Chereads / Global New History / Chapter 21 - Behind the Cheat of the Century: The Dark History of Doping.

Chapter 21 - Behind the Cheat of the Century: The Dark History of Doping.

Sport is supposed to be a pure display of human strength, speed and skill, a sublime arena for the spirit of fair play. However, the issue of doping has loomed over the field like a lingering cloud, and the story behind it is far beyond the realm of sport. It all started with an athlete at the 1988 Seoul (now Seoul) Olympic Games in South Korea.

The 'Cheat of the Century' at the Seoul Olympics

At 3:00 a.m. on 27 September 1988 in Seoul, South Korea, officials of the Canadian Olympic delegation, with blood in their eyes, made a momentous decision - to summon their athlete, Ben Johnson, overnight. The purpose of the meeting was clear: to get back something important: the Olympic gold medal. At the same time, Ben Johnson received notice of his dismissal from the Canadian team.

Just seven hours later, the IOC held an official press conference with the largest press turnout in Olympic history. At the conference, the IOC made a shocking announcement: Canadian athlete Ben Johnson, the gold medallist in the men's 100 metres at this year's Olympic Games, had been found to have doped after the race, and was disqualified from the championships and faced a two-year ban from the sport.

Just three days ago, Ben Johnson beat his old rival Carl Lewis of the United States in the final of the men's 100 metres at the Seoul Olympics. He crossed the finish line in a world-record time of 9 seconds 79, in a race that was hailed by the media as 'the race of the century'. However, it has now turned into the infamous 'Cheat of the Century'.

In this race, Carl Lewis only ran a personal best of 9 seconds 92, but in the eyes of the crowd, compared to Ben Johnson's cheating, this time was clean, worthy of an Olympic gold medal, and worthy of his professed belief in fighting for his wife and mother. Since then, Carl Lewis has been actively involved in 'anti-doping' campaigns. The legend, who has competed in four Olympic Games, won nine Olympic gold medals and eight world championships, has continued to call for strict drug testing and has decried the 'unprecedented squalor' that has engulfed the track and field arena.

In April 2003, however, the story took a dramatic turn for the worse. An American doctor named Wade Eckerson produced a 3,000-word document exposing that the USOC had been harbouring and condoning the use of banned substances by its athletes to enhance their performance. In this list of harbouring athletes, Carl Lewis's name was listed, and the document showed that 'three tests before the 1988 Olympic Games were positive, and the banned substances in his body included ephedrine and three other kinds of drugs. The U.S. Olympic Committee, after first making the decision to ban him from the Olympics, then accepted Lewis's complaint that he 'was unknowingly taking the drugs' and allowed him to travel to Seoul on behalf of the United States.' At first, Lewis tried to weasel his way out of it, but on 24 April 2003, he finally gave up his resistance and admitted that 'I guess I did the wrong thing'. The incident brought back memories of Ben Johnson's angry protest after he was stripped of his gold medal in 1988: 'Everybody took their medicine! Why am I the only one being penalised?'

The history of doping

While this series of events is mind-boggling, the history of doping goes back even further. In Norse legend, the divine warrior Berserker (Barsaka) would take a drink called Butotens (不头疼) before battle, which was said to dramatically increase combat effectiveness. It has been proven by later generations that this drink probably contained poisonous mushrooms as ingredients, and poisonous mushrooms were thus considered as 'stimulants' that might have been used by ancient Olympic athletes before their competitions.

Britain, the country that started the 'Opium Wars', was perhaps the first country to apply opium to sports. In the 19th century, an ultra-long endurance run was popular in Britain, and in 1807, endurance runner Abraham Wood openly claimed that only with laudanum could athletes stay awake and keep running for 24 hours. in 1878, the British endurance champion's time was staggering - at 520 miles (837 kilometres), the champion ran for 138 consecutive hours, and in 1878, the British endurance champion was the first to win the race. ), the champion ran for 138 hours straight. At the time, there was no concept of 'doping', only the use of drugs as reasonable behaviour.

