Drug doping in competitive sport: Brief History
Saturday, February 26, 2005
- Ancient Greece
Early Olympians use extracts of mushrooms and plant seeds. - Roman period
Chariot racers mix drugs in the feed of their horses to make them run faster. Gladiators doped to make their fights vigorous and bloody for the public. - 1886
The first recorded death: cyclist Arthur Linton overdoses on trimethyl. - 1904
Marathon runner Thomas Hicks almost dies at the Olympics in St Louis after mixing brandy and strychnine. - 1930s
Amphetamines start to be produced. - 1950s
Soviets begin to use male hormones; Americans respond with steroids. - 1952
Speed skaters taking amphetamines at the Oslo Winter Olympics fall ill. - 1960
At the Rome Olympics, amphetamine-taking Danish cyclist Knut Jensen collapses, fractures his skull and dies. - 1967
Another amphetamine death: Britain's Tommy Simpson, in the Tour de France. - 1968
The IOC issue list of banned substances. Testing begins at Mexico City Olympics. - 1972
Dr Bjorn Ekblom of Stockholm invents blood packing: removing blood, increasing the concentration of red blood cells in a centrifuge, then restoring it through transfusion. - 1976
East German swimmers win 11 out of 13 Olympic events. In the early 1990s it emerges they had been pumped with steroids by their coaches. - 1983
At the Pan American games in Caracas, Venezuela, 17 athletes test positive for anabolic steroids. - 1987
EPO emerges as a way of boosting blood thickness; deaths follow in young cyclists and orienteers. - 1988
At the Seoul Olympics, Ben Johnson tests positive for an anabolic steroid. - 1991
Twenty ex-East German swimming coaches admit giving anabolic steroids to their former charges. - 1992
German sprinters Katrin Krabbe, Silke Moller and Grit Breuer submit identical urine samples in out-of-competition tests. Escape ban on a technicality. - 1994
Diego Armando Maradona banned from World Cup for taking a cocktail of five drugs. - 1996
Ireland's Michelle Smith wins four Olympic swimming golds at Atlanta. Found guilty of manipulating samples in 1998 and banned for four years. - 1998
The Festina team are expelled from the Tour de France after trainer Willy Voet is caught with 400 vials of performance-enhancing drugs. Florence Griffith Joyner dies at the age of 38 from a heart seizure. - 1999
The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is established as a result of the 1998 Tour de France scandal. It includes representatives of the Olympic movement and governments. - 1999
The nandrolone controversy breaks. British sprinters Linford Christie and Dougie Walker and Czech tennis player Petr Korda, plus French footballers Christophe Dugarry and Vincent Guerin, all have adverse findings - the first of many. - 2000
Manfred Ewald, former president of East Germany's National Olympic Committee, goes on trial in Berlin charged with 142 counts of being an accessory to causing bodily harm. - 2001
In Italy, Edgar Davids and Fernando Couto are found to have taken nandrolone by the reopened Acqua Acetosa laboratory, which in 1998 had been destroying evidence of adverse findings. Frank de Boer and Jaap Stam also test positive for nandrolone. - 2002
Alain Baxter, the British skier, loses his Olympic bronze slalom medal after he used a Vicks inhaler. - 2003
British sprinter Dwain Chambers tests positive for the new anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). - 2004
Greg Rusedski tests positive for nandrolone. He is said to be one of 44 players to have done so.
posted by Frank Mori, 26.2.05
