New Book on History of Anabolic Steroids and Doping in Sports

Daniel Rosen of the Rant Your Head Off blog has written a new book on the history of anabolic steroids and doping in sports. The book Dope: A History of Performance Enhancement in Sports from the Nineteenth Century to Today is scheduled to be released on June 30, 2008. Rosen tells us more about it in his blog.

While the attention that is currently paid to the subject makes it often appear as if the problem is of relatively recent vintage, you’ll learn about a scandal in the 1950s that rocked the world of track and field in much the same way as the Festina scandal and other scandals have rocked cycling over the past 10 years. At the center of the story was a doctor who claimed that many of the athletes who broke the four-minute mile mark in the 1950s did so through the use of amphetamines. His character and behavior are eerily reminiscent of other, more recent figures. An interesting outgrowth of that scandal: One of the first scientific studies aimed at determining the real benefit of a performance-enhancing drug.

But most of all, what I hope you’ll get out of the book is an appreciation and understanding that doping is not a problem that just magically appeared over the last twenty years (despite how the many in the mainstream media seem to cast the story). The desire to boost human performance, and to find ways of pushing the boundaries of what we’re capable of, has existed for a very, very long time. And at one point in time, the human experiments that doping athletes perform were once even considered merely using technology in man’s quest to be better, faster and stronger. The perfectability of man/woman, if you will.

I really look forward to reading this book. And I really hope contemporary sportswriters take the time to read it as well to place the current doping scandals in their proper historical context.

About the author

Millard

MESO-Rx | Website

Millard writes about anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs and their use and impact in sport and society. He discusses the medical and non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids while advocating a harm reduction approach to steroid education.