Introduction

Much like the space race, Olympic competition functioned as a proxy for the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War shifted the Olympic Games’ purpose from providing entertaining, high-stakes athletic competition to symbolizing a nation’s ideological legitimacy (Dimeo, 2007). Medal counts did not just quantify an individual athlete’s success, but gradually began to reflect a nation’s capacity to produce stronger and more advanced citizens (Hoberman, 2001). While the United States publicly grounded its athletic identity in democratic individualism and fair competition, it began facing increased pressure to outperform Soviet athletes on the global stage. However, this new ideological pressure created conditions in which doping became an increasingly rational response for nations seeking competitive advantage, as Cold War competition intensified pressure to produce athletic success and keep pace with rival nations (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Hunt, 2011).

This tension became increasingly visible as concerns over performance-enhancing drugs entered international athletic competition. The death of Danish cyclist Knud Jensen at the 1960 Rome Olympics—a complex event involving severe heat stroke alongside amphetamine use—intensified skepticism around performance-enhancing drugs and accelerated public expectations for institutional reform (K. E. Henne, 2009). Pressured to uphold America’s global image, American officials rapidly strengthened anti-doping regulations to prove that American athletes succeeded through individual merit rather than artificial enhancement (K. E. Henne, 2009). Soon, such regulations extended internationally. The IOC subsequently formalized an international system of testing and prohibited-substance regulation, beginning with the establishment of official Olympic testing procedures in the late 1960s (K. E. Henne, 2009; International Olympic Committee, 1967). The International Olympic Committee (IOC) increasingly presented chemical testing as a means of establishing consistent standards for identifying prohibited substances, including through emerging technologies such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (K. E. Henne, 2009). This development unfolded alongside broader Cold War anxieties surrounding Soviet advancement. Reflecting wider public fears of communism, American media increasingly portrayed Soviet athletic success as evidence of systemic manipulation throughout the 1960s and 1970s (O’Connor, 1976).

Therefore, analyzing the practical effectiveness of anti-doping enforcement may not suffice to understand its broader impact on global justice. The central global justice question of this period—and today—is: Who gets to define fairness in a supposedly universal international system? Anti-doping must be considered as a system through which chemical technologies and concentrated regulatory authority manufactured definitions of athletic “purity,” while universal standards masked underlying inequalities in norm-making power. This article uses manufactured purity to describe the institutional process through which scientific testing, regulatory classification, and political interpretation transformed historically contingent definitions of acceptable enhancement into seemingly objective distinctions between “clean” and “doped” athletes.

This study adopts a framework of global regulatory justice to analyze how anti-doping governance constructed athletic “purity.” Global regulatory justice in sport functions across three distinct dimensions: distributional justice (the spatial allocation of scientific infrastructure and testing capacity), procedural justice (impartiality in rulemaking and enforcement), and recognition justice (how cultural biases, gender norms, and geopolitical identities dictate whose bodies and practices are presumed legitimate versus inherently suspicious prior to scientific verification). For this study, these three dimensions provide an analytical framework for evaluating how anti-doping authority was distributed and exercised. By examining the distinction between equal rules and unequal rule-making power, this historical framework speaks directly to live concerns in contemporary anti-doping scholarship. Modern critical studies continue to highlight how global anti-doping governance reproduces resource asymmetries, procedural barriers, and regulatory illegitimacy between developed and developing nations. Recent anthropological research in Ethiopia and Cameroon similarly demonstrates how biomedical definitions of sporting fairness can overlook athletes’ lived realities and structural inequalities in resources and opportunities (Crawley & Kovač, 2026). Connecting Cold War norm-creation to these ongoing debates demonstrates that the concentration of regulatory power is a persistent structural feature of international sport governance.

How did Cold War anti-doping institutions transform scientifically measurable differences into globally authoritative definitions of legitimate and illegitimate athletic performance, and what does this process reveal about justice, power, and inequality in international sport?

