Wada as Sporting Empire: Prospects And Shadows

In the efforts to police doping practices in high performance sport, the World Anti-Doping Agency exerts formidable powers of registration and control over competing athletes. Using the political framework of Empire developed by Hard t and Negri, this essay interrogates WADA’s policing practices, which allow it to draw biological specimens from an athlete’s body in or out of competition with no advance notice; which require athletes to provide accurate whereabouts information at all times for said testing; which reserve the right to retroactively nullify previous results should future detection techniques be discovered within an eight-year statute of limitations; and which is implementing a longitudinal “athlete passport” system. The essay concludes that due to these techniques of contro l the striated space of sporting competition has mutated into a topological form that challenges traditional understandings of fixed space and time, and that this introduces potential new s ubjectivities for high performance and recreational athletes alike.
 

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