Doping in sport

• 1. Introduction

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  Doping in sport is as old as sport itself. Long before laboratory tests and anti-doping agencies, athletes were swallowing, injecting, and inhaling substances to squeeze out an extra margin of performance. The questions that drive this documentary are not simply about who cheated or which drugs were taken. They are about why human beings have always pushed past natural limits, what governments were willing to do to win gold medals, and how the rules written to protect athletes have been applied with striking inconsistency.

  At the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis, the eventual winner crossed the finish line after his trainer injected him with strychnine and brandy mid-race. The official race report afterward did not condemn this. It praised the demonstration of how drugs could be "very useful to athletes in long-distance races." That sentence captures something important: for most of recorded history, the line between preparation and cheating simply did not exist. The story of how that line came to be drawn, and how powerful interests have repeatedly erased it again, is what this documentary will trace.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Charmis of Sparta won the Stade race at the Olympic Games of 668 BC on a diet of dried figs consumed throughout his training period. That detail, small as it seems, points to something universal: the earliest athletes already understood that what you put into your body shapes what your body can do.

  Scandinavian mythology describes warriors called Berserkers drinking a preparation called "butotens," thought to have been made from the Amanita muscaria mushroom, to amplify physical power at the cost of sanity. In ancient Rome, chariot racers drank herbal infusions before competing. These were not fringe practices. They were embedded in the cultures that created the concept of competitive sport.

  By 1807, an endurance walker named Abraham Wood admitted to using laudanum, an opiate preparation, to stay awake for 24 hours during a walking race against Robert Barclay Allardyce in Britain. By April 1877, walking races in Britain had stretched to 500 miles. The following year, at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, London, competitors covered 520 miles, with 20,000 spectators attending each day. The spectacle was enormous, and the appetite for pushed-to-the-limit human performance created a commercial pressure that would shape the doping story for the next century and beyond.

• 3. The Six-Day Race Laboratory

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  Six-day bicycle races in the late nineteenth century became, in the words of University of Texas professor John Hoberman, "de facto experiments investigating the physiology of stress as well as the substances that might alleviate exhaustion." These races were brutal in ways that drew crowds and prize money in equal measure.

  Riders leaned on soigneurs, the French word for healers, who functioned as support staff. Among the treatments these helpers supplied was nitroglycerine, a drug used to stimulate the heart after cardiac attacks, which was credited with improving riders' breathing. Hallucinations were common. The American champion Major Taylor abandoned the New York race, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand."

  Press reports of the era described riders going "queer" in their heads and their faces becoming "hideous with the tortures that rack them." Public reaction shifted, but the commercial logic of endurance spectacle did not disappear. It migrated into the Tour de France, where the same pressures, the same soigneurs, and the same substances would resurface on a vastly larger stage. The doping specialist Max M. Novich later wrote that trainers of the old school declared with assurance that a tired rider would get his second breath after absorbing cocaine-based mixtures.

• 4. Strychnine, Steroids, and the Cold War

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  At the 1904 Olympic marathon, Thomas Hicks, an American born on the 7th of January 1875 in England, crossed the finish line in a state that sports historians describe as "between life and death." His trainer Charles Lucas had injected him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine and given him brandy to drink. A second injection followed four miles from the end. Hicks recovered, collected his gold medal a few days later, and lived until 1952, but never competed in athletics again.

  Fifty years later, the chemistry shifted. In 1954, physician John Ziegler traveled to Vienna with the United States weightlifting team. A Russian colleague, over what Ziegler later described as "a few drinks," repeatedly asked what the Americans were giving their athletes. When Ziegler turned the question around, the Russian said his own lifters were being given testosterone. Back in the United States, Ziegler tested low doses of testosterone on himself, on trainer Bob Hoffman, and on two lifters, Jim Park and Yaz Kuzahara. All gained more weight and strength than any training programme would produce, but side-effects appeared. Ziegler sought a cleaner compound and worked with Ciba Pharmaceutical to produce methandrostenolone, first made in the US in 1958 and marketed as Dianabol, colloquially known as "d-bol."

  The results spread through sport rapidly. Paul Lowe, a former running back with the San Diego Chargers, told a California legislative committee on drug abuse in 1970 that players had to take steroids at lunchtime, placed on a saucer by an official, with the suggestion that refusing might result in a fine. Olympic statistics recorded a 14 percent increase in the weight of shot-putters between 1956 and 1972, compared to 7.6 percent for steeplechasers. Gold medalist pentathlete Mary Peters later observed that a US research team trying to study steroids in weightlifters and throwers found so few who were not taking them that they could not establish any worthwhile comparisons.

• 5. East Germany's State Machine

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  In 1977, a 17-year-old sprinter named Renate Neufeld fled East Germany with the Bulgarian man she would later marry. A year after her escape she described what had happened to her at the East Berlin Sports Institute. Her trainer, Günter Clam, had offered her pills he described as vitamins while she was running 200 meters in 24 seconds. Her legs cramped. Her voice became gruff. She began to grow a moustache and her periods stopped. When she refused the pills, the secret police came to her dormitory at 7am and questioned her. She fled in October 1977, carrying with her grey tablets and green powder that the West German doping analyst Manfred Donike identified as anabolic steroids.

  Her story was not an exception. After the 1990 German reunification, records opened on the 26th of August 1993 showed that the Stasi, the state secret police, had supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification. Manfred Ewald, head of East Germany's sports federation, imposed blanket doping from 1974 onward. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the country of 17 million collected nine gold medals. Four years later the total was 20, and in 1976 it doubled again to 40. Ewald was quoted as telling coaches: "They're still so young and don't have to know everything."