This article argues that Cold War anti-doping systems did more than detect prohibited enhancement: they manufactured an institutional category of athletic purity. Because regulatory authority, scientific expertise, and testing infrastructure were concentrated within a limited network of predominantly Western institutions, apparently universal standards of “clean sport” emerged through unequal processes of norm creation. The cases of Rome 1960, Montreal 1976, and Los Angeles 1984 demonstrate how scientific measurement, geopolitical suspicion, and selective regulatory classification shaped whose bodies and enhancement practices were recognized as legitimate. Anti-doping history therefore reveals a broader global-justice problem: formally universal rules can reproduce unequal power when authority over defining, measuring, and adjudicating fairness is unevenly distributed.

Literature Review

Existing scholarship establishes several important dimensions of Olympic doping and anti-doping. Scholarship has established how doping enhances athletic performance (Fitch, 2017; Hoberman, 2001). It has also examined how chemical technologies operate mechanistically to detect doping in athletes (Dimeo, 2007; K. E. Henne, 2009). Fitch’s review of blood doping at the Olympic Games demonstrated how blood transfusions increase red blood cell concentration and oxygen delivery to muscles, improving endurance performance (Fitch, 2017). Henne’s historical analysis of the IOC Medical Commission traced the development of scientific testing methods, including thin-layer and gas chromatography, alongside the Commission’s efforts to establish standardized definitions and procedures for doping (K. E. Henne, 2009).

Beyond the physiological and technological dimensions of doping, existing scholarship has connected the increasing importance of the Olympic Games during the twentieth century to rising geopolitical tensions during the Cold War (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Hunt, 2011). Individuals believed that victory in the Olympics symbolized their nation’s power on the international stage (Hunt, 2011). This increased emphasis on winning correlated to a surge in doping rates during the Cold War era (Hunt, 2011). Previous research has also demonstrated the rapid development of secretive doping programs in Eastern Bloc countries, including Germany and the Soviet Union (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Hoberman, 2001). Beamish and Ritchie’s analysis of high-performance sport systems examined the political, social, and material forces that shaped athletic development on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

However, the scholarship reviewed here places greater emphasis on doping practices, state-sponsored programs, and the development of testing technologies than on how Western-concentrated institutions shaped the standards through which doping was identified and judged. Henne’s research demonstrates that the IOC Medical Commission was composed primarily of members from Western Europe and that the Commission developed significant authority over anti-doping testing and regulation (K. E. Henne, 2009). This institutional history raises an unresolved question: how did Western-concentrated institutions gain the power to decide what counted as enhancement, which bodies warranted surveillance, and which technologies remained legitimized? While this scholarship confirms that anti-doping governance was politically and institutionally constructed, it leaves a critical theoretical gap: what standards defined athletic “purity,” and how and by whom were those standards constructed? Within the scholarship examined in this study, greater attention is given to state compliance and Cold War rivalry than to how the category of athletic “purity” itself was produced through the interaction of scientific measurement, geopolitical suspicion, and unequal regulatory authority. Rather than asking whether anti-doping tools successfully caught cheaters, this paper examines how Western-concentrated institutions gained disproportionate power to decide what counted as enhancement, which bodies warranted surveillance, and which technologies remained legitimized.

While existing scholarship has demonstrated that anti-doping governance was politically and institutionally constructed, far less attention has been given to how the category of athletic ‘purity’ itself was produced through the interaction of scientific measurement, geopolitical suspicion, and unequal regulatory authority.

Materials and Methods

The purpose of this paper was to examine how the geopolitical context of the Cold War influenced how regulatory institutions created doping regulations and used anti-doping technologies. First, the emergence of scientific testing after the 1960 Rome Olympics is examined, followed by the ideological interpretation of doping at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Finally, the selective regulatory environment surrounding enhancement at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics is analyzed.

This study uses a qualitative historical research methodology based on iterative source analysis. This approach was selected to examine how historical actors, institutions, and contemporary observers understood anti-doping practices and their broader political significance rather than to measure the statistical effectiveness of doping enforcement. Research began with a broad review of scholarship on the origins of anti-doping, the administrative bodies of the Olympics, and athletics during the Cold War. Secondary sources were used to establish existing historical interpretations and identify areas of scholarly disagreement, while primary sources were used to examine how anti-doping policies and controversies were represented at the time. Primary sources included contemporary newspaper accounts, IOC documents, and records related to Olympic testing and enforcement. All primary and secondary sources were organized in NoodleTools, where digital notecards were used to record quotations, source information, and preliminary observations. As recurring themes emerged, the notecards were reorganized to compare different historians’ interpretations with contemporary newspaper accounts and IOC documents.

