“Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports” by Mark Johnson
Hardcover, 416 pages
Published 2016 by VeloPress
ISBN-10 : 9781937715274 | ISBN-13 : 978-1937715274
Date Finished: Dec 28, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 5/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
This book will be hard for many to get through, but if you already have an interest in doping and the business of sport you’ll find it fascinating. Johnson tests some basic assumptions about anti-doping and for that I applaud his efforts here, and he provides an important history lesson for fellow obsessives like myself.
My Notes:
...drug-free play is a relatively recent moral precept forced upon sports whose participants have always been chemically enhanced.
Fans, athletes, governments, sports organizing bodies, and advertisers are all complicit in the championing of chemistry in the service of greater happiness and performance in life.
This books attempts to give a better understanding of this complicity and whey it has never been in the interest of athlete, fan, or journalist to spit in the soup that feeds us all with the nourishing sustenance of money, entertainment, and—in the case of the Olympic Games—political clout.
First Olympic marathon, "with runners dropping out with cramps and heat exhaustion, Lucas "was forced to administer one-sixtieth grain of sulphate of strychnine, by the mouth, besides the white of one egg."
H.G. Wells in his 1897 book The Invisible Man. "Strychnine is a grand tonic." The drugs was a performance-enhancing wonder that took "flabbiness out of a man."
The position of the authorities was clear: Getting a ride in a mechanical conveyance was cheating. But taking an assist from chemical stimulants was commitment, a heroic glorification of country. After marathon failures at the first two modern Olympics in 1896 and 1900, the Yanks had turned to modern chemistry and delivered victory [in the 3rd].
"The Marathon race, from a medical standpoint, demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road, and that warm sponging is much better than cold sponging for an athlete in action." Lucas, after the win 1904 Marathon.
For roughly the first 100 years of professional sports, mixing drugs and human endeavor did not spark moral panic and social outrage. When an elite athlete turned to modern chemistry to increase output, it was evidence of an honorable commitment to a trade.
By 1920, that proportion exceeded 50 percent; for the first time, city dwellers outnumbered country folk.
Paris got its first velodrome in 1879 and built six more between 1892 and 1897.
In 1890, there were about 50,000 bikes in France. By 1910, there were 3 million.
In the midst of this explosion of pro sports, athletes taking drugs to ply their trade was not the scandal it is today. Rather than report on drugs from a position of moral outrage and disgust, the press described athletes enlisting chemicals to extend human performance as an unremarkable matter of fact.
"This was hocus-pocus," Gleave told me when I visited him at his university office not far from Disneyland. "They actually believed they were speeding up and slowing them down, but they were using things lie mercury and rosemary and tincture of thistle—crazy stuff. And that didn't make the horse go any faster."
Thoroughbred racing became concerned about doping's financial harm at the same time pro cycling boomed in the United States.
Although alcohol and other stimulants were perfectly acceptable for six-day riders, even the hint of the administration of output-retarding drugs was cause for scandal.
From the days of the first professional races in the 1870s, pro cycling was a sport for the working classes, and the competitors were the same laborers who saw alcohol and stimulants as a necessary tool for enduring the remorseless nature of their work and the hard-fisted bosses who ruled the mines and factories.
The British doctor was inspired to take up his research after reading German zoologist Eduardo Poppig's 1835 book Travels in Chile, Peru, and on the River Amazon. Based on five years of field studies in the Andes, Poppig described Peruvian natives banging out 50-mile hikes fueled on nothing but coca leaves. Cocaine, Poppig concluded, "has a really wonderful power in supporting the strength under prolonged fatigue without food."
Christison also tested coca on himself. He walked 15 miles without chewing coca and reported that the task left him physically ruined and "unfit for mental work."
To avoid this negative association, he recommended calling PEDs—as powerful as cocaine and as benign as fruit juice—ergogenic aids. Springfield College professor exercise physiologist Peter Karpovich.
Using drugs to improve performance was only a problem when those drugs were so powerful and addictive that they could harm the athlete, not because they violated a spirit of fair play or threatened society's social order.
