Customer Reviews

Doping in Elite Sport: the Politics of Drugs in the Olympic Mvnt: The Politics of Drugs in the Olympic Movement

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This book is a book that provides a lot of information and hard facts for how the doping situation in the Olympics needs to be solved. It points out all of the corruption not only in athletes and countries but in the IOC, the organization responsible for drug testing. In editing the book, Wayne Wilson and Edward Dares attempt to collect articles, written by various authors, to show their disapproval of doping in sport and in their condemnation of the IOC for their apathy toward the epidemic. According to Ramin Minovi "Most of the writers deplore the failure of governing bodies to address the question, allowing drug use to proliferate, paying lip service to its dangers but taking no action." The majority of the works in the book does reprimand the IOC for not doing their job and for the corruption that exists or existed in it. The other chapters give the history of doping, give an example of the drugs used to escape detection and the methods of testing. By no means is there any chapter that supports the IOC in their dealings with drugs and enforcement of their drug policy.
The book it self was a very informative book but therefore was not very captivating. The book gave tons of facts but if the reader was not very interested in the topic to begin with then the book would not hold your attention. To compensate for the monotony of the book the book is short and has many sections to it. As a result of each chapter being a different article, written by different authors. This made the book "both readable and worth reading" to Ramin Minovi. He and I disagree on the difficulty of the reading. He said that the book was a "big read" and I feel that the articles were simplistic but some knowledge of steroids may be required. However one of chapters describes what some of these drugs do. Some of the articles of the book are almost repetitive and therefore could be left out. I feel as though these chapters should be skimmed through and then the reader should weed out the articles he/she has no interest in. The book also provides images which make the book a little more interesting. According to Minovi, they are the chapters about "Australian attitudes toward performance-enhancing drugs", and on Canada, German and China's regulations and dealings with toward athletes who abuse drugs. The book may also disinterest some from reading it because it is sort of a long book to be just informative but many of the pages are work cited pages. The book overall is decent but I would not recommend it to a person with no interest in the topic.

References

Ramin Minovi. 2001. http://www.abcc.freeserve.co.uk/drugs_elite1.html