During the research process, numerous anti-doping controversies were examined to identify recurring patterns rather than isolated events. Rather than attempting to discuss every example, the study narrowed its focus to the 1960 Rome Olympics, the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics because these cases collectively capture the establishment of anti-doping policy, its use in Cold War ideological conflict, and its selective enforcement. Cases were selected based on their chronological position, significance to the development of anti-doping policy, and ability to illustrate changes in the relationship between scientific testing and political authority. The 1960 Rome Olympics provided a starting point for examining the institutional response to doping following Knud Jensen’s death, while the 1976 Montreal Olympics illustrated tensions surrounding the credibility and political use of anti-doping testing. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics provided a later case through which to examine how anti-doping regulations were enforced by the United States. Together, these cases provided a broad view of how scientific testing evolved across the period.

Each case was first analyzed individually before being compared to identify broader historical patterns. For each source, the facts of what occurred were first examined at face value, followed by an analysis of how the media source portrayed those facts. The nation the media source originated from, its political viewpoints, and its reach were considered, including whether its coverage remained within that nation or spread internationally. This was important because the United States and Soviet Union were both attempting to extend their political influence internationally. Questions that emerged from one case guided additional research into related sources, allowing the central argument to develop alongside the evidence. Ultimately, this methodology was designed to prioritize uncovering the relationship between the standards established by Olympic governing institutions and public perception of controversial events during the Games.

Results

Distributional Justice: Rome 1960 and the Concentration of Scientific Infrastructure

The 1960 Olympics in Rome provides a starting point for examining how scientific and institutional authority became increasingly concentrated within the international anti-doping system.

Jensen’s death did not immediately produce coordinated institutional reform, but it forced a public reckoning with the presence of performance-enhancing substances in elite sport. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, anti-doping tests became increasingly reliable, moving beyond rudimentary physical inspections and urine checks of earlier decades (Dimeo, 2007). At the 65th IOC Session in Tehran (1967), the IOC formally codified this transition, establishing medical machinery, publishing official lists of prohibited substances, and adopting technical entry requirements (International Olympic Committee, 1967). New molecular detection methods, such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, could identify banned substances and, in some cases, their metabolites with increasing precision, transforming doping from an arbitrarily immoral act into one that was quantifiable through scientific analysis (Dimeo, 2007). As Henne (2014) demonstrates, these technological developments did not simply improve the detection of doping; they also helped shape the regulatory goals and rule-making authority of the IOC Medical Commission. This technical shift transformed doping from a vaguely defined moral infraction into a quantifiable scientific metric, creating a public perception that anti-doping enforcement was governed purely by objective chemical facts.

However, beneath this technical objectivity lay a fundamental issue of distributional justice: scientific authority became concentrated within a narrow institutional network. By 1974, the Olympic Charter had formally incorporated regulations specified by the IOC Medical Commission, giving the Commission an increasingly established role in defining the boundaries of doping regulation (Meier & Reinold, 2018). This institutional authority was reinforced at the highest administrative levels when the IOC appointed Prince Alexandre de Mérode of Belgium as Chairman of the IOC Medical Commission in 1967 (International Olympic Committee, 1967). As scientific testing expanded, the Medical Commission’s expertise and regulatory authority increasingly shaped which substances could be identified, tested, and sanctioned (K. Henne, 2014; K. E. Henne, 2009). Consequently, a centralized network of scientists and IOC Medical Commission experts gained primary authority to define the operational boundaries of “clean sport.”

