The use of performance enhancing drugs has been occurring for more than a century. The types of drugs used have changed as science has made advances in the production of drugs. Doping agencies find it difficult to keep up with new forms of performance enhancing drugs used by athletes that are hard to detect in doping tests.
Steroids
Steroids are the most commonly known version of performance enhancing drugs. They are produced using testosterone and are taken orally, injected or absorbed into the skin. Modifications are made to testosterone to enhance its anabolic (muscle building) effects while reducing the male sexual characteristics of the drug. Overtraining by athletes can result in muscle breakdown, so steroids are designed to prevent muscle breakdown, allowing for extra training.
Early Discoveries
Mystery surrounds the first death associated with performance enhancing drugs, but it is claimed that Welsh cyclist Arthur Linton died after taking the stimulant trimathyl. Taking part in the 1886 Bordeaux to Paris race, Linton collapsed and died. Typhoid fever is given as the official cause of death, but Linton is usually cited as the first known drug death in sport.
Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard is seen as the father of steroid research. In 1889, the 72-year-old French physician made public the fact he had injected himself with testicular fluid from dogs in an attempt to fend off the effects of age on his body. After the work of Brown-Sequard and using his work as a basis, hormones were discovered in 1905, leading directly to the development of anabolic steroids.
Germany
In an attempt to treat the testosterone deficiency hypogonadism, German scientist Adolf Butenandt developed anabolic steroids in 1935, and his work with anabolic steroids won him the Nobel Prize. The side effects of steroids were harnessed by the German army during the World War II in an attempt to create more aggressive, physically strong soldiers. After World War II, anabolic steroids were used to reverse the effects of confinement on prisoners of Nazi concentration camps.
Weightlifting
It has been reported that the weightlifting teams of both the United States and the Soviet Union began using performance enhancing drugs in the 1950s. In 1954, U.S. team doctors reported conversations with doctors form the USSR team revealing testosterone use to enhance performance.
Four weightlifting medalists at the 1983 PanAm Games tested positive for steroids and were stripped of their medals. As a result, 13 members of the U.S. team withdrew from the games.
Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sport
The use of steroids became a worldwide scandal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal and world record for the 100 meters when the steroid Stanozol was found in his urine.
American football player Lyle Alzado admitted to two decades of steroid abuse in 1992, and Alzado died of brain cancer he blamed on his use of steroids.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, Irish swimmer Michelle Smith came under suspicion of using performance enhancing drugs after her performances brought her from an average swimmer to winning four medals at the games. In 1998, Smith received a four-year ban after missing a number of drugs tests and adding whisky to a urine test in an attempt to hide her use of steroids.
Laws and Rules
In 1990, the U.S. Congress introduced the Anabolic Steroids Control Act, making the trafficking of steroids a felony instead of a simple misdemeanor offense. This was followed in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee establishing the independent World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to handle testing of athletes around the world.
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