The formation of a professional specialty — sports medicine — is described with emphasis on how drug abuse has become a public issue. This notion’s itinerary is traced between 1955 and 1999 so as to show how doctors with different profiles and activities successively raised the issue of “doping”. The objectives of medicine, as it was being applied to sports, gradually changed. At the start, the intention was to cure, a view that celebrated the virtues of practicing a sport and it condemned using drugs. A new field of medical competence was opened with the “biological preparation of performances”, which, though presented as an alternative to using drugs, blurred the boundaries with doping. Medical positions became polarized: on the one side, a science of training took shape around the physiology of physical efforts, which made it possible to intensify activities while optimizing them thanks to rest periods; and on the other side, clinicians who, in closer contact with the everyday life of players, both understood the requirements ensuing from a continuous renewal of performances and tended to favour taking “products” for “curative” purposes. Sports medicine was legitimated as a medical specialty on two grounds: the one, obvious, sets doping at odds with health; and the other, aberrant from the viewpoint of health but nonetheless accepted, associates intensive sports with health.