Raised with the creed that faith in God grows best when combined with the cultivation of the intellectual and the physical self, Coubertin had a strong affinity for the British public school emphasis on the development of citizen-athlete-scholars.
For traditionalists like Coubertin who celebrated sports as a source of moral and physical uplift, professionalization was a social threat spearheaded by unrefined, landless working classes—a social group considered alien and inferior in both bloodline and upbringing.
From their earliest days, cycling and running rewarded winners with cash and prizes; as a result, Ensor and like-minded public figures considered these sports morally corrupting and off limits. "Gentlemen must not run foot-races or ride bicycle races in open company," Ensor warmed. Comparing pro athlete trading to American slavery, win at all cost and losing meant financial ruin.
This Sorbonne reunion was the first step toward creating a sporting event that fulfilled Coubertin's nostalgic—and explicitly religious—vision of international games as a rehabilitative force guided by revived chivalric codes of knightly conduct.
The delegates also endorsed an Olympic motto that, with time, would come to represent the enduring tension between the elite athlete's essential will to win and Coubertin's commitment to amateur modesty and effecting services to others: Citius, Altius, Fortius—Faster, Higher, Stronger.
Even training was discouraged among amateurs. "The amateur athlete was the one who could just show up and play any sport" without preparation.
That is why Olympic regulations stated that an athlete would lose amateur status for merely stepping onto a field with professionals, even if the athlete were not being paid. Bc aristocrats shouldn't play with men of another station.
CHAPTER 3
Signs of the Olympic transition away from amateur innocence began as early as 1928, when the Amsterdam Olympics organizing committee sold advertising rights to Coca-Cola. When IOC officials arrived in Holland and saw Coke signs affixed to the walls of the Olympic stadium, they were outraged by the violation of Coubertin's rise-above-money founding values. pg 41
The Nazis had invented this 3,000-runner relay as an Olympic marketing novelty to amplify the can-do grandeur of the Third Reich; throughout the relay, the torchbearers were shadowed by German Opel car carrying a spare torch. pg 44 Hitler's Olympics, 1936
Two years before the Berlin games [Hitler's games], historian, technology philosopher, and New Yorker writer Lewis Mumford published Technics and Civilization. Mumford's 1934 book explores how industrialized society created a demand for professional sports. Sport that was once an unremunerated human diversion became a product in itself: entertainment. "Mass-sport is primarily a spectacle." Mumford wrote of the transformation of sport from personal recreation to mass distraction. Industrial-era workers were so wrung by factory life that they needed to vicariously experience "difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life sense." pg 44
Mumford argued that we fill stadiums and gather around sports broadcasts because the chance-riddled exploits of sports heroes return suspense, excitement, and aesthetic pleasure to mechanized lives. pg 44-45
... sport offered a place where elements of serendipity and uncertainty still enlivened our days. pg 45
From sleep to nutrition, training to equipment, Mumford proposed that sporting excellence demands absolute dedication to craft, to the exclusion of all other aspects of a balanced life. pg 45
The 1936 Olympics were the first to be broadcast live on television and radio.
