques and substances should be primarily and precisely considered as a form of bio-medical technology. Hopefully, there is no need to appeal to any scholarly authority to support the widely assumed claim that technology is in itself morally neutral: what is morally qualifiable is the use that human beings make of it. The blanket ban imposed by anti-doping agencies on the use of a wide range of certain biochemical and biotechnological substances and techniques in any amount and/or frequency, but not on others (see Møller, 2004 and Houlihan, 2002), suggests a failure to acknowledge this basic point. Taking these ideas as its premise, this paper aims at a re-reading of the history of doping and anti-doping in the light of the interpretive frame proposed by the media scholar and historian Brian Winston (1998), in order to analyse the processes of technological change and innovation. What makes this model especially interesting and useful is its dialectical approach to these processes: its results are always the outcome of a tension between ‘supervening social necessities’ and ‘the law of suppression of the radical potential’ (see below for an explanation of these terms). Although Winston focuses on media and information technology, his understanding of the dynamics of technological change can arguably be applied to the analysis of doping as technology, and, indeed, of any kind of technology.