In 1904, at the Third Olympic Marathon in St Louis, the British-American Thomas Hicks was followed by his syringe-wielding coach, Charles Lucas, throughout the race. Whenever Hicks ran out of stamina, Lucas would give him a well-timed injection of Strychnine, also known as strychnine, a central nervous system stimulant, and make him drink a glass of whiskey. Eventually, Hicks won the championship.

Not only athletics but also other sports were plagued by doping problems. in 1930, the entry manual for the famous Tour de France cycling race clearly stated that the organisers were not responsible for the cost of the teams' "drugs", meaning that at the time, drugs were legal by default in cycling, but only at the teams' own expense. If this situation had continued, the modern Olympic Games could well have been reduced to a quadrennial 'doping results expo'. However, a series of tragic events changed that trend.

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Danish cyclist Jensen died suddenly during a race in which an autopsy revealed that he had taken amphetamines, alcohol, and another vasodilator, and seven years later, former Olympic bronze medallist and British cyclist Simpson died suddenly on the way to the Tour de France, with unfinished amphetamines in his coat pocket at the time of his death. These incidents made people re-examine athletes who used drugs to win, such as the marathon champion Hicks, who took injections while running, and who never competed in another major race after that Olympics.

And then there was Joyner, the famous American female sprinter 'Butterfly'. In the 1988 Seoul Olympics women's 100 metres, she won the race with a time of 10 seconds 54, which is still an Olympic record. She also ran a world record 10:49 at the U.S. domestic Olympic trials that year. It should be noted that the women's 100 metres at the 2016 Rio Olympics was won in 10 seconds 71, and even after the emergence of advanced equipment such as plastic high elasticity track, high-tech air cushion running shoes and wind-resistant jerseys, female athletes are still unable to break or even come close to the record set by Joyner that year. 1998, Joyner died in her sleep at the age of 38, and countless people suspected that it was the overdose of stimulants that had taken away her young life. Many people suspected that an overdose had taken her young life. These tragedies gradually made mankind aware of the dangers of doping.

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, the first anti-doping test in the history of mankind came into being. But this was only the beginning of a long struggle between the cat and the mouse.

Types of doping and the dilemma of detection

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, Sweden's modern pentathlete Lijnwall became the first person in Olympic history to suffer a doping violation, though the only banned substance he took was an overdose of alcohol. This is not to suggest that the Games were particularly clean, but rather that anti-doping methods were too outdated at the time.

There are many different types of doping, which can be broadly categorised as follows.

The first category can be summarised as 'won't get tired', mainly central nervous system stimulants such as caffeine, cocaine, ephedrine, etc. The tincture of opium taken by the endurance runners mentioned earlier also belongs to this category. This type of stimulant is the earliest that can be detected.

The second category is the 'special strength' steroids, of which testosterone is the best known. When these drugs are taken, muscle strength increases significantly, bones become thicker, and female characteristics gradually disappear. In China, this type of drug is commonly known as 'Dali Tonic' (Meandrostenolone). Looking back at history, the incident of the 'Horse Family Army', which once claimed to have been taking 'Chinese Turtle Essence', is thought-provoking. Before the Sydney Olympics in 2000, steroid drugs were difficult to detect. However, in that very year, there were significant advances in the means of detection, and six out of the seven members of the 'Ma's Army' who had qualified for the Olympics failed to participate in the Sydney Games, and one of the world record holders of the Chinese women's swimming team was banned from participating in the Games by internal regulations.

The third category is 'EPO', or erythropoietin, originally used to treat anaemia. When athletes use it, their ability to supply oxygen is enhanced, and all aspects of their ability, such as endurance, are increased. For a long period of time, this type of stimulants could not be detected at all.

The fourth category is various miscellaneous categories. For example, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, North Korean male shooter Kim Jong-soo won a bronze medal in the men's 10-metre air pistol and a silver medal in the 50-metre pistol, but was stripped of his medals after the competition because he had been found to have taken 'doping' - technically the the opposite of 'doping': a sedative called 'cardiac glycosides' (propranolol).

The fifth category is the latest high-tech 'gene doping,' which enhances an athlete's ability by modifying the body's genes. At present, this is still at the speculative stage, and all existing tests are powerless against it.

