What it means
What does doping really mean? One way of finding out is to look in the dictionary, where it tells you that it comes from a Dutch word “doop” meaning a thick liquid or sauce, a reminder that it originally referred to a South African drink. In days gone by, “dope” was something you drank to help you work hard, if only for a short space of time. So, in English, “to dope” means to administer a drug, specifically as a stimulant.
An official definition of “doping” was adopted in Uriarge in 1963. Since then, it has meant the use of substances and any other available methods of artificially enhancing performance in a sporting event, or when preparing for it, in a way which violates sporting ethics and damages the physical and psychological health of the athlete or player.
So doping is an operation which sets out quite deliberately and knowingly to do two things: combat fatigue and enhance performance.
This definition needs some refining. To start with, there are the medical aspects.
What doping involves is misusing medicinal products or techniques. Where products are concerned, it can mean every drug in the pharmacopoeia. Some of them are exogenous, which means coming from outside the body and therefore easy to identify. Others are endogenous, stimulating the body to secrete particular molecules itself. Identifying these means doing medical tests. When it comes to techniques, it boils down to using medical practices for the wrong purposes, e.g. the practice of putting sportsmen and women on drips.
We also have to find a definition of doping in terms of the law. It flies in the face of sporting ethics, and tarnishes the image of sport as a means of keeping society in balance. Doping is also bad for the health. It is a criminal offence, and both users and suppliers of “dope” can be punished.
And then, of course, there is the definition of the term as understood by sportspeople themselves. More and more they seem to be split between two camps. For some, there is no “doping” unless a person’s life is in danger. They can accept a situation where drugs are administered by a doctor or under medical supervision. Others use the term to mean engaging in practices or taking substances which are against the rules. The problem here arises from the lack of uniform standards. The criteria for regarding products as forbidden drugs vary from one sport to another, as the list drawn up by the International Olympic Committee is not yet universally accepted.
Some history
Higher, faster, stronger – that was the Olympic motto dreamed up by Baron Pierre de Coubertin at the end of the 19th century. Yet men and women have always striven to excel themselves and sport, or physical exercise in the broader sense, has given them the opportunity to do so. And there have always been techniques for sportspeople to apply or substances to take to increase their strength, raise their standard or improve their performance artificially. The poppy was already being used in the Neolithic era, and opium was highly prized by the Egyptians, the Romans and, of course, the Greeks, who were also especially fond of beef when the Games were on, believing that it gave them the strength of ten. Both then and subsequently, in other parts of the world, ginseng root, coca leaves, hemp, maté and kava (an extract of the pepper plant) were also highly valued.
Doping, however, in the sense used today, really came onto the scene in the 19th century. In a way it was brought into being by medical advances and by the emergence of sport as we see it today.
The first drugs to be used were heroine and morphine. Heroine was mainly found in horse-racing circles, while morphine was very much in fashion in boxing and so-called endurance sports. At any rate it was suspected of having caused the death of Arthur Lindon, a Welsh racing cyclist who died a few months after the Bordeaux-Paris race of 1896, thereby becoming the first ever recorded victim of doping.
Things really got out of hand at the beginning of the 20th century, with strychnine and ephedrine making their appearance, not to mention steroids.
The team behind Thomas Hicks, a runner who won the marathon at the 1904 London Olympics, were clearly giving him the first of these, laced with alcohol and cocaine, to push him to victory.
The second (ephedrine) was actually the forerunner of amphetamines. Developed at the beginning of the 1930s, amphetamines first came into use in sport at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. They were widely used in battle in the Second World War and became extremely popular in the years that followed. What made them especially common was that most of the time they could be bought freely. Some time later, however, they were clearly implicated in at least three deaths. The victims were two cyclists, Knut Enemark Jensen from Denmark, during the 100 kilometre race against the clock at the Rome Olympics in 1960, and Tom Simpson of England in the Tour de France in 1967, as well as a French footballer, Jean-Louis Quadri, who died in 1968.
Hormone doping arose out of the work done as long ago as 1889 by a French physiologist, Edouard Brown-Séquard, and then in 1935 by Ernest Laqueur, who isolated the male hormone, testosterone. Four years later the Wolverhampton football team tried it out in England. It was not until the 1950s, though, that anabolic steroids really made their entry onto the sporting stage, starting with weight-lifting and athletics. But they spread fast. The Spanish tennis player Andres Gimeno admitted taking them in 1959, a long time before it was discovered what lay behind East Germany’s sporting successes in the 1970s or before the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was disqualified from the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.
