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This article examines how the lay press and the expert literature have contributed to spreading the bad image of human Growth Hormone as a doping drug despite the lack of a solid scientific grounds proving its alleged deleterious side-effects. The analysis of the press coverage shows that the drug has been associated with a number of negative concepts and mainly with several health hazards and even (indirectly) with death, through the insistence on the fact that it used to be extracted from cadavers prior to 1985. The expert literature review unveils that a vast majority of the claims about the negative side-effects of the drug contained in the reviewed articles and book chapters are actually suppositions or deductions, not based in actual empirical research. The story about the use of cadaveric hGH is also lavishly quoted by the expert literature. The true available scientific evidence points only to mild side-effects of hGH supplementation in healthy adults. It is therefore concluded that this discourse can be labelled as ideological rather than factual or scientific. These claims have become common sense or naturalized knowledge, and have ultimately become instrumental in the anti-doping campaign succeeding in imposing its perspective on doping and its radical recipes to eradicate it.

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This article sets out to make a case for a non-moralistic and non-Manichaean approach to the doping phenomenon, where doping is seen as but one more form of technology applied for the enhancement of performance in sport. Departing from these premises, the article proposes a re-interpretation of the history of doping and anti-doping in the light of the interpretative frame proposed by the media scholar Brian Winston to analyze the processes of technological change and innovation. According to this dialectic model, the evolution of any technological novelty must be understood in the wider social framework where it develops and in particular as the result of the interplay of social accelerators (the social necessities or demands that the technology in question helps to solve) and brakes (the social forces whose status or position may be challenged by the new technologies). It is argued that the main and probably the only social force pushing forward the innovation processes in sport, including doping, derives from the inexorable tension of sport towards hierarchy, performance and victory. Among the social brakes for the development of doping one can add a part of the medical and journalistic professions, the sports governance structure and some national governments. The current state of doping practices and anti-doping policies is the result of the balance of forces in the tension between social brakes and accelerators, which accounts for all the apparent inconsistencies and whims of the current list of prohibited substances and methods.