Wake up, young people, from your illusory pleasures; strip off your disguises and recall that every one of you has a sex, a true sex. 1 Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct. 2 Michel Foucault's words above neatly summarize the overriding concern of this paper: the emergence and control of modern sexuality, specifically the socio-historical construction of the sexual body in sport. What follows is the history of a sport policy. The so-called "sex test" policy and its concomitant battery of verification procedures was imposed upon elite female athletes in major international athletic competitions from the 1960s until the IOC's recent decision to cancel testing in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. 3 The procedure-referred to synonymously as "sex testing," "gender verification," or "femininity controls"-required that women entered in major international competitions-most notably and visibly the Olympic Games-undergo either a chromosomal or physical inspection in order to "verify" their femininity. Although the specific reasons for its implementation were never cited formerly in International Olympic Committee publications, the test's apparent purpose was to guard against men posing as females in women's athletic competition. 4 However, beneath the sex test's "ethical" integument lay sport's gendered practices and institutions, ones through which athletes became markers of social-sexual normalcy and deviancy. The history of the sex test presents an opportunity to trace several gender-based facets of modern sport. These include the social construction and control of sex and sexuality; the operation of social and political power in and through the body in sport; the hegemony of male-controlled scientific and medical disciplines · Sport History Review, 2003, 34, 80-98

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The central justification for the prohibition of drugs in the Olympic Games is that drugs are contrary to the 'spirit of sport'. This paper considers the 'spirit of sport' claim by placing Olympic ideals in their full, historical relief. The central thesis is that the recent prohibition against performance-enhancing substances based on the ideal of the 'spirit of sport' is in fact part of a much longer historical project to proffer an image of the Olympics as a 'pure' form of sport. The ideals and 'foundation myths' of Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin are first used as a comparative point upon which to study major changes to Olympic sport in the twentieth century and the construction of antidoping policies. Coubertin built his system of myths around sport from three epochs: ancient, medieval and modern. The study then moves on to consider two important historical periods in the Olympic movement: the first three decades of the twentieth century and the period from just after WWII to the early 1970s. During both time periods, major challenges to Coubertin's original foundation myths are considered alongside attempts on the part of the International Olympic Committee to sanction performance-enhancing substances and methods. The foundation myths upon which Coubertin built his movement are also essential elements of anti-doping regulations.

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