The Invention of a ‘Drug of Mass Destruction’: Deconstructing the EPO Myth

In the wake of previous contributions by scholars like Verner Møller and Paul Dimeo, which have demonstrated the mythical nature of the accounts concerning two famous ‘doping deaths’ (the cyclists Arthur Linton and Knud Enemark Jensen), this article thoroughly examines the existing evidence (both anecdotal and scientific) concerning the much repeated claim that EPO ‘killed’ 18 Dutch and Belgian cyclists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This examination shows that these claims almost absolutely lack empirical evidence, and that in fact the existing truly experimental and epidemiological research downplays or even rules out the existence of a casual link between EPO intake and sudden death in healthy adults. It is therefore concluded that EPO has been constructed by the expert literature and the lay press as the ‘drug of mass destruction’ of the war on drugs in sport, and that the story about the ‘EPO deaths’ is to be seen as anti-doping propaganda.