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Canwest News Service
Doping in sports didn't begin with Ben Johnson or end with baseball's BALCO affair. Here's a chronological look at the top 10 moments in doping history.
East Germany's state-sponsored drug program
In the seedy history of drugs in sport, the former East Germany goes down as the only country in the world to be caught systematically doping its athletes. The program, started in 1966, was sanctioned at the highest level. Under the direction of minister of sport Manfred Ewald, who also doubled as president of the country's national Olympic committee, and Dr. Manfred Hoeppner, East Germany's top sports doctor, athletes were fed concoctions of steroids and other drugs as part of a Communist propaganda program to dominate the podium.
The result was stunning: East Germany, with a population of 17 million, dominated the Olympics. At the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico, the first time East Germany appeared as a separate team, it won nine gold medals, finishing fifth overall. Four years later in Munich it won 20 gold medals, moving to third overall above host West Germany.
At Montreal, it won an astounding 40 gold medals, with its female swimmers winning 11 of 13 events, a feat they repeated four years later at the boycotted Moscow Games. In the five Olympic Games in which East German athletes took part, they won 409 medals, of which 234 were gold.
Sports doctors and officials around the world widely believed that East German athletes were taking muscle-enhancing drugs, but could not prove it. Few of the athletes ever tested positive. Even when a test for steroids produced the first positive tests in the Montreal Games, the East Germans escaped detection.
But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, secret documents emerged showing the depth of the program. Coaches and doctors strictly administered drugs, knowing when to stop in order to keep athletes from testing positive. Many athletes said they had no idea they'd been fed drugs, instead believing they were given "vitamins," but many of the athletes' entourages were convicted. In 2000, Ewald and Hoeppner were convicted of wilfully inflicting bodily harm on the athletes and were given suspended jail sentences. Ewald, unrepentant to the end, died two years later.
As for the athletes, the German government set up a $2.2-million fund to help them. But fewer than 200 filed for compensation by the 2003 deadline. Many simply didn't want the notoriety that would come from applying.
1976 Montreal Olympics
East Germans managed to avoid detection as they claimed a record 40 gold medals, but the 1976 Games were the first where anabolic steroids were detected. Of the 11 positive tests in Montreal, eight of them were for the muscle- building drugs.
Among the cheaters were two gold medallists in weightlifting, Poland's Zbigniew Kacmarek and Bulgaria's Valentin Khristov.
The test for steroids was developed by three doctors: German anti-doping chief Manfred Donike (whose tests for stimulants at the 1972 Munich Games caught seven athletes), Arne Lungqvist and Arnold Beckett. Lungqvist, now the chairman of the IOC's medical commission, recalled recently that the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen at the 1960 Rome Games from a suspected drug overdose had alarmed the sports world. Lungqvist, Donike and Beckett set about trying to create a test for steroids, but they faced political resistance from organizers who feared that positive drug tests would give the Olympics a black eye.
By the 1974 European Championships in Rome, they had developed a rudimentary test using assays of amino that could identify compounds in urine samples. They were, however, unable to validate any of the tests and set about refining the instrumentation. The eight positive tests in Montreal proved the new system worked, but the process was so slow it took up to six days to get results, meaning the Games were over before some of the positives came in. The assay method was discarded after the 1984 Games.
It was a small first success, but did send a message to athletes. The problem? Tests were announced in advance, with athletes knowing when and where they would give samples. Documents would later show that East Germany had aggressively doped its female swimmers, but German scientists had by then perfected the art of taking athletes off drugs at just the right time to avoid detection.
1983 Pan-Am Games: The start of systematic drug testing
Before Ben Johnson there was Guy Greavette, Canada's best hope for a gold medal at the Pan-Am Games in Caracas, Venezuela. The weightlifter didn't miss his mark; he won gold, while his teammate Michel Viau picked up bronze.
By then, however, Donike had refined his steroidal test, using a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer that could detect substances in concentrations as small as one part per billion. The equipment was so accurate operators could detect traces of drugs used six months earlier.
They were aggressively targeting medal winners, and Greavette and Viau immediately tested positive. The first of 16 athletes to test positive at the Games, they were stripped of their medals and suspended from competition for two years.
The positive test of Greavette and Jeff Michels, one of the best amateur weightlifters in the U.S., was a warning to other athletes. More than two dozen, half of them American, quickly quit competition and left Caracas. Some later claimed they hadn't taken steroids but were worried the tests would pick up traces of other drugs.
Greavette recovered modestly from the scandal; after serving his suspension he competed at the 1988 Seoul Olympics (finishing 10th), and won bronze medals at the 1986 and 1990 Commonwealth Games. Now living in Kelowna, he is a volunteer coach and executive director of B.C. Weightlifting.