Over the last few years, doping has taken a new and dangerous turn. Growth hormones have appeared, as well as intravenous doping involving transfusions of the athlete’s own blood, and then erythropoietin, perfluorcarbons and reticulate haemoglobin. In none of these cases has respect for human life necessarily been the primary consideration.
All this has changed the whole course of doping. Drugs used to be taken just for a one-off effect which activated various standard bodily functions, but now they may bring about the biological reprogramming of the body. To put it plainly, the time is not far off when it will be scientifically possible to make artificial but lasting changes in the way an organ functions and when the technicians of sport will be able to tailor each drug to meet the specifications for a particular level of performance.
The Festina affair
The skies over Dublin were changeable. Everything was ready for the Tour de France to set off from Ireland, and France had not yet won the World Cup. A few hours before the cyclists were to leave the starting line for the most prestigious cycle race of the season, a strange rumour began to spread. In the middle of the week a trainer for the Festina team – the pick of the bunch, the team featuring such riders as Richard Virenque, the darling of the French public, world champion Laurent Brochard and Alex Zulle, twice winner of the Tour of Spain – was checked by customs at Neuville-en-Ferrain on the French-Belgian border. And according to the rumour, the officers had found a great many unusual things in his vehicle, which was officially accredited to the Tour de France. Shortly afterwards the world was to learn that he had been carrying EPO (erythropoietin), growth hormones, testosterone, corticoids, amphetamines and vaccines.
At the Tour, they started to shake in their shoes. For the first time in the history of the Tour and for the first time, indeed, in the history of cycle-racing and sport, the participants realised that the authorities were aware of how little winning the race had to do with sporting prowess alone and had decided to do something about the doping.
But it was a bitter struggle. When the Tour got started in Dublin, the Festina affair had still got no further than merely questioning the Festina team’s trainer, Willy Voet. Not until he confessed on 14 July and Bruno Rossel and Eric Ryckaert, the team’s manager and doctor, were detained for questioning did people at last realise that in this particular case the doping operation had been run by a very well-oiled and experienced machine.
The Festina affair began to have wider ramifications. On 17 July, Festina’s cyclists were disqualified from the Tour. Another case came to light when investigations were started into the Dutch TVM team in Rheims, and the Tour only made it to Paris a fortnight later by the skin of its teeth. Twice, on 24 and 29 July, the participants threatened to go on strike. Some teams had their vehicles and hotel rooms searched. On police orders riders were made to take medical tests. One of them, Rodolfo Massi, was placed under investigation, as was Nicolas Terrados, the doctor for the Once team, a Spanish line-up which withdrew from the Tour along with five others.
At the end of the day, when Marco Pantani, the first Italian to wear the winner’s yellow jersey since Felice Gimondi in 1965, crossed the finishing line in Paris at the head of the pack, everyone was left with a strange taste in the mouth. For once it had become abundantly clear how widespread doping was in sport.
And then the fight began. It was a hard battle. Some called for all sport to be completely above board, while others argued that there was a place for doping provided it was done under medical supervision and did not jeopardise the health of the competitor concerned. Some saw sport as a school for human behaviour, while others, themselves active sportsmen and women, were not at all keen to break with old habits.
It was a very real conflict, fought out on the sports field, with the organisers of the Tour de France putting the ethics of cycling at the top of their list of concerns. And there it stayed when the International Olympic Committee, at the beginning of February, held an anti-doping conference and set up an Agency whose primary task was to make sure that the Sydney Olympics were clean.
Governments were also involved. On the initiative of Marie-George Buffet, the Minister for Youth and Sport, France passed a new law on action to combat doping. This made safeguarding the health of sportsmen and women the main priority, stressed the need for prevention and laid down stiffer penalties for suppliers. Things began moving in other European countries as well. When, in May, the French courts again looked into the habits and practices of the cycling fraternity, the Italian courts (especially those in Bologna and Turin), not wanting to be left behind, began investigating cases in a variety of sports, including football and cycling. The Italian Minister for Sport, Giovanna Melandrini, said she was determined to move in the same direction as Marie-George Buffet. And lastly, as the German courts looked into what had happened in the world of East German sport, the European Union’s Ministers for Sport said they were anxious to be involved in the Anti-Doping Agency set up by the IOC.