Since the 1920s, German cobbler Adi Dassler had worked in a shoe business with his father and brother. In 1948, a feud split the family, and Dassler went off on his own to create a new shoe brand called Adidas. Dassler's company competed with Puma, a brand his father and brother, Rudolf Dassler, continued to run. pg 47
When Germany won the 1954 World Cup soccer tournament, many attribute the victory to the ingenious screw-on studs on the bottom of their Adidas shoes. pg 48
Owens won four gold metals in Berlin. Despite the fact that his skin color excluded him from many restaurants and hotels in his home country, this son of an Alabama sharecropper became an international sensation. p gpg 48
The IOC was apoplectic. Spitz's blatant use of the Olympic podium as a product display case was too much to overlook, especially since the money changing hands for this demonstration was not going into an IOC bank account. pg 52
TOP is a cash cow for the IOC. TOP members pay in the neighborhood of $100 million to $200 million for the right to adorn their products and services with the five-ringed symbol of Coubertin's Olympic fantasy. pg 53
And in this marshaling of efficiencies in the interest of victory lay the impossibility of chemical purity of athletes. pg 54
A December 1, 1895, New York Times editorial, "The Use of Stimulants by Athletes: Drugs Designed for This Purpose Not Favored," took drug manufacturers to task for marketing their products to athletes. pg 55
During the annual convention in 1928, the IAAF executive council passed strict rules outlawing athlete compensation. At the same time, the IAAF wrote what may be the sport's first anti-drug regulation. pg 56
In advance of the IOC’s 1938 annual meeting in Cairo, Egypt, the organization commissioned several reports on the state of doping in sports. Pg 59
At some point, the IOC could not continue to pretend that its amateurs were not embracing professional doping habits. A 1964 report commissioned by the Council of Europe (CoE) cited an Italian survey of amateur cyclists conducted during the 1962 and 1963 race seasons. ...14 of te top 30 finishers tested positive for drugs—46.6 percent positive among a group of non-pro riders who had been dold in advance that they would be tested. pg 61
But while the pervasiveness of doping in amateur sports was becoming too obvios for the IOC to ignore, it was a death at the 1960 Rome Olympics that forced the organization to pay sharper attention to the anti-doping rule that had been sitting quietly ignored on its books since 1938. pg 61
Though Italian authorities will not release it to this day, the official autopsy reportedly attributed the first death in modern Olympic history to heatstroke, which was probably not helped by Jensen's head injury and the fact that he was severely dehydrated on a day that saw 31 other riders suffer from the same debilitating condition. pg 62
The team trainer, Oluf Jorgensen, told Jensen's attending doctors that he had given his riders a vascular dilation drug called Roniacol before the race. pg 62
In response to Jensen’s death and the subsequent media eruption, in 1962 the IOC created a medical commission to examine doping in Olympic sports. Pg 63
Even though Jensen's autopsy did not mention the presence of drugs in his blood, a myth took hold that Jenson had amphetamines in his system. pg 63
In 1967 Prince Alexandre de Morede (no medical experience) lead the stuy. 1968 Winter games in Gernoble, France and the Summer Games in Mexico City. pg 63
Jensen's death became one of the earliest examples in the American historical record of the dangers of doping in sport, even though it should have been evidence of the danger of practicing endurance sports in extreme heat without properly trained medical technicians on hand. pg 64
Seeing which way the social and bureaucratic winds were blowing, the IOC agreed at its annual congress in 1964 to formally condemn drug use and intruct its national Olympic organizing bodies to let their athletes know they might be tested. pg 65
... until creation of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2000. pg 67
As Moller writes, Prokop's desire to get doping out of sports "led hi to make unsubstantiated claims" in the service of his cause. pg 69
... drugs may indeed have contributed to Jensen's death—only evidence does not point to the demon stimulant that spawned today's anti-doping organizations as the culprit. pg 71
Before the arrival of Christians, Moller said, cyclists were like indigenous peoples living "with completely different notions and ideas and values." pg 72
pregnant mothers anti-nausea treatment, the drug thalidomide... babies were born with birth defects. pg 73
1963 TdF... 14 riders dropped out with "food poisoning." Rider statements suggested that something stronger than a bad plate of fish at the team hotel. In fact, it was morphine. pg 76
During the summer of 1965, France and Belgium made sports doping illegal. The laws targeted the peloton's favorite pick-me-up, amphetamines.
The French lawmakers had two objectives: protect athletes from an exploitative sports system, and shield them from their own self-destructive impulses. pg 77
French newspaper, Le Figaro's sports editor Roger Flabart. "There is no other event in the world where you have to keep going in a maximum effort six hours a day for 22 days. It just cannot be done without dope." pg 77
It seemed that cycling was being unfairly singled out to sovle the nation's health crisis while society at large got a pass. pg 79
Tour director Felix Levitan hissed that the riders were "a band of drug addicts who are discrediting the sport of cycling." pg 79
Simpson, the son of a British miner, had amphetamines in his jersey pockets and his autopsy reveled amphetamines and alcohol in his bloodstream. The chemicals contributed to a heart attack due to heat exhaustion and dehydration. pg 80... didn't seem to dampen the riders' appetite for PEDs.