Media coverage further obscured this narrow distribution of scientific authority by sustaining an ideological fiction that reduced competition to a contest of pure individual discipline. Contemporary Olympic coverage frequently framed athletic success through broader narratives of national identity and political competition, allowing sporting performances to acquire meanings beyond the laboratory itself (O’Connor, 1976). By framing “clean” performance as an embodiment of individual discipline—where personal discipline rather than institutional engineering produced athletic excellence—media accounts could translate technical questions about doping into broader public judgments about athletic legitimacy. Consequently, public perception embraced the idea that victories stemmed solely from legitimate individual achievement, obscuring the political power of Western-concentrated institutions to define what constituted legitimate performance in the first place.

Crucially, this institutional concentration should not be read as evidence of intentional Western favoritism, but rather as a structural asymmetry in norm-making power. Because Western institutions controlled the accredited laboratories and testing protocols, they established the baseline definitions of athletic legitimacy to which all international competitors were subjected. By anchoring scientific authority within the Global North, early anti-doping systems created a model of governance where formal compliance was expected universally, but the power to create and interpret rules remained disproportionately concentrated.

Beyond the Cold War binary, this concentration of scientific authority produced a profound disparity between the Global North and South over who had access to scientific expertise. Contemporaneous IOC records reveal that this institutional imbalance sparked active internal debate: during the 1967 Tehran Session, Soviet representative Aleksi Andrianov submitted formal proposals demanding equal rights across all National Olympic Committees (NOCs), while IOC leadership acknowledged growing friction with “younger NOCs” critical of their exclusion from executive decision-making (International Olympic Committee, 1967). As newly decolonized nations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America entered the Olympic movement during the 1960s and 1970s, they entered a regulatory system in which decision-making authority remained disproportionately concentrated within established IOC leadership and technical institutions (K. E. Henne, 2009; International Olympic Committee, 1967). Universal compliance was demanded, yet the scientific and regulatory expertise necessary to define and validate anti-doping norms remained disproportionately concentrated within established European and North American institutions (K. E. Henne, 2009). Formally uniform standards thus reproduced systemic inequalities in scientific capacity: less powerful NOCs were often positioned primarily as recipients of regulatory standards established elsewhere.

Recognition Justice: Montreal 1976 and Preemptive Surveillance Obscuring Human Rights

The 1976 Montreal Olympics advances this analysis to recognition justice, revealing how Western media coverage and Cold War assumptions interacted with gendered aesthetic norms to transform non-conforming female bodies into preemptive objects of suspicion. Anti-doping dynamics expanded beyond standard regulatory testing to an issue of recognition justice: certain aesthetic body types inherently invited institutional suspicion and surveillance. The institutional framework established in 1967—which consolidated authority over rule-making, medical machinery, and banned-substance lists within the IOC Medical Commission—provided the administrative apparatus necessary to expand testing protocols dramatically by the mid-1970s, making Montreal the first Games where large-scale testing for anabolic steroids was operationalized (K. Henne, 2014). However, when East German women dominated swimming events, American media swiftly accused them of illicit enhancement prior to any definitive chemical verification (Amdur, 1976). This premature reaction highlights a critical question regarding sport and geopolitical bias: what happens when an athlete’s body is treated as immediate evidence of a violation before chemical testing has confirmed a rule infraction? In Montreal, East German women were scrutinized beyond the realm of laboratory metrics. Instead, some American media coverage targeted these women physically and visually, treating their muscular physiques as evidence that their performances were unnatural or chemically enhanced (Amdur, 1976).

This preemptive scrutiny illustrates how the broader anti-communist climate surrounding Cold War competition shaped the interpretation of East German athletic success in some American media coverage (Amdur, 1976). This geopolitical divide directly aligned with a physical one: the muscular physiques of East German female swimmers drastically conflicted with prevailing American athletic ideals—specifically, a lean, slender norm. Consequently, media rhetoric surrounding East German athletes repeatedly invoked notions of “unnaturalness,” using Western gender norms against non-conforming body types. While American standards of leanness were celebrated as the natural result of individual discipline and personal sacrifice (O’Connor, 1976), muscularity in Eastern Bloc women was interpreted as legible manifestations of state coercion and authoritarian intervention. Physical traits acquired radically different meanings depending on the nation—and by extension, the political system—the athlete represented.

