Steroids, Strychnine and a Dash of Skullduggery: A Potted History of Doping in Sport

With the Rio Olympics only a few weeks away, there are seemingly countless issues for organisers to deal with. Concerns have been raised over soaring crime, civil disorder and economic instability in Brazil, while the creeping menace of the Zika virus has already prompted several big names to drop out of the Games. There are worries about infrastructure and public services in Rio, and some have called for the event be moved or cancelled. Meanwhile, the world of sport has its own glaring problem. This summer has been plagued by that worst of afflictions – the pestilential scourge of doping.

If doping is an infectious disease of sorts, then Russia is certainly a carrier right now. Unfortunately for clean Russian athletes, the country's treatment has been fairly severe. Having digested the findings on the country's doping scandal in November 2015, the International Association of Athletics Federations resolved to ban Russia outright from Rio 2016, a decision which has been upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The discovery of an endemic, state-sponsored doping programme elicits a strong response these days, clearly.

Doping hasn't always been treated with such severity, however. Before we were getting on our high horse about Russian athletes – not to mention Tyson Gay, Lance Armstrong, Dwain Chambers and numerous others – the use of performance enhancing drugs was part and parcel of athletic endeavour and endemic in competitive sport. Doping has been a feature of the Olympics since antiquity, and sportsmen have been trying to gain chemical advantage over each other since time immemorial. It might offend modern sensibilities, but performance enhancement has huge historical precedent. In fact, there have been times when doping in sport has been practically unexceptional.

The earliest historical evidence of drug use and sport crossing paths comes from Ancient Greece, and the original Olympic Games. At the time, athleticism was inherently tied in with the idea of citizenship, and a contestant's fitness to serve his city on the battlefield and in times of war. Javelin throwing was evidence of the martial nature of the early Games, as were events such as chariot racing, wrestling and running in armour. In antiquity, soldiers would often drink herbal concoctions before heading into battle, either to increase their strength and stamina or inspire them to acts of heroism. This was essentially performance enhancement, and these practises seem to have made their way from the battlefield to the running track and gymnasium.

The ancient Olympics were probably rife with what we might now consider doping, though there is little evidence to suggest that performance enhancement was as taboo as it is today. It seems more likely that chemical advantages were a fairly common part of the event, just another facet to the fierce competition of the Games. There is evidence to suggest that similar practises went on in the Roman hippodrome, and drug use in sport may well have been the cultural norm. Among the barbarian peoples who would eventually come to overrun both Greece and Rome, the use of herbal infusions and the like was equally prevalent. For all we know, doping might have been an everyday aspect of competitive exercise, from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages, the Medieval period and beyond.

Come the 19th century, doping in sport perhaps reached its pinnacle. With constant advances to science, technology and medicine, newer and more effective performance enhancers became available. Many of these were incredibly dangerous, however, and could have been lethal for those who used them. In the late 1800s, long-distance walking races came into fashion, and some participants turned to laudanum – an addictive and potentially dangerous opiate – to keep them awake for prolonged periods. Soon, long-distance cycling was all the rage, and beleaguered participants would take amphetamines and even nitroglycerine to give them the artificial means to go on.

During a six-day cycle race in New York in 1896, champion rider Major Taylor refused to continue, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand." He was most likely hallucinating from a cocktail of stimulants, which was anything but a rare occurrence. A report from the New York times in 1897 referred to long-distance cycling as "an athletic contest in which the participants 'go queer' in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them." It went on to say: "It is not a sport, but a brutality." That was the contemporary reality of unfettered doping, which had at this point started to take a horrendous and sometimes immediate physical toll on its victims.

In one of the most famous cases of the early twentieth century, American runner Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon having been made to ingest a mixture of strychnine and alcohol. As he flagged toward the end of the race, his trainer, Charles Lucas, injected him with the chemical, and gave him a glass of brandy to drink. This gave him the necessary boost of energy, and with only one more injection he made it over the finish line as champion. Unfortunately, strychnine is extremely toxic, and very nearly killed Hicks. He was said to be "between life and death" after the race and, although he recovered in time to collect his medal, he never took part in athletics again.

It was around this time that the world of sport started to take a dim view of doping. Not only was it detrimental to athletes' health, it was also offensive to the ideal of the gentleman sportsman. The idea of the 'clean' athlete started to develop, and the social stigma around performance enhancement gradually grew. Nonetheless, the use of stimulants in sports over the next few decades was well documented, with abuse of cocaine, caffeine and amphetamines reportedly still rife by the time the Berlin Olympics came around in 1936.

It would not be until the 1960s that sports federations started to ban certain drugs, and the International Olympics Committee only established their own rules on doping in 1967. That had been prompted, in part, by the development of the anabolic steroid in the previous decade, and the serious health complications that had started to arise among users. The origins of steroid abuse in sport can be traced back to John Ziegler, an American physician who pioneered its use on behalf of the U.S. weightlifting team. Weightlifters gained huge body mass in short periods of time, and built vast amounts of muscle very quickly. Sadly, many of them soon developed serious heart problems, some of which would lead to their premature deaths.

Ziegler's development of the anabolic steroid has to be understood in its sporting context – namely the great Olympic rivalry of the Cold War. The ideological tussle of the USA and the USSR was forever being played out between their respective athletes, and triumphs for either country were touted as crucial propaganda coups. In 1954, Ziegler went to Vienna with the U.S. weightlifting team, and became friendly with a Russian physicist who, when drunk, asked him: "What are you giving your boys?" It turned out that his Russian counterpart was supplying his compatriots with testosterone, which inspired Ziegler to seek out a stronger and more effective alternative. He supplied his athletes with prototype steroids, and for some of them it had a devastating effect on their health.

Though steroids and other performance enhancers were soon put on the banned substances list, that only pushed doping underground. The era of unbridled drug use was over, but drug cheating as we now know it had only just begun. Never again would we see casual usage in competitive sport, like that of the 1962/63 First Division season in which Everton were crowned champions of England, despite many of their players being chronically dependent on the potent amphetamine Benzedrine. Instead, doping became a dirty secret, only to be sporadically and sensationally exposed.

There were the East German Olympic teams of the '70s and '80s, many of whom were systematically administered anabolic steroids from an appallingly young age. Then there was the 1988 Seoul Olympics, in which Ben Johnson set the 100 metres world record only to have his gold medal rescinded after testing positive for the steroid stanozolol. Six of his eight fellow finalists were implicated in drug scandals later in their careers, including Carl Lewis, Linford Christie, Dennis Mitchell and Desai Williams. These were some of the most famous names in athletics, and their tarnished reputations stood as testament to the perfidious prevalence of doping.

Since then, we have seen drug scandals consume hundreds of athletes. As the authorities get better at detecting banned substances, so the number of cases grows. Michelle Smith, Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin, Asafa Powell – the list goes on. Indeed, in the context of the long and murky history of doping, the scandal that has now embroiled Russian athletics looks like nothing more than another footnote. Performance enhancement and competitive sport have gone hand in hand down the centuries, and may well continue to do so for centuries more.

@W_F_Magee