Abstract des Autors

Sports and doping are topics with salient media bandwagon effects. In this paper, special attention is attached to the tension between equality of opportunity and desire to win in cutting edge competitions. How far victory depends on physical conditions and natural talent of the athletes and sportsmen? It is well known that inherited traits unfolds only in conjunction with consistent training and are triggered by an iron will and mental concentration. Natural factors cannot be disconnected from social and cultural practices. But to what extent does doping matter? In the past few decades, doping underwent both a semantic and a practical mutation. For an adequate analysis of this shift neither cultural nor social history are sufficient. Instead historians have to cope with economic and media theories. Topics such as advertisement and marketing, subjectivities and personality have to be combined with the history of knowledge of physiological enhancement and biomolecular innovations. Grappling with post humanism and cyborgs opens new analytical trajectories beyond the nature-culture dichotomy and the nature-nurture debate.