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The Use of Performance-enhancing Substances in the Olympic Games: A Critical History

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The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies

Abstract

After the infamous Ben Johnson drug scandal at the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, the Canadian government created the Commission of Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance, commonly referred to as the Dubin Inquiry after Chief Justice Charles Dubin, who chaired the proceedings. In his report to the Canadian people, Dubin claimed that drugs represented the single greatest moral threat to sport and its integrity. Drugs, Dubin claimed, were the ‘antithesis’ of sport and their use ‘threatened the essential integrity of sport and is destructive of its very objectives’.1 Reiterating the same philosophy, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s World Anti-Doping Code states in its preamble that drug rules ‘seek to preserve what is intrinsically valuable about sport. This intrinsic value is often referred to as “the spirit of sport”, it is the essence of Olympism’.2

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Authors
  1. Ian Ritchie
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Canada

    Helen Jefferson Lenskyj

  2. Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

    Stephen Wagg

Copyright information

© 2012 Ian Ritchie

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Ritchie, I. (2012). The Use of Performance-enhancing Substances in the Olympic Games: A Critical History. In: Lenskyj, H.J., Wagg, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230367463_26

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