2 What does history tell us?
Looking back through history can help tell us how things evolved to the present day. Any contemporary issue benefits from some context and background into how things have progressed to the present day.
Activity 2 How much is doping just a modern phenomenon?
Timing: Allow about 15 minutes
Look at the history of doping in this timeline and answer the following questions:
- How much were performance-enhancing substances evident before 1939 (the start of the Second World War)?
- When was the first Olympic athlete disqualified for doping?
| 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 dope to make their fights vigorous and bloody for the public. |
| 1886 | The first recorded death from doping: British cyclist Arthur Linton overdoses on trimethyl. |
| 1904 | US marathon runner Thomas Hicks almost dies at the Olympics in St Louis after mixing brandy and strychnine. |
| 1950s | Soviet athletes begin to use male hormones; US athletes 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 | A further amphetamine death: UK’s Tommy Simpson dies in the Tour de France. |
| 1968 | The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issues a list of banned substances. First ever testing at Mexico City Olympics results in Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a member of the Swedish modern pentathlon team, being stripped of his bronze medal. |
| 1972 | Blood doping method is invented in Sweden: 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 that coaches had given them steroids. |
| 1987 | Erythropoietin (EPO) emerges as a way of boosting blood thickness; deaths follow in young cyclists and orienteers. |
| 1988 | At the Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tests positive for an anabolic steroid. |
| 1994 | Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona is banned from the World Cup for taking a cocktail of five drugs. |
| 1996 | Ireland’s Michelle Smith wins four Olympic swimming golds at Atlanta. She is found guilty of manipulating samples in 1998 and banned for four years. |
| 1998 | The Festina team are expelled from the Tour de France after their trainer is caught with 400 vials of performance-enhancing drugs. |
| 1999 | The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is established as a result of the 1998 Tour de France scandal. |
| 1999 | The nandrolone controversy breaks. UK sprinters Linford Christie and Dougie Walker and Czech tennis player Petr Korda, plus French footballers Christophe Dugarry and Vincent Guerin, all have adverse findings. |
| 2002 | Alain Baxter, the UK skier, loses his Olympic bronze slalom medal after he used a Vicks inhaler containing a substance on the prohibited list. |
| 2003 | UK sprinter Dwain Chambers tests positive for the new anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). |
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Discussion
- You are encouraged to form your own view of this question; you may be surprised. You will come back to your response and use this knowledge later in this course.
- This happened in 1968, which was relatively late in the history of sport. Gradually more and more substances were placed on the list of prohibited substances and methods. Imagine what might have been happening in sport before this disqualification.
This activity demonstrates that any contemporary issue benefits from some context and background history into how things have progressed to the present day. It is useful to be questioning and critical of what you read in university-level study. You can begin to see with your brief reading of doping headlines and history that issues are often complex. To further illuminate a contemporary issue you may have to explore reading in varied areas and be curious about what you see or read.