From the race's earliest days, Tour riders were variously seen as abused workers, convicts, and indefatigable machines. pg 81
The Tour boss hectored riders, insisting that they must "leave gear changes to women and the old, you are the kings, the giants of the road, you must vanquish the obstacles with which it confronts you by your means alone, without recourse to subterfuges unworthy of you. pg 81
From his Ball State University office in Indiana, Thompson told me that French anti-doping enforcers were obsessed at that time with "the idea that you have to protect youth coming up from imitating their idols." pg 82 For the French government, there was a real concern that endurance sports such as cycling were becoming so difficult that "professionals would fall into the trap that the only way they could make a living and compete is by doping—with potential threats to their health and maybe to their lives." pg 82
The Festina affair completed the transformation of doping from an act of valor and scientific modernity t an act of social deviance and medical abuse. No longer a proletarian hero, the dope-taking athlete was now an entitled demon. pg 83
For the IOC leadership, doping was "primarily a public relations problem that threatened lucrative television and corporate contracts." pg 87
The public relations nightmare worsened for the IOC in December 1998. A Swiss lawyer and IOC executive board member named Marc Hodler divulged that the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics organizing committee had paid IOC members for their votes to hold the Games in Utah. pg 88
After World War II, doping in sports gradually transitioned from a homegrown endeavor managed by individual athletes and perhaps a soigneur into a collective science research enterprise. Energized by international Cold War tensions between communist and capitalist states, doping pivoted away from the haphazard, one-off sports survival efforts of the six-day rider or marathon runner who swallowed booze and stimulants to finish a race. As nations began to see Olympic sports as a means of achieving geopolitical ambitions, doping moved out of the kitchen and into the lab. Doping guided by old wives’ tales became applied pharmacology as an element of sports science—a new field of study that demanded the collective efforts of not just one doctor or a soigneur, but experts from multidisciplinary fields of medicine, chemistry, psychology, materials science, physiology, and nutrition. And unlike earlier homespun doping practices, performance-enhancement research during the Cold War required government-level funding and organizational resources. Pg 97
The Stasi also monitored the coaches and administrators who managed the GDR’s national athletics programs and oversaw the world’s first, and biggest, institutionalized sports doping program—one that relied heavily on the administration of anabolic-androgenic steroids to young athletes.
As nations began to see Olympic sports as a means of achieving geopolitical ambitions, doping moved out of the kitchen and into the lab. pg 97
The Cold War put sports performance-enhancement research on steroids. Pg 98
In the USSR’s post-World War II scramble to seize territory and forestall the rise of another Teuton dictatorship, Germany was split into two countries. Beginning in 1949, East Germany was democratic in name only. Run by Soviet central planners, the GDR’s infamous Ministry for State Security—the Stasi secret police—infiltrated every aspect of personal and public life. Pg 101
While postwar West Germany grew into a thriving democracy and became Europe’s third-largest economy, the GDR enjoyed no such revival. Russian overseers moved East Germany’s most productive factories to the USSR, leaving the GDR economy in a grinding funk and its people chronically short of food and daily necessities. Pg 101
When the IOC denied East Germany a team berth in the 1948 Olympics, GDR party leader Walter Ulbricht propagandized the dismissal as a further attack on East Germany sovereignty. Pg 102
Ewald stated that sports are “no different than any military conflict.” Pg 103
With ex-Nazi Ewald leading the effort, building the world’s best sports medicine research and development program was essential to East German’s national renewal project. Pg 103
Although it was an open secret that drugs were an important element of the GDR sports program, East German leaders had to publicly deny their use because the IOC had banned steroids for the 1976 Montreal games. Pg 104
In many respects, State Plan Subject 14.25 was the sporting equivalent of the U.S. Manhattan Project. Pg 104
In the 1060s, Ewald began building the GDR High Performance Sports Commission. Its labs studied athlete responses to drugs—known euphemistically in the GDR as “supplemental means.” Pg 104
Historian John Hoberman describes this system as the first-ever “Communist-style mobilization of thousands of people for the purpose of producing elite athletes.” Pg 105
Records that came to light after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall indicated that beginning in 1966, some 2 million doses of anabolic steroids like the GDR-manufactured Oral-Turinabol were distributed to 2,000 elite East German athletes every year. Pg 105
