Spitting in the Soup written by Mark Johnson published by Velopress reviewed by Matthew Pioro

Like an action-packed thriller you might read at the beach, Mark Johnson’s historical look at doping is a page-turner. It has crime, deceit and intrigue. It isn’t, however, those elements that drive pulpy novels that had me hooked for almost 400 pages. I wanted to find out where he was going with his argument – his very well-researched argument – that doping isn’t as simple or as “bad” as we think it is.

If you think dopers are just bad people, this book will challenge you and that naive view. My “worry,” if you will, as I read Johnson’s book, was that the author was headed to what I would call another naive conclusion: that we should just allow doping in sports. But of course, the journalist who has worked as a writer and photographer for Slipstream Sports, is too nuanced for that.

There’s a lot of hypocrisy in the world of anti-doping from the organizations that are supposedly interested in clean sport. It seems that that hypocrisy really bugs Johnson. He explores how rumour and lazy research has affected anti-doping policies. For example, the death of a cyclist in the 1960 Olympics, which was the result of heat stroke and a head injury, became attributed to a vascular dilation drug. His death, one of the earliest attributed to doping, actually had very little to do with the drugs in his system. A bit of anti-doping hypocrisy surrounds the lab set up for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It wasn’t there to ensure clean competition during the Games. It’s role was to prevent embarrassment. Twenty positives were found at the end of those Games, but suspiciously, the head of ioc medical commission at the time lost the paper that could connect the test results with athletes. And there’s George Bush. Yes, the former president of the U.S. During his presidency, he dutifully continued the war on drugs. But, the former owner of the Texas Rangers benefited from the rise in attendance at Rangers games, following baseball’s strike in 1994, that was fuelled by ’roided up performances by Iván Rodríguez and Juan González.

The doping in cycling gets a lot of coverage in Johnson’s book. The author looks at Lance Armstrong as well as Jacques Anquetil’s ahead-of-its-time blood doping. Johnson also contacts one of cycling’s favourite villains, Hein Verbruggen. The writer’s discussion of these people and their practices is fair as he attempts to look at all the institutional forces and changing attitudes that shaped the role of drugs in sport. Johnson’s look at the 1998 Festina affair is striking. He argues that its catalyst was a French minister interested in workers’ rights.

I won’t tell you about the conclusions Johnson comes to at the end. I want you, too, to have that page-turner feeling as you follow all his findings. You might share in his dismay at all the baloney (there is a stronger B-word, too) that underpins much of the anti-doping industry. I will say that I found Johnson’s conclusions surprising, maybe not totally convincing, but things I’m happy to mull over. I recommend that you, as a fan of cycling, a fan of sport, mull them over, too.