Using Drugs in Sports Used to Be Considered Just Part of the Game
August 7, 2006
An American weightlifter, Ken Patera, was training for a rematch against a Russian superheavyweight, Vasiliy Alexeev, at the 1972 Olympics. In an earlier competition, Mr. Alexeev had narrowly beat Mr. Patera.
"The only difference between me and him," Mr. Patera explained to reporters, "was that I couldn't afford his pharmacy bill. Now I can. When I hit Munich next year, I'll weigh in about 340, maybe 350. Then we'll see which are better -- his steroids or mine."
For centuries, elite athletes have used special diets and potions to give them an edge beyond their physical training. Ancient Greek athletes apparently prepared themselves with high-protein diets and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Roman gladiators may have used stimulants. But starting in the late 19th century, advances in science and the emergence of a new class of professional athletes combined to make drugs an increasingly common competitive strategy.
"Ethical objections, such as the idea that doping is a violation of 'the spirit of sport,' did not exist at the beginning of the high-performance era," says John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a historian of sports doping. "The entire athletic enterprise was regarded as an exploration of human limits and what could be done to extend them. The idea of using drugs to combat fatigue seemed like a perfectly natural strategy, since the primary competition was between human beings and their fatigue symptoms."
So, for example, in the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, U.S. marathon runner Thomas Hicks finished first, thanks in part to the strychnine (a stimulant at low doses) and brandy his handlers were feeding him along the route. Despite this becoming public knowledge, Mr. Hicks was allowed to keep his medal.
In the decades since, the desire to win has only intensified, as top athletes have become commercial gold mines. Amphetamines were the drugs of choice for many athletes in the 1940s and 1950s. Then, in 1956, Ciba Pharmaceuticals, in collaboration with an American sports doctor, John Ziegler, released Dianabol, the first widely available anabolic (tissue-building) steroid. Although supposedly aimed at burn victims and the elderly, the pills became popular among U.S. bodybuilders. Soon, many competitive athletes were testing the benefits -- and side effects -- of these so-called bulk bombs.
"Over the past century, the quantifiable elite sports, such as weight lifting and track and field, have developed into nothing less than an enormous biomedical experiment on the human organism itself," Mr. Hoberman says.
But as drugs became more prevalent and effective, apprehension about them also increased. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, a Danish cyclist, Knud Jensen, collapsed while riding in a 100-kilometer team trial, fractured his skull and died. An autopsy revealed amphetamines in his blood. Mr. Jensen's death, the first in Olympic competition since 1912, was a wake-up call to the International Olympic Committee, which had no official policy on doping.
Nor was it only Olympic athletes who were doping themselves. Jacques Anquetil, a French cyclist who won the Tour de France five times beginning in 1957, openly admitted using drugs during competitions and implied that every top cyclist did. "Only a fool would imagine it was possible to win the Tour de France on mineral water," Mr. Anquetil said. On July 13, 1967, British cyclist Tommy Simpson died as he competed in the televised Tour de France; traces of amphetamine and cognac were later found in his blood.
A few months earlier, in May 1967, the Olympic committee officially banned a number of substances, including narcotics and amphetamines, and announced that small-scale drug testing would begin at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble and Mexico City. (Steroids weren't banned until 1975.) Despite the new rules and enforcement plans, Harold Connolly, who had won the gold medal in the hammer throw at the 1956 Olympics, told a congressional committee in 1973, "I know any number of athletes on the 1968 Olympic team who had so much scar tissue and so many puncture holes in their backsides that it was difficult to find a fresh spot to give them a new shot."
Terry Todd, author of "A History of the Use of Anabolic Steroids in Sports," (1992) believes two cultural phenomena of the 1960s made doping in sports inevitable and intractable. Athletes growing up then were taught that "science could make their lives -- their athletic quests -- easier." And there appeared a "significant subculture in which the use of illegal substances was not only permissible but a badge of honor."
Since then, many athletes and their doctors have joined a pharmaceutical arms race with the organizations that govern their sports. In 1968, reporters at the Mexico City Olympics asked an American weightlifter about a new ban on amphetamines.
"What ban?" he said. "Everyone used a new one from West Germany. They couldn't pick it up on the test they were using. When they get a test for that one, we'll find something else. It's like cops and robbers."