Crucially, examining this dynamic demonstrates that cultural and ideological differences frequently trigger institutional scrutiny, illustrating that anti-doping judgments can occur within broader political realities. While historically documented state-sponsored doping programs did exist in East Germany (Hoberman, 2001), cultural biases in institutional athletic regulators partially dictated more surveillance on different nations like East Germany. This created a stark institutional paradox: even though the East German team was not identified as positive under the testing procedures in use at the Games (Hunt, 2011), these German women swimmers were nonetheless tried and convicted in public conversations and media based purely on physical appearance. Furthermore, because the centralized institutional model established during the 1967 Tehran Session meant that rule codification, testing execution, and regulatory adjudication remained concentrated within the same governing organ, athletes and national teams were subject to technical standards whose development they did not necessarily control (K. E. Henne, 2009; International Olympic Committee, 1967). By targeting athletes’ bodies through geopolitical hostility and non-conforming aesthetics, international sport compromised individual privacy and bodily dignity, subverting the very procedural fairness it claimed to uphold.

This framework of misrecognition completely erased the human agency and bodily autonomy of the athletes themselves. The East German swimmers—many of whom were minors subjected to forced, involuntary doping under the guise of state-administered “vitamin” programs (Franke & Berendonk, 1997)—were forced to carry the physical toll of this political warfare. Decades later, these victims suffered severe, lifelong health crises, including heart disease, infertility, and psychological trauma (Franke & Berendonk, 1997; Spitzer, 2006). The claim of objective detection methods obscured how governing institutions could police compliance through anti-doping technologies while leaving broader systemic human rights violations outside the scope of chemical testing.

Procedural Justice: Selective Enforcement and the 1984 Los Angeles Games

By the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War boycott converged with a fully established anti-doping regime. The central global justice problem was no longer simply whether testing could detect substances, but rather who possessed the regulatory legitimacy to decide which forms of performance enhancement were classified as illegitimate, and how those rules were selectively enforced amidst massive geopolitical division. No moment exposed these asymmetries of anti-doping enforcement and regulatory process more clearly than the U.S. cycling team’s unpenalized use of blood doping during the 1984 Games (Gleaves, 2015).

Evaluating institutional integrity during 1984 reveals a procedural justice oversight: certain enhancement technologies—namely blood transfusion and targeted autologous reinfusions—escaped formal classification as doping.

During the Los Angeles Games, American cyclists used autologous and homologous blood transfusions to improve endurance performance by increasing red blood cell concentration and oxygen delivery to muscles (Fitch, 2017; Gleaves, 2015). While chemical interventions like anabolic steroids were codified into regulatory bans, blood doping occupied an uncertain position because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) governing apparatus had not yet formally prohibited blood reinfusion procedures (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Gleaves, 2015). This distinction is vital because it demonstrates that institutional oversight relies on formal legal classification rather than objective biological facts. From a scientific standpoint, both anabolic steroids and blood transfusions represent human-induced alterations to the body’s homeostatic state. However, within the U.S. cycling program, blood transfusion was treated as a legitimate performance-enhancement technique rather than as a prohibited violation because the IOC had not yet formally classified it as doping (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Gleaves, 2015). Such enhancement practices paradoxically coexisted alongside the United States’ verbal commitment to clean sport, revealing a governance system where enhancement practices remained legitimate simply because institutional powers had not yet classified them as violations.

This partiality in Olympic adjudication can be attributed to several potential causes. The origin of this regulatory authority traces directly back to the administrative consolidation of the late 1960s. The 1967 IOC Tehran minutes reveal how executive leadership systematically limited external participation from non-Western NOCs and broader sports federations, centralizing norm creation within the IOC Executive Board and Medical Commission (International Olympic Committee, 1967). First, before the Games even began, the USSR and its allied nations refused to participate, mirroring the United States’s refusal to participate in the 1980 Moscow Olympics (Shales, 1984). The absence of the Soviet bloc altered the geopolitical composition of the Games and reduced one major source of reciprocal Cold War scrutiny. However, the available evidence does not establish that the boycott itself caused the regulatory loophole surrounding blood transfusion. Instead, the episode demonstrates how a fragmented geopolitical environment could coexist with gaps in anti-doping classification.