The effort delivered early results at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. East and West German athletes competed as one team, but the GDR competitors were the stars, winning more medals than their capitalist teammates. pg 105
Under-18 athletes were told they were taking vitamins, and those older than 18 took an oath of secrecy not to divulge the nature of their steady diet of performance-enhancing "supplements." pg 105
No GDR athlete could leave East Germany for international competition until his or her dope tests came back negative. Before the 1978 swimming world championships, East German aquatic stars Petra Thumer and Christiane Sommer spent days in Kreischa resubmitting samples that kept coming back positive for nandrolone—a performance-enhancing drug they had injected eight weeks earlier, but which lingered in the body much longer than GDR scientists had expected. pg 106
The GDR anti-doping lab became a model in how to use federal resources to tilt the odds for Olympic athletes. Pg 106
Coubertin believed women had no business participating in the Olympics as athletes. pg 107
The sports medicine programs developed for the Cold War sporting arsenal were built on the shoulders of Germany’s pioneering sports medicine establishments. The world’s first sports medicine college was founded in 1920 in Berlin. To disseminate their research, Germany physicians established the world’s first sports medicine journal in 1924. Pg 107
Doping was just one part of an all-encompassing state-run sports medicine machine that marshaled German money and minds in the interest of rebuilding German self-esteem on Olympic and world championship playing fields. Pg 107
The GDR noted that women could be particularly fertile soldiers in the ongoing reassertion of the tattered German identity. Not wanted them to “become the focus of a spectacle,” Coubertin believed women had no business participating in the Olympics as athletes. Instead, “their role should be above all to crown the victors.” Pg 107-108
East German trainers had women take on progressively harder and longer training loads that enemies like the United States considered too tough for the female constitution. Pg 108
Muscle-building anabolic steroids helped these athletes recover from this enormous increase in workload and intensity.
Well into the 1970s, many considered it dangerous for women to adopt stressful training workouts. This was certainly the case in the United States, where the paternalistic state of affairs was famously illustrated in 1967 when the director of the Boston Marathon physically accosted runner Kathrine Switzer four miles into the event, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!” As Switzer recalled in 2007, American coaches at the time thought running such a long distance would destroy female reproductive organs. Pg 108
In a post-1976 Olympics report, GDR sports science director Hoppner concluded "that women have the greatest advantage from treatments with anabolic hormones with respect to their performance in sports... Especially high is the performance-supporting effect following the first administration of anabolic hormones, particularly with junior athletes." pg 109
While that reaction might seem counterintuitive today, when the long-term dangers of doping are better understood, East Germans in the 1960s still carried the shame of being a war-losing, economically and spiritually eviscerated Soviet puppet state that also happened to be author of the planet’s worst human holocaust. Pg 109
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, star German discus thrower and shot-putter Brigitte Berendonk and her husband, Werner Franke, gained access to thousands of Stasi athlete records files. While many records had been destroyed in an effort to protect the doctors and administrators who oversaw the GDR athletics programs, the preserved files detailed the systematic doping of some 10,000 athletes during the Cold War. Pg 109-110
Two years before his 2002 death, German courts handed the 74-year-old sports minister Manfred Ewald a two-year suspended sentence for his role in systematically doping East German athletes, including causing bodily harm to 20 athletes due to drugs that were being administered to unknowing athletes from ages as young as nine. Pg 110
In spite of the horrors that came with its unabashed drug use, the GDR system was widely emulated and continues to be today. Even after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the GDR system altered global sports. Pg 110
Spread across the planet like dandelions, these coaches perpetuated the GDR’s systematic, evidence-based sports medicine and performance-enhancement methods. Pg 111
Even in an era when Olympic athletes were ostensibly amateurs, top runners were also handsomely paid in East Germany. “A top sprinter might make twice as much as the GDR’s most successful industrial manager,” Hille told Francis. Pg 111
Soviet and GDR sports systems became the model for all future national and professional sports programs—well-funded, systematic, obsessively measured, evidence-based sports medicine platforms that hold performance enhancement as their core defining value. Pg 115
Female gymnasts as young as six were enrolled in sports schools where they followed relentless, meticulous training programs. pg 115 the state rewarded metal winners like Olga Korbut with two-bedroom apartments.
