Spitting in the Soup

DON'T HATE THE PLAYER.HATE THE GAME.Doping in sports is a history of good versus bad. Or so the story goes.Truth is, athletes have doped to do their jobs since the dawn of organized sports. But cleaning up drug-soaked sports has been a mission at odds with the spectacle-hungry interests of advertisers, Olympic organizers, governments, reporters, and fans, none of whom want to spit into sports' nourishing broth of money, power, and national pride.In Spitting in the Soup, Mark Johnson traces the shocking trail of hypocrisy that belies the tidy myth of clean athletes fighting corrupt deviants. Journalists spin false claims about amphetamines and EPO. Cold War governments treat anti-doping as an inconvenience. Olympic organizers dismiss the pursuit of clean sports as a budgetbreaking nuisance. And U.S. lawmakers tie themselves in knots to enrich snake-oil supplement makers while railing against performance-enhancing drugs as a stain on the American Way.Spitting in the Soup is an eye-opening tour through the ethical, social, and economic clamor that arises from our ongoing efforts to create a sporting island of chemical purity in the midst of a drug-dependent world.