Abstract

The author offers a similarly thorough account of the doping scandal that hit Spain in 2006, which occurred in the wake of a police investigation into the illegal importation of medicine from Australia. Similarly, in this case, the public was informed about suspected athletes before a formal lawsuit had been presented. He argues that the Spanish doping case known as ‘Operation Puerto’ exists within the framework of the abandonment of old, modernist notions of law and the construction of a new functional global system. Hardie uses Operation Puerto as a vehicle to show how law (related to anti-doping at least) is constructed or performed in the media as much as it is constructed and enacted in the law courts. Operation Puerto is an example par excellence of the distance that exists between the rhetoric of the media crisis surrounding doping and professional cycling and the actual reality of the material processes that are occurring as cycling goes through the process of global structural readjustment and the construction of the new cycling cartography. Legitimation occurs through the management of crisis and events - exception, functionality and spectacle - under the guise of the just war against the evil of doping. Aus der Einleitung