Second, the institutional structure of the 1984 Games further reinforced this biased standard framework through facilities like the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory under Dr. Don Catlin (Pieper, 2013). As the primary testing facility for the 1984 Games, the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory occupied a central position in the technical enforcement of anti-doping rules (Pieper, 2013). Accredited laboratories and Western governing bodies did not need to perform overtly fraudulent actions to reinforce their power. More often, as Kathryn Henne’s work illustrates, authority operated by narrowing the range of questions considered relevant and defining what counted as measurable unfairness (K. E. Henne, 2009). Scientific and regulatory authority could therefore operate through the definition of which forms of performance enhancement were technically measurable and administratively actionable (K. Henne, 2014; K. E. Henne, 2009). The laboratory in Los Angeles produced legitimacy by enforcing standards that rendered certain forms of chemical advantage as violations while leaving other technologies, including blood transfusions, largely unquestioned and unpoliced. Formal equality—the idea that a single set of rules applied universally to all bodies—masked the reality that the standards had been designed, operationalized, and adjudicated by a narrow coalition of Western actors and domestic facilities like the UCLA laboratory, deciding whose athletic bodies were recognized as pure and whose were designated as violative.

Discussion

The historical trajectory from Rome 1960 through Montreal 1976 and Los Angeles 1984 demonstrates that anti-doping systems did not merely detect pre-existing violations; they actively manufactured the institutional and moral category of the “clean athlete.” By transforming complex biological and technological differences into binary classifications of legitimate versus illegitimate performance, Cold War regulatory bodies established an authoritative framework of athletic purity under the banner of universal fairness.

Crucially, global justice scholarship reveals a fundamental tension at the heart of this system: the distinction between formal equality under rules and unequal rule-making power. While the IOC presented its anti-doping codes as uniform standards applicable to all nations equally, the authority to define prohibited substances, accredit testing laboratories, establish analytical thresholds, and interpret scientific evidence was disproportionately concentrated within a select group of Western states and institutions (K. Henne, 2014; K. E. Henne, 2009). Universal enforcement thus functioned to obscure deep underlying asymmetries in norm-making power.

This Cold War legacy directly informs contemporary global justice debates. Modern critical studies demonstrate how universal biomedical definitions of sporting fairness obscure broader structural inequalities in resources and athletic opportunity across developing nations (Crawley & Kovač, 2026). Examining Cold War institution-building clarifies how contemporary anti-doping governance came to institutionalize an ideal of purity that reproduces global hierarchies when applied across materially unequal environments.

Limitations & Scope

While this article examines the structural and institutional mechanisms of anti-doping governance, several analytical boundaries must be noted.

Regarding archival and source constraints, this study draws primarily upon published institutional reports, contemporaneous regulatory codes, media analysis, and established historical literature. Access to internal, unredacted IOC Medical Commission meeting minutes and confidential laboratory communications remains limited, necessitating further primary archival research to fully map informal decision-making processes.

Furthermore, the geopolitical scope focuses predominantly on the global tensions between Western regulatory bodies and Soviet-bloc practices; consequently, the specific regional anti-doping developments in non-aligned nations, Latin America, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa during the Cold War era warrant dedicated future investigation.

Finally, the temporal scope is restricted to the institutional formation period between 1960 and 1984. While contemporary anti-doping literature and WADA frameworks are integrated to demonstrate continuous global justice implications, this study does not aim to provide a comprehensive administrative history of post-1999 anti-doping policies.

Conclusion

Cold War anti-doping governance established more than a system of chemical detection; it created a globally authoritative mechanism for defining legitimacy in international sport. By leveraging scientific expertise and institutional dominance, Western regulatory bodies embedded specific cultural and political assumptions of purity into universal Olympic rules.

Ultimately, the history of anti-doping demonstrates that when formal equality of rules is imposed upon an uneven playing field of rule-making power, the system risks perpetuating the very global injustice it claims to eliminate. Recognizing how the institutional category of the “clean athlete” was historically constructed provides a necessary foundation for building more equitable, procedurally fair, and globally representative governance structures in international sport today.