Regulating Performance-Enhancing Technologies

Abstract

This article compares the efforts to govern performance enhancement technologies in two seemingly different competitive arenas—financial markets and professional cycling—where the pressures to outperform are enormous. In the two decades prior to the 2007 financial crisis, new derivative financial commodities such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were created to “juice up” investment returns for extraordinary profits. Over roughly the same period, the development and use of blood boosting drugs and technologies brought so-called doping by cyclists to new levels of complexity and sophistication with extraordinary race results and new levels of commercialization of the sport. The efforts to “turbocharge” their respective competitive spaces took place within complicated regimes of self-regulation that had strikingly dissimilar narratives about performance enhancement and, consequently, different technologies for control. Looking across these seemingly disparate cases draws our attention to how regulation fits into the assemblage of competition and prospects for reform.