Since the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, mankind has been unable to do anything about it, although it is determined to rid itself of athletes who resort to drugs to enhance their performance. Anti-doping detection methods were often invented and improved only after the advent of doping, which resulted in the 'devil' always being one step ahead of the 'way' when it came to doping. That's why the doping test of Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics caused such a stir, because until then, anti-doping efforts had produced few results.

National factors and complex interests behind doping

National factors also appear to play a role in fuelling the doping problem. During the 'Cold War' it was thought that the socialist countries were the main source of doping. The GDR played an inglorious role. From 1972 to 1988, the GDR won 384 Olympic medals and set numerous world records. The proportion of medals won by the GDR was 10 times that of the United States, based on the size of its population. After the merger of the GDR and the FRG, the archives of the former GDR State Security Service were declassified, and a programme called 'Komplex08' came to light, in which coaches at the GDR's major training facilities systematically gave athletes blue pills, falsely claimed to be vitamins but in fact steroids. Heidi Krieger, the GDR's women's shot put European champion, was so altered by her long-term steroid use that she opted for gender reassignment surgery.

Doping, however, was not unique to socialist countries: in the 1954 Men's World Cup final, Hungary was the 'dream team', scoring two goals against the GDR in the opening eight minutes of the first half. However, in the second half, the Federal Republic of Germany was a different team, eventually winning 3-2, in a match known as the 'Miracle of Berne'. However, in 2004, the German media disclosed that during the halftime of the 1954 World Cup Final, each member of the FRG team was injected with a central nervous system stimulant drug to enhance stamina and explosive power. What is even more lamentable is that in 2008, the Science Bureau of the German Ministry of the Interior, in conjunction with the German Olympic Committee, commissioned the Humboldt University of Berlin to conduct an investigation into the history of drug prohibition in Germany. The results showed that the former Federal Republic of Germany, in order to pursue performance, had organised to make its athletes take all kinds of prohibited drugs for more than 30 years, and at that time, eight members of the team were undergoing convalescence because of jaundice hepatitis as a result of the injection of drugs, and two of the members of the team died of liver cancer a few years later.

'The problem of doping continued after the end of the Cold War, when the entire Russian track and field team was banned from competing in the 2016 Rio Olympics due to doping concerns. But shortly after the Olympics, Russian hackers broke into the World Anti-Doping Organisation's computers and released a list of five waves of athletes from various countries who had tested positive for doping but had still been allowed to compete, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and other capitalist countries. This situation makes people wonder, 'A country's scientific and technological strength determines the performance of that country's athletes in the Olympic Games.' This statement is full of irony and helplessness behind.

The Human Roots of Repeated Doping

The driving force behind the persistence of doping does not only come from the national level. 1984 before the Los Angeles Olympics, Bob Goldman, president of the Canadian Anti-Drug Abuse Organisation (CADAO) and an expert on steroids, posed a thought-provoking question: 'If I had a miracle drug that would make you invincible in all competitions including the Olympics, within five years. in all competitions, including the Olympics, within five years. But be careful! If you take this medicine, you will die after five years, will you be willing to take it?' He put this question to 198 outstanding athletes from all over the world and 103 of them answered yes. The great honour and social prestige brought by the Olympic Games to individuals, as well as the huge financial benefits brought by commercialisation, drove more and more athletes to take the risk. After Ben Johnson was stripped of his title, an Italian shoe manufacturer immediately cancelled a sponsorship contract with him worth $2 million, which shows the high commercial value of an Olympic champion. 'What you can find out is doping, what you can't find out is high-tech', which has become the biggest motivation for many athletes to take the risk. It is easy to fight against doping, but it is much harder to fight against human greed and desire, which is perhaps the main reason why the road of anti-doping is so difficult.

In this long battle against doping, we have seen the sadness of the tarnished spirit of sport, the chaos of national interests, and the fragility of human nature in the face of honour and profit. However, we still hope that sports can return to its pure nature, and become a pure land for human beings to pursue excellence and show their good qualities, rather than a place of fame and fortune corrupted by doping.