The issues at stake
The challenge to sport
With sport operating as an organised system for producing performances, there is a built-in tendency to stray from the straight and narrow. The task for sportsmen or women, especially in the top rank, is to beat the others and get a result. This twofold imperative creates a third one: they have to equip themselves to achieve their aims. So, to their way of thinking, doping does not seem like cheating; to put it bluntly, it is just something that has to be done.
The system makes increasingly gruelling demands on its practitioners and they have to keep up. Sporting calendars are getting fuller and fuller.
Sportsmen also have to keep up with a system which is making top-flight athletes and players more and more frail and tired. They now have to cope with ever tighter constraints imposed by the media and with economic necessities which are more and more pressing every day. In these circumstances the decision to take drugs is often taken passively. Sportsmen and women are, in a sense, acting under pressure from an environment which practically makes doping essential.
In the broader context, however, we need to stress that this need to resort to artificial ways of carrying off a performance is at odds with the basic values of sport as a social, cultural and educational activity. On the principle that all athletes and players contain within themselves the resources they need to bring out their personal best, doping diverts sport away from its true purpose. It prevents it from being a school for human behaviour.
The challenge to the media
The media influence sport in two ways. Firstly, they turn ordinary happenings into “events” and even set about making sure there are more of them, for essentially economic motives. Secondly, in some cases the media are well on the way to making organisers follow their rules. Sport no longer just means physical exercise. Since the end of the 1970s, and especially since the media began to call the tune, it has been turning into show-business, and the financial stakes involved are high. By their very essence, because they involve such huge sums of money and because of the thinking which motivates the people who organise them, these show-business events are more than likely to influence the use of drugs for doping.
The challenge to politicians
Doping is a genuine public-health problem, since it affects everyone involved in sport, including amateurs and young people. All of them want to be recognised, and all of them want to identify with an élite.
What makes doping a really burning question is that the products and methods used are getting more and more dangerous and the ways they are used can easily lead to real dependence, which in the end is tantamount to drug addiction.
But prevention is no easy task. To begin with, as there are no reliable health indicators it is impossible to work out exactly how many people are affected. And it is not at all easy even today to pinpoint what the actual pathological consequences of doping are.
This means that the battle has to be waged on two fronts. First, we need to do something about prevention, in other words a public-information campaign should be directed at users and a public-education campaign at non-users. Then we need to run a public-health alertness exercise. At all times we should remember that there is a price to be paid for stamping out doping.
The challenge to medicine
Athletes and players have to be kept under medical supervision. This was true before and it is still true today, for the function of medicine is to cure. Why it was overlooked before, and what makes it even more important today, is that doctors have to be concerned for the bodily and/or psychological wellbeing of the sportsmen or women under their care.
Sports medicine can almost be regarded nowadays as a kind of occupational medicine, for it, too, helps individuals adapt to a particular environment. To put it simply, with the passage of time doctors have steadily become more and more involved in bringing athletes to the top of their form. This is obviously different from using drugs to enhance performance. And that is where the borderline lies between what is known as “medical preparation” and doping.
We need a code of practice for doctors to follow, and the resources to put it into effect. For there are now real dilemmas facing the medical profession. Refusing to take part in doping means, as far as doctors are concerned, not just objecting to the prescribing of banned products, but also rejecting the use of authorised substances which are administered in ways or prescribed in doses incompatible with medical ethics or sporting ethics.
But to push this line of reasoning to its limits, and looking at the way things are developing today, might a doctor who refuses to take part in doping eventually be suspected of refusing to give help to a person at risk?
The challenge to society
Obviously, sport is not the only sphere of human activity where drugs are used. There are other fields where rivalry and competition sometimes push people to use artificial, i.e. chemical, means of achieving their ends.
It cannot be right, though, to treat doping as respectable just because it is common practice in the society we live in. Sport is, first and foremost, an activity unlike any other, one which relies on rules which are not supposed to be open to dispute and must be respected. Drug use for purposes other than sport as such may be dictated by the need for high performance but that does not mean the law is blind to it. There are rules governing the taking of drugs, and most cases of drug dependence arise from attempts to cure an underlying condition.
