#367 Mark Johnson, Author of Spitting in the Soup, on the History of Doping in Sports

Mark Johnson (www.ironstring.com) is a sportswriter and sports photographer. He has covered cycling and endurance sports since the 1980s. His work often focuses on the business of pro cycling—a topic that frequently intersects with the sport’s long history of doping. Along with U.S. publications like VeloNews, his work is published in Cycling Weekly in the UK, Velo in France, Ride Cycling Review in Australia as well as general-interest publications including the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Mark has bicycled across the United States twice and completed an Ironman triathlon. A graduate of the University of California, San Diego, the author also has an MA and PhD in English Literature from Boston University.

VeloPress published Johnson’s first book, Argyle Armada: Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life, a documentary in words and photos of a year with the Garmin-Cervélo professional cycling team.  Today we discuss his amazing book Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports. As the book description reads, "The history of doping in sports is one of good versus bad. Or so the story goes. Truth is, athletes have doped to do their jobs since the dawn of organized sports. But cleaning up drug-soaked sports has been a mission at odds with the spectacle-hungry interests of advertisers, Olympic organizers, governments, reporters, and fans, none of whom want to spit into sports' nourishing broth of money, power, and national pride. In Spitting in the Soup, Mark Johnson traces the shocking trail of hypocrisy that belies the tidy myth of clean athletes fighting corrupt deviants. Journalists spin false claims about amphetamines and EPO. Cold War governments treat anti-doping as an inconvenience. Olympic organizers dismiss the pursuit of clean sports as a budget breaking nuisance. And U.S. lawmakers tie themselves in knots to enrich snake-oil supplement makers while railing against performance-enhancing drugs as a stain on the American Way."

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