Abstract:

The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the transition in British sports from amateurism to professionalism. Thereafter, sportspersons have obtained material opportunities with sponsorships and attracted entrepreneurs. However, since sponsors in this new era have been using sportspersons to manipulate consumer behaviour, the vested interests of capitalists led to the misuse of the media and medical industry at the cost of the health of sportspersons. The commodification of sports has put much pressure on sportspersons for sportive success. This pressure, on the other hand, has been tried to be circumvented by the illegal use of doping. Although sportspersons in countries of the Iron Curtain were state sponsored, thus were not pressed by entrepreneurs for sportive success, they faced a similar pressure by their states. To show their political superiority, countries of the Iron Curtain forced their sportspersons to use doping. Louise Page in her Golden Girls 1984 criticises, in a light tone, the politics of sports in the Britain of the 1980s. She looks at the result of the transformation of sports from amateurism to professionalism, deals with the free use of doping in Iron Curtain countries to contrast it with the illegal use of doping in capitalist Britain, and focuses on the topical issues about British sportswomen and the oppression they have felt because of their gender by the male dominated world of sports. Therefore, this article will first give a brief history of the development of athletics in Britain from the 1960s onwards, then the relationship between media and sports that commodifies sports in the Britain of the 1980s, and lastly the use and effects of doping as they are reflected in Golden Girls.