WADA As Sporting Empire: Prospects and Shadows (World Anti-Doping Agency) (Report‪)‬

Introduction While athletes have sought to gain competitive advantage over their sporting opponents for centuries, the stakes for winning have gotten much higher in the contemporary age of capitalist high performance sport, and the techniques by which competitive advantage are gained have followed suit. As a result, interventions at the level of the athletic body designed to improve performance have increased considerably, some of which push the boundaries of legality in sport while others cross them completely. These latter interventions, understood broadly under the rubric of sports doping, involve a host of techniques that introduce substances into the body or methods of body augmentation contrary to the rules of sport. This essay concerns the efforts of sporting authorities to police these practices in high performance sport on an increasingly global basis.