And because pharmaceuticals were essential scientific elements of these new sports systems, the anti-doping movements that took root in the late 1960s and 1970s did not have a chance of eliminating the chemical tools essential to the central performance-enhancing raison d’être of elite sports. Pg 113
In 1955, Congress authorized the addition of "In God We Trust" to all United States currency, a Cold War change intended to distinguish a nervous U.S. from the atheist Soviet Union. pg 116
On Dec 26, 1960, a month before his inauguration, president elect John F. Kennedy used the pages of Sports Illustrated to send a New Year's message to the nation: Get off your duffs. In a cover story titled "The Soft America," Kennedy took up the Brundage and Eisenhower gauntlet. He challenged his fellow citizens to get fit in the name of national pride and defense against communist threats. pg 118
"In a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security," Kennedy warned. pg 119
... an East German sports doctor told the New York Times that his country's athletes were backed by "an entire collective of doctors, technicians and coaches—just like mission control when an astronaut is sent into space." pg 122
Looking for a tissue-building medicine to help rehabilitate burn and polio victims, Ciba had recently synthesized an anabolic-androgenic steroid called Dianabol. Ciba's objective was to create a drug that delivered the anabolic (muscle-building) benefits of the hormone testosterone, but without the negative androgenic (masculine-characterized) effects such as an enlarged prostate, atrophied testicles, acne, and a spaced -out feeling that can affect people using straight testosterone. pg 124
Ziegler gained access to Nazi testosterone data while conducting Dianabol research in China. After WWII, the U.S. and Russia had confiscated the studies from German labs with the thought that it might someday be of use for their own needs. pg 125
Side effects of testosterone boosting, the prostate can enlarge and impinge on the urinary tract. Without cauterization, the Russian athletes could not pass water. Pg 126
Zeigler’s efforts to help wounded patients and underarmed Olympians was backed by his understanding of endocrinology. Testosterone is a male hormone. Secreted by the testicles beginning at puberty, it creates male sex characteristics like the beard, a deep voice, and sex drive. It also helps build muscles and bones—that’s why boys go through dramatic physical changes when they hit puberty. Beginning in the 1880s, researchers identified testosterone’s anabolic , or muscle-building, powers when they documented how castrated lab animals had smaller muscles and weaker skeletons than their intact brethren. Because steroids played such a large role in Cold War doping, it’s worth taking a tour of their history. Pg 130
Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard’s, 72-year-old French physician: the promise of science to provide hope for reverse aging with medicine. Pg 130
Brown-Sequard's experiments were based on the widely held assumption that sexual gland secretions where the seat of some sort of human potency and power. His research was groundbreaking, so much so that historian John Hoberman describes Brown-Sequard as "the authentic father of our thinking about anabolic steroids and they're alleging effects." Page 131
Squib pharmaceuticals begin funding research on synthetic testosterone in 1926. pg 132
In the complete term for the synthetic version of testosterone, anabolic-androgenic steroid, anabolic refers to the hormone's ability to build muscle mass through a metabolic process of storing proteins and building tissue. Amdrogenic refers to the hormone's masculinizing effects; it signifies production of (gen) male (andro-) traits. Steroid refers to a class of organic and synthetic compounds with their own unique molecular structures. Anabolic-androgenetic steroids are essentially versions of the testosterone hormone but are manufactured by a chemistry lab rather than human glands. Although steroids were first synthesized in the 1930s, so far no steroid has been invented that can deliver muscle building anabolic effects without androgenetic side effects. Page 132
After the age of 30, human testosterone production slowly declines—a biological fact that drives today's blooming business selling testosterone supplements to address “low-T", and from the mellowing libido and slackening energy that settles in with age. Females also produce testosterone, but typically at a ratio of 1 to 8 compared to males. Females relative lack of testosterone is why the East German sports doctors documented testosterone having a more dramatic physical effect on women and men—facial hair, deeper voices, and unusually powerful sex drives. Page 133