  Some athletes were as young as ten years old when doping began without their knowledge. Rica Reinisch, a triple Olympic champion and world record-setter at the 1980 Summer Olympics, later suffered numerous miscarriages and recurring ovarian cysts. Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education estimated around 10,000 former athletes bear the physical and mental scars of years of drug abuse. Two former Dynamo Berlin club doctors, Dieter Binus and Bernd Pansold, were found guilty in 1998 of administering hormones to underage female athletes from 1975 to 1984. In 2005, the drug manufacturer Jenapharm was still facing lawsuits from almost 200 former athletes, 15 years after East Germany ceased to exist.

  Virtually no East German athlete failed an official drugs test in those years, even though Stasi files show that many produced failed results at the Kreischa laboratory in Saxony, which at the time was approved by the International Olympic Committee. The laboratory passed into government control precisely so that the results could be managed.

• 6. Seoul, 1988

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  Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson crossed the finish line first in the 100 meters at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. The test afterward found stanozolol in his urine. Johnson was stripped of his gold medal and his world-record time. He later admitted to using stanozolol, Dianabol, testosterone, Furazabol, and human growth hormone among other substances. Carl Lewis was promoted one place to take the gold title and was recognized as the new world record holder.

  The 1988 race became one of the most scrutinized in Olympic history, and not only because of Johnson. An IOC official later stated that endocrine profiles done at those Games indicated that 80 percent of the track and field athletes tested showed evidence of long-term steroid use, although not all were banned. Documents later provided to Sports Illustrated by Wade Exum, the USOC's director of drug-control administration from 1991 to 2000, revealed that roughly 100 American athletes failed drug tests between 1988 and 2000 but were cleared to compete anyway.

  Lewis had tested positive for pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine at the 1988 US Olympic trials. The highest level recorded was 6 parts per million, which in 1988 was regarded as a positive result. The acceptable threshold has since been raised to ten parts per million for ephedrine and twenty-five parts per million for other substances. Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, agreed that those levels were consistent with someone taking cold or allergy medicines and unlikely to affect performance. Lewis's claim of inadvertent use, traced to a dietary supplement containing "Ma huang," the Chinese name for Ephedra, was accepted by the USOC.

  Of the top five finishers in that 100-meter final, only Calvin Smith of the US, the former world record holder who took bronze, never failed a drug test during his career. Smith later said: "I should have been the gold medalist." A CBC radio documentary broadcast on the 19th of September 2013, for the 25th anniversary of the race, stated that 20 athletes tested positive for drugs but were cleared by the IOC at those Seoul Games.

• 7. Russia and the Modern Era

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  Systematic doping in Russian sports has resulted in 47 Olympic medals and tens of world championship medals being stripped from Russian competitors, the most of any country and more than four times the number of the runner-up, and more than 30 percent of the global total. More than 200 Russian competitors have been caught doping at the Olympic Games.

  On the 9th of December 2019, WADA banned Russia from all international sport for four years following widespread doping violations, including an attempt to manipulate computer data to sabotage ongoing investigations. Russia appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. On the 17th of December 2020, the court reduced the penalty to two years, allowing Russia to participate in the Olympics and other major events but prohibiting the use of the Russian name, flag, or anthem. Athletes were required to present as "Neutral Athlete" or "Neutral Team."

  On the 19th of February 2021, it was announced that Russia would compete under the acronym "ROC," standing for the Russian Olympic Committee. On the 22nd of April 2021, the IOC approved a replacement anthem: a fragment of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, after an earlier choice of the patriotic war song "Katyusha" was rejected.

  The scale of the Russian program was distinct from other national cases. British journalist Andrew Jennings reported that a KGB colonel stated that the agency's officers had posed as anti-doping authorities from the IOC in order to undermine doping tests and that Soviet athletes were rescued with what he called "tremendous efforts." A 1989 Australian study of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow stated that there was "hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another." Documents obtained in 2016 revealed Soviet plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. That plan was prepared by Dr. Sergey Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture, the same figure later identified as one of the main architects of the Russian doping program leading up to 2016.

• 8. Scale and What Remains

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  A study commissioned by WADA found that at the 2011 World Championships in Athletics, 44 percent of participating athletes had used banned substances during their careers, though only 0.5 percent of those tested were caught. The gap between prevalence and detection captures the fundamental problem that anti-doping authorities have faced for decades.

  The range of prohibited substances is broad. Anabolic steroids remain the most common class. Stimulants, the second most common class, include substances as familiar as caffeine, which the IOC and WADA removed from the banned list in 2004. Erythropoietin, known as EPO, became prevalent among endurance athletes in the 1990s, but there was no direct test for it until 2002. Modafinil was added to the prohibited list on the 3rd of August 2004, ten days before the 2004 Summer Olympics opened. Each time a threshold or detection method is defined, athletes and their support staff look for substances that sit just outside the boundary.

  Surveys of high school athletes in the United States found that 6.6 percent of 12th-grade students had used anabolic steroids at some point or had been counseled to use them. At the collegiate level, surveys show use among athletes ranging from 5 percent to 20 percent. A separate study found that skin changes were an early detectable marker of steroid use in young athletes, pointing to a role for dermatologists in early detection.

  Bob Goldman, a physician and osteopath, posed a question to elite athletes that became known as Goldman's dilemma: would you take a drug guaranteed to bring sporting success but that would cause your death within five years? In his research, approximately half the athletes said they would. More recent work by James Connor and co-workers found much lower acceptance rates, closer to those of the general population. Whether the dilemma reveals a genuine willingness to trade life for victory, or simply the pressure athletes feel to say they would do anything to win, the question itself frames what is at stake whenever a governing body sets a rule and an athlete decides whether to follow it.