Enhancing the Odds: Horse Racing, Gambling and the First Anti-Doping Movement in Sport, 1889-1911

The sporting world has long considered doping both a recent phenomenon and one associated with performance enhancement. It has also typically viewed the debate over prohibiting doping to be one about safety, fair play and the spirit of sport. Yet this article will show that concerns about doping, which first emerged in the sport of horse racing, was indeed about fair play, but not fair play for the athletes. Rather the fair play threatened by doping related to gambling. Indeed, turn-of-the-century horse racing viewed doping as a tool equally useful for improving a horse's performance as it was for slowing it. This article concludes that such concerns over doping reflect the 'developed cosmology' of the early-twentieth-century public imagination. In this way, the historical roots of anti-doping reveal much about today's fascination with drugs and sports.