Today, we know that anabolic steroid abuse can be highly destructive, even fatal. Autopsies of anabolic-steroid-using weight lifters and football players have revealed heart damage caused at least in part by heavy steroid use. 1978 East German national swimming champion Jutta Gotta hall testified that the steroids caused intensely painful menstral cycles. "I could of climbed the walls my period was so awful." Her son was born blind. Many other female GDR athletes were unable to bear children, and those who did conceive frequently gave birth to children with disabilities.another swimmer, Martina Gottschalk gave birth to a son with physical deformities, including a Club foot—second-generation side effects of the steroid administered to her as a swimmer. Steroids can destroy liver cells, leading to hepatitis, and they have been linked to cancer, depression, and suicide. Men suffered from gynecomastia, or a naturally large breasts. At the 2000 trial of GDR dumping mastermind Manfred Ewald, on East German swimmer was asked how coaches explained her unnaturally deep voice. Forced to take up to 30 pills a day, plus steroid injections from the age of 11, she recalled, "they told me to swim, not saying."
Created from Ziegler's personal stew of patriotism, intellectual curiosity, and a desire for professional status as a groundbreaking medical researcher, the anabolic steroid monster was out, and as much as Ziegler came to regret it, it wasn't coming back. Page 136
It went on to quote Ziegler on how the drugs he first champion in the mid-1950s had spun out of control. Explaining that athletes were gulping dosages 20 times greater than what he prescribed, Ziegler fumed about why he discontinued his involvement with the US Olympic team: "I lost interest and fooling with IQs of that caliber." Doping had become "as widespread among these idiots as marijuana." Page 137
Following the Montreal games, Professor Kurt Tittle, the head of German sports Institute in Leipzic, told the New York Times that every GDR gold-medal was back by "an entire collective of doctors, technicians and coaches – just like mission control when an astronaut is sent up into space." Page 143
While Adidas was one of the first companies to show how the Olympic aura could sell products and Hitler was the first to use the games to sell a national ideology, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first to turn the sports extravaganza into a self-supporting marketing package. Page 151
Where cities were ones responsible for all Olympic hosting costs and risks, who is now illegal to use California tax payer money to fund the Olympics. Page 154
Despite American IOC president Brundage’s early warning that a flood of sponsor dollars might be “a great danger if Olympic ideals are not maintained,” the 1984 Olympics were a watershed moment when the influence of parsimonious American taxpayers and a strong-willed American businessman forever displaced Coubertin’s romantic “religious of the muscles” with an abiding faith in commerce as the new guiding Olympic principle. Pg 161
In advance of the 1984 Games, the IOC Medical Commission, then led by the Belgian prince Alexandre de Merode, set up a drug-testing lab in Los Angeles. Overseen by UCLA scientist Don Catlin, the IOC approved the lab in November 1983. A few weeks later, the USOC approached Catlin about testing U.S. athletes in advance of the Games. Pg 161
With IOC and LAOOC cognizant of the importance of sponsor dollars to execute their Olympic mission, there was a lot of incentive to ensure that drug scandals remained behind closed doors. Catlin’s Los Angeles lab was a convenient way to screen out doped athletes before they could cause negative publicity. More than a lab to ensure a level sporting playing field, the lab was an insurance policy. Pg 162
Of the 86 U.S. athletes who tested positive in the pre-1984 Olympic drug tests, only two were denied spots on the Olympic team—and even those two were not sanctioned. Pg 165
After Catlin gave Merode his list of positives, the Belgian prince informed Catlin that the list had gone missing from his room at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel. The IOC could not identify who the positive tests belonged to, so all were considered innocent. Pg 166
And while other nations boasted well stocked coaching staffs, the Post pