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Blood Doping
As long as athletes have sought to run faster, jump higher or throw farther than their opponents, the more unscrupulous have resorted to dubious means. Greek athletes at the ancient Olympics ate sheep testicles to raise their testosterone levels.
Others combined wine with strychnine, a poison used as a stimulant in small amounts. Strychnine was still in vogue when the Games were revived in 1896, and the 1904 Olympic marathon gold medalist Thomas Hicks used it in combination with brandy during the race. It took four physicians to revive him after his victory.  Cyclists, in particular, during the late 19th century resorted to stimulants to enhance performance and numb the pain. Heroin and cocaine were combined in a speedball. A less potent concoction mixed wine with extracts from the coca leaf.
Doping as a term appeared in an English dictionary in 1889 and as a scientific aid to performance in 1935 when German scientists isolated the male sex hormone testosterone, the key ingredient in increasing muscle strength.
Testosterone was injected into Nazi troops to increase their aggression and fed to German athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where stimulants in the form of amphetamines were also in use. State-sponsored doping began in earnest after World War II when Soviet-bloc countries in particular gave sports a prominent place on the ideological battlefield. With the stakes raised, a search began for a synthetic drug that would reproduce the effects of testosterone. In 1955, John Ziegler, physician for the U.S. weight-lifting team, developed the first anabolic steroid. Steroids served a legitimate medical function. Patients with wasting diseases were revitalized by drugs that stimulated the synthesis of protein, the key ingredient of muscles, bones and skin. But their attractions to those seeking a quick fix were obvious. Athletes, whether subjected to a state-controlled regime as in the Soviet Union or East Germany or acting independently in the West, found they could train longer and recover faster when using steroids.
Amphetamines, which stimulate the nervous system and ward off fatigue, became immensely popular for all sorts of pursuits, including sport. At the 1960 Olympics, the Danish rider Knut Jensen collapsed and died as a result of a combination of nicotinic acid and amphetamines. In 1967, Tommy Simpson of Britain died during a brutal climb in the Tour de France. A vial containing an amphetamine was found on his body. During the 1960s, steroids permeated the Olympics, with significant effects in the throwing events. They were also widely used in football, a sport of controlled aggression. Responding to a danger threatening to distort their sport, the world governing athletics body banned steroids in 1975, two years after a test for them had been developed by a Briton, Raymond Brooks.
Drug-taking proliferated during the 1980s in men's and women's athletic events. Women benefited more than men from steroids because testosterone radically changed their bodies, sometimes with alarming effects. It was not until a Canadian, Ben Johnson, tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol after winning the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100-meter final that the magnitude of the problem became apparent to the world at large. Since Johnson there have been major drug cases in swimming, when seven Chinese swimmers tested positive for steroids at the 1994 Asian Games, and four years later in the Tour de France, when the Festina team was expelled after customs officers discovered a car full of drugs.
Potentially the greatest scandal erupted last year with the discovery of a new testosterone steroid derivative in California used by many professional athletes.
Drew Voight
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