Doping in sport goes back further in history than you might think

Doping in sport has a lengthy — and until relatively recently, altogether legal — past. Once, says Robert Hume, the use of stimulants was considered fair play.

1. Alpha and beta of drugs

Greeks at the original Olympic Games in 776 BC took performance- enhancing drugs to stand the best chance of winning.

Athletes might be awarded just a bunch of laurel leaves at the Games, but when they returned home their city would hand out huge cash prizes and perhaps free meals for life.

So they drank “magic” potions made from wine, used hallucinogens such as mushrooms and opium juice (“doop”, hence “doping”), and gorged themselves on exotic meat such as lizard, and raw animal hearts and testicles, to give themselves that cutting edge.

Nero drank a potion of wild boars’ manure.

Although match fixing and bribing officials and other athletes was against the rules and could result in a hefty fine, no way was taking drugs considered cheating.

2. When in Rome...

Roman gladiators at the Colosseum, circa 100 AD, supplemented their diets by using stimulants such as strychnine (the active ingredient in rat poison) to deal with the traumas of the arena, to improve the intensity of their fighting, and to conceal pain.

Unlike their Greek counterparts, who were competing for honours and money, they were literally fighting for their lives.

Chariot racers, under pressure to win at all costs, regularly fed their horses hydromel (an alcoholic beverage made with fermented honey) to try to get them to run faster. Sometimes horses were quite clearly drunk.

The Romans would be shocked by our doping scandals, but not because of the substances we’ve found: they simply wouldn’t have understood why we had a problem with it.

In their eyes, competitors should take advantage of the best “medicines” available.

3. Winning wine

French cyclists and a champion lacrosse team in the late 19th century repeatedly used preparations made from Bordeaux claret and South American coca plant leaves from which the drug cocaine is synthesised.

This “wine for athletes” (“Vin Mariani”, named after its inventor, Corsican chemist, Angelo Mariani) was taken as an energy booster by athletes, who found that it helped reduce tiredness and hunger brought on by prolonged exertion.

Those who endorsed it, such as Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia and Pope Leo XIII (who carried it around in a hipflask and awarded it a Vatican gold medal), found it tasted like a fine red wine but had an added kick.

4. Strychnine cocktails

American marathon runner Thomas Hicks, at the modern Olympic Games in Saint Louis in 1904, was given a vile concoction of brandy, caffeine and two raw egg whites, laced with strychnine.

On the day of the marathon, it was a searing 90 degrees.

Twice Hicks began to flag and wanted to stop, but his managers would not hear of it, and administered the stimulant.

Each dose was 1/60 grain (about 1 mg). A third dose would probably have killed him.

Hicks staggered towards the finishing line and won the race.

Though fellow competitor, Fred Lorz, was disqualified for hitching a lift, there was no question of Hitch being eliminated: He had broken no rules.

He was a hero for doing everything he could to win.

Other competitors cursed the fact that strychnine cocktails had not been available to all the Olympic runners.

5. East Germany

Government-backed doping of East German athletes, from the 1970s included the routine use of anabolic steroids, testosterone and oestrogen, often given to athletes without their knowledge.

The International Association of Athletics Federation in 1928 had declared doping illegal.

Yet, here we had the production of performance-enhancing substances as part of a state scientific experiment (State Plan 14.25), funded through taxes, to make the country’s athletes the greatest in the world.

One measure of the programme’s success was that East German women remained dominant in swimming for decades.

Another example came at the 1983 World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, Finland, where East Germany finished top of the medal table.

A large number of former athletes now suffer from health problems as a result of taking these substances.

Many young women have grown up to look and speak like men.

Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the doping programme exposed.

6. Lance’s tour de force

Lance Armstrong, winner of the Tour de France over seven consecutive years, 1999-2005, was stripped of his medals in 2012 for using illegal substances to help him cycle faster and need fewer breaks.

He is also banned from cycling events for life.

The American star was, according to the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), at the epicentre of a “systemic, sustained and highly professionalised team-run doping conspiracy”.

He had a mega team at US Postal helping him cheat, including a PA who followed on a motorbike carrying testosterone and the prohibited blood-boosting agent Erythropoietin (EPO).

USADA named Armstrong as the ringleader of “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen”.