Chinese swim team
East Germany may have been the only country to admit to state-sponsored doping, but China's swim team also has been associated with a suspicious pattern of chemical enhancement.
As East Germany's swim team faded from the limelight after the 1988 Seoul Olympics, China's team began a meteoric rise. At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, they won four gold medals in the pool. Two years later, they took all but four of the women's events at the 1994 world championship in Rome.
Anti-doping scientists suspected the team was into organized doping. Later that year at the Asian Games, 11 of the athletes tested positive for a testosterone derivative. The findings killed China's chances at the 1996 Atlanta Games, where they won just one gold.
China had rebuilt its team by 1998, but disaster struck again that year when four more swimmers were caught just before the world championship in Australia. Worse still, a Sydney customs agent examining the luggage of breaststroker Yuan Yuan found enough human growth hormone to supply the entire team.
China denied it was into systematic doping and fought to clean up its sport. It withdrew four swimmers from the 2000 Sydney Games. It also tightened up mightily in advance of the 2008 Beijing Games, conducting more than 10,000 tests in and out of competition. But just over a month before the Games, China's top backstroker, Ouyang Kunpeng, and his coach were banned for life after the swimmer tested positive for the steroidal clenbuterol. Ouyang was the 46th Chinese swimmer to be caught since the team's rise after the Seoul Games.
Ben Johnson and Canada's dark day
Who can forget Ben Johnson? A Canadian hero, transplanted from Jamaica, who had taken on the world's fastest men – including American Carl Lewis – in the Olympics' signature event in 1988 and bested them with a world record of 9.79 seconds. Canadians everywhere were glued to their TV sets.
Days later, they were tuning in for a different reason; Johnson had tested positive for stanozolol, an anabolic steroidal. Arne Lungqvist, then the chief medical officer for the International Association of Athletics Federations, remembers with clarity the night Johnson's test results were slipped under his hotel door. "I said, 'Oh no, this will not be a good day. This will totally tarnish elite sport because the top athlete in the world has just been caught at the Olympics.'"
Stripped of his medal and sent home, Johnson's disgrace was Canada's, and the federal government commissioned an inquiry led by Ontario Appeal Court Chief Justice Charles Dubin to look into the prevalence of drug abuse in sport.
Dubin's recommendations, following 92 days of testimony from 122 witnesses, including Johnson, led to the formation of an independent drug testing authority in Canada. Now called the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, the agency conducts more than 3,000 tests both in and out of competition in an effort to ensure Canadian athletes are clean.
Johnson's career did not end there; after serving a two-year suspension, he returned to the track and qualified for the 1992 Barcelona Games but missed the finals. He put the coup de grace to his career the following year when he tested positive for testosterone and was banned for life. Adding to his ignominy, in 1999 he tested positive for a banned diuretic, a masking agent, when he arranged for a re-test as part of an appeal to be reinstated.
At the Dubin Inquiry, Johnson's coach, Charlie Francis, said Johnson had been using steroids, particularly furazabol, since 1981.
Johnson was the only member of the Seoul race to be caught. But in later years, three of the four top contenders, including Lewis and Britain's Linford Christie, were tarnished. Lewis, the world record holder heading into the Games, had tested positive for three stimulants at a training camp before the Games and was banned from competition by the U.S. Olympic Committee. But the USOC, which at the time was also responsible for testing its athletes, reversed itself when Lewis claimed he'd inadvertently taken a herbal remedy.
Christie also had been found with a stimulant in his urine, but in an 11-10 vote by the IOC's disciplinary committee was allowed to race. In later years, he too tested positive for steroids. Desai Williams, a Canadian who placed seventh in that race, never tested positive but at the Dubin Inquiry was listed among the athletes, including Johnson, who were administered steroids by their doctor, Jamie Astaphan.
Still, Johnson has long protested his innocence, saying he was the victim of a "mystery man" who spiked some post-race beers before his urine test. In an autobiography, Seoul to Soul, to be released in February, Johnson claims to have a taped confession from Andre Jackson, a "friend" of Lewis, admitting he spiked Johnson's drink with stanozolol, the steroidal found in the test.
U.S. track and field team
Why was it that from the 1980s until 2000, when the United States Olympic Committee turned over drug testing to the independent U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, that while other countries had their share of drug cheats the Americans seemed so clean?
Apparently they weren't. At least not by today's standards.
In 2003, Dr. Wade Exum, the former director of drug control, turned over 30, 000 pages of documents to Sports Illustrated showing that between 1980 and 2000 more than 100 Americans, including 19 who went on to win medals, had tested positive for drugs but were allowed to compete at the Olympics. Among the athletes was sprinter Carl Lewis, who was given the 100-metre gold medal at the 1988 Games after Ben Johnson was disqualified.
