There are books to be consumed and discarded, and there are brilliant but untimely books the value of which will be discovered in the (hopefully) not too distant future. At least no other categories come to my mind right now.
Thomas Søbirk Petersen’s Doping in Sport: A Defence belongs to the latter category. The argumentation is unerringly astute, the tone of voice sober, and the conclusions couldn’t be more compelling. Yes, performance-enhancing means and substances are part and parcel of modern sport, and no, the current World Anti-Doping Code doesn’t make sense at all (to put it nicely). It’s an utterly ridiculous compilation of moral posturing and antiquated notions of the so-called meaning of sport.
Of course, messieurs Miah, Møller, Mauron et al. have reached pretty much similar or even identical conclusions, either alone or as co-authors, but that’s another story.
What I find particularly commendable about T.S. Petersen’s take on the topic is his ability to put the message across in less than 100 pages. Appropriately enough, the slender tome is published in the Routledge Focus on Sport, Culture and Society book series. While the size is reminiscent of a pamphlet, the argumentation is indeed academic in the positive sense of the word.
“I’m doped,” the Danish don exclaims in the preface, and goes on to hope for an “open dialogue on doping,” which will surely take place in our lifetime. By “us,” incidentally, I refer to those of my esteemed readers who are not older than the average age of the forumbloggen audience – it just cannot be much above 50 years, can it?
Better to put the slim book aside, then. You might even consider hiding it in the furthermost corner of your sprawling home library. That’s what I did earlier this year, and when the forumbloggen boss reminded me for the third time of my commitment to compose a conventional book review, I finally had to settle for a modest blog post.
Apologies for that, and congratulations to professor Petersen for a thoroughly untimely book which will definitely be feted as a prophetic masterpiece towards the mid-twenty-first century.
