Drugs in sport

The use of drugs in sport has been around since the turn of 20th century although there are many earlier reports of use going back to the Ancient Greeks use of stimulating potions.

The International Association of Athletics Federations were the first governing body of sport to take the situation seriously. In 1928 they banned participants from doping but with little in the way of testing available they had to rely on the word of the athlete that they were clean.

Progression in pharmacology has always outstripped the ability of sports federations to implement rigorous testing procedures but since the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999 more and more sportspeople are being caught.

The Germans had used Testosterone injected into Nazi troops to increase their aggression as well as giving it to their athletes at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin where amphetamines were also widely used.

It was not until the 1966 that Fédération Internationale de Football Association and Union Cycliste Internationale joined the IAAF in the fight against drugs closely followed by the International Olympic Committee the following year.

The first tests for athletes were at the 1967 European Championships and a year later the IOC implemented their first drug tests at both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Anabolic steroids became prevelant during the 1970s and after a method of detection was found they were added to the IOC's prohibited substances list in 1976.

With some remarkable performances during the 1970s and 1980s it was widely suspected the many of the Eastern bloc nations had athletes who were augmenting their ability with some kind of pharmacological help.

With the collapse of the Soviet regimes there was a decline in the standards many athletes had previously achieved. The main culprit appears to have been East Germany with coaches such as Manfred Ewald and Manfred Hoeppner giving sportsmen and women, some as young as eleven years old, steroids and other drugs.

One of the most blatant uses of performance enhancing substances was at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada where the East German female swimmers took 11 of the 13 available gold medals. It is rather a puzzle how they didn't mange to win the other two. They also managed to pick up six of the the silvers and a bronze. This was quite an improvement from the four silvers and 3 bronze medals they they had achieved in 1972.

The most widely known case of cheating came when Ben Johnson of Canada won the 100 m. He subsequently failed the drug test when Stanozolol was found in his urine test. He later admitted to using the steroid as well as Dianabol, Cypionate, Furazabol, and human growth hormone amongst other things. Carl Lewis was then promoted one place to take the olympic title home.

Cycling too has had its fair share of problems. In 1998 the entire Festina team were kicked off the Tour de France when first, a car belonging to their team was found to contain huge quantities of various performance enhancing drugs and then the team director admitted that some of the cyclists were routinely given banned substances. Six other teams pulled out in protest including Dutch team TVM who left the tour still being questioned by the police.

This rather over shadowed Marco Pantani's tour win but he himself later failed a test and more recently David Millar the 2003 World-Time Trial Champion admitted using Erythropoietin and was stripped of his title and suspended for two years.

At present tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and modafinil are causing ructions throughout the sporting world with many high profile cases attracting major press coverage as for the first time United States athletes are starting to test positive. A few athletes have tested positive for the latter and protested their innocence as the drug was not on the prohibited list at the time of their offence, however WADA say it is a related substance to those that are banned so the decisions stand. Modafinil was added to the list of prohibited substances on August 3, 2004 just ten days before the start of the 2004 Summer Olympics.

See also

External links


This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia article. Browse Wikipedia for more information.