But Exum had argued long before then that USOC was not interested in catching cheats. In July 2000, he resigned as head of doping control, claiming the USOC encouraged athletes to dope. Later, on the last day of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Dr. Robert Voy, the USOC's former medical chief, filed an affidavit in support of Exum in which he said the organization "had no interest in curbing the use of banned substances."
Voy stated that "the USOC's doping program encouraged the use of performance- enhancing drugs."
At the time, neither Exum nor the USOC named the athletes, although newspaper reports indicated that in 1999 alone American elite athletes failed drug tests 207 times but only 10 were suspended.
But after Exum contacted Sports Illustrated, the IOC and the World Anti- Doping Agency raised concerns. WADA president Dick Pound said the USOC should have banned the athletes from competition.
Dr. Cristiane Ayotte, director of the Montreal anti-doping lab, disagrees. She said recently that at the time Lewis was tested, the use of herbal remedies and supplements wasn't well understood. They weren't on the banned list. If Lewis were tested today, the same results would earn a suspension. But in 1988, neither the scientists nor the athletes understood the effect a herbal supplement could have.
Tour de France and the rise of EPO
Drugs and the Tour de France have gone hand in hand since the inception of the gruelling race in 1903. In early years, cyclists used alcohol, ether, cocaine, amphetamines and even strychnine to help them. In 1967, after Britain's team leader Tim Simpson died at Mont Ventoux during the 13th stage, officials found amphetamines in his blood and in his race jersey. The race always seemed to go on.
But in the 1990s, the use of performance-enhancing drugs became so rampant authorities were forced to act. In 1998, French border police stopped Willy Voet, an employee of the Festina cycling team. In his car they found 250 bottles of the oxygen-boosting blood product erythropoietin (EPO), as well as 400 bottles and ampoules of other products, including anabolic steroids. Subsequent news reports indicated police in March had also seized 104 bottles of EPO from a vehicle associated with the TVM team.
Over the next three weeks, many cyclists were forced to give urine and blood samples. Ultimately, eight of nine Festina cyclists tested positive for EPO, with the last one admitting he had taken the drug. At the time, tests could not differentiate between naturally occurring and man-made EPO.
Several cyclists and team members later told police the use of EPO had been going on for years.
The crackdown led to cyclists "striking" along the route. Many quit the race, and only 111 riders finished. The black image of the tour caused Coca-Cola to withdrew as a major sponsor. The International Cycling Union, in an effort to save the Tour, brought in more rigorous drug testing.
In 2000, the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory, with the assistance of the World Anti-Doping Agency, developed a test for recombinant EPO.
But that wasn't the end of EPO in the Tour, or of efforts by riders and teams to cheat.
In 2004, French police found more EPO, as well as hormones and amphetamines, and arrested two cyclists attached to Team Cofidis. In 2006, Spanish police conducted Operation Puerto, an investigation into doping efforts by Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes, a recently retired team doctor for Team ONCE. They alleged Fuentes assisted more than 200 professional athletes, including tennis and soccer players, as well as members of cycling teams on the Tour. They discovered a large quantity of blood doping products, including 100 bags of code-named blood belonging to athletes.
Several cycling teams evicted members after their names were linked to Fuentes. In all, riders from half a dozen teams were outed, although some were later cleared by a Spanish court.
But the 2006 Tour had a bigger problem: Eventual winner Floyd Landis tested positive for testosterone and was stripped of his title.
The 2007 season proved no better, with a rash of positive EPO tests and allegations of missed tests. Team Cofidis pulled out after one of its athletes tested positive. The race was won by Alberto Contador, who was named in Operation Puerto. He has never tested positive and never been sanctioned, but the history of the sport means fans have a difficult time with presumption of innocence.
Juiced baseball and the BALCO affair
Drug use in that great American pastime, baseball, has led to the introduction of the asterisk in the record books. The public may have suspected that record-breaking sluggers Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and a raft of other players were taking steroids, but there was little proof until 2002. That's when Jose Canseco, upon retirement, claimed that 85 per cent of all baseball players "juiced." Subsequent investigative reports found some truth to the claim, including a Sports Illustrated interview with National League MVP Ken Caminiti, who said half the players were using steroids.
What made this significant was that while steroids were banned by the IOC and national basketball, hockey and football leagues, Major League Baseball was silent on the issue.
In mid-2003, U.S. sprint coach Trevor Graham surreptitiously gave the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency a syringe containing what he claimed was a new and as-yet undetectable designer steroidal that was developed by Victor Conte at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). The steroidal, tetrahydrogestrinone, nicknamed "The Clear," was being given to a raft of athletes, including Olympic hopefuls and many baseball players. When a test was developed by Don Catlin at the UCLA's Olympic Analytical Laboratory, he retested 550 urine samples and found at least 20 positives.
The BALCO affair spawned a congressional probe into baseball in 2005 where many players, including Sammy Sosa, Canseco and McGwire, testified. Or at least they were summoned to testify. McGwire's refrain – "I'm not here to discuss the past" – led to a widespread belief he had juiced.
The twin scandals forced baseball to begin instituting tests for steroids, and it imposed multi-game suspensions for transgressors. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Bonds on charges of perjury, alleging he'd lied to investigators about his use of steroids.
But the BALCO affair hadn't fully run its course. Among the athletes named as clients of the lab were U.S. track stars Marion Jones, her boyfriend Tim Montgomery, and her one-time husband C.J. Hunter. Jones, who won five gold medals at the Sydney Olympics, was forced to return the medals.
Nordic skiing cheats at Salt Lake City and Turin Olympics
For years, Canadian Beckie Scott watched as Russian cross-country skiers Larisa Lazutina and Olga Danilova consistently beat her. It happened again at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. She believed they and other Nordic athletes were doping but couldn't prove it.
But a new test for EPO, developed before the 2002 Games, nabbed the two Russians, as well as a Spanish skier. It was the first time EPO or any of its variants had been identified at the Olympics. The variant the three used was so new it had only been on the market for several months and wasn't yet on the list of banned drugs.
The test showed that scientists and anti-doping administrators could get ahead of cheating athletes, who use new drugs in the expectation that tests haven't yet been developed.
Scott eventually had her bronze medal upgraded to gold.
Salt Lake also was a precursor to another major scandal involving blood doping and Nordic athletes that continues to this day. Cleaning staff there found used blood transfusion equipment in the room of Austrian skiers, leading the IOC to believe illegal doping had taken place. Ultimately, two skiers without medals were sanctioned and coach Walter Mayer was banned from both the 2006 and 2010 Games.
But the case alerted anti-doping officials to the possibility that Austrian skiers were involved in a more organized effort to cheat. Officials found more blood transfusion equipment in Austria while conducting out-of-competition tests and Mayer was seen in the company of athletes at the Turin Games. WADA alerted Italian police, who conducted raids on a chalet housing the Austrian skiers and biathletes. Mayer fled back to Austria, crashing while trying to elude police. Ultimately, the IOC handed lifetime bans to six athletes and fined the Austrian Olympic Committee for failing to stop the doping.
The Austrian committee gave lifetime bans to a number of biathlon and cross- country coaches, but recently lifted the ban on 12 of the coaches, after it deemed they were "rehabilitated."
In 2007, still stinging from the scandal, Austria brought in a new national anti-doping agency.
The following year, it enacted tough criminal sanctions against athletes caught with drugs; it tightened the law further last year after a cyclist was caught using EPO.
But the fallout continues. On Dec. 31, the Austrian winner of the 30-km race at the 2002 Games, Christian Hoffman, was suspended by the new antidoping agency on suspicion he was involved in a blood-doping ring. The suspension would have prevented him from attending the 2010 Games. Rather than fight the suspension, Hoffman announced his immediate retirement. He has always denied using drugs.
Beijing and the long reach of science – backwards
In the past, athletes who doped but weren't detected at the Olympics had a fair chance of escaping with a medal. No more. Under new rules adopted when WADA was created, anti-doping officials can go back and re-test samples up to eight years after they were collected.
That rule gives doping police the hammer they need to keep on top of the coaches, labs, trainers and others who constantly look for new ways to give athletes an edge. It's also a significant deterrent for athletes who, as former WADA president Dick Pound said, "might get out of town with their medal but not very far."
In practicality, the ability to retest has been limited by how many of athletes' secondary "B" samples still exist. The IOC keeps leftover urine and blood samples in a storage facility in Lausanne, but the paucity of samples has meant that until recently WADA and the IOC had to be careful about when they do "further analysis."
In the buildup to the 2008 Tour de France and the 2008 Beijing Games, however, antidoping officials got a clear indication that a new variety of EPO, called MIRCERA, might be misused by athletes. Manufacturer Roche Holdings assisted WADA and anti-doping labs in what to look for when testing urine and blood samples.
During the Tour, at least four cyclists tested positive for MIRCERA and were ejected from the race. But at the Beijing Games weeks later the test wasn't put into place in part, the IOC said, because there were "no proper validated methods to test for the new EPO generation" when Beijing signed its host city contract.
Arne Lungqvist, chairman of the IOC's medical commission and vice-chairman of WADA, said later the IOC retested 847 samples and found seven MIRCERA positives, including two from one athlete. Among those caught was middle- distance runner Rashid Ramzi, who gave Bahrain its first gold medal, and Italian cyclist Davide Rebellin, who won a silver in the road race. They were stripped of their medals. Three others were also given suspensions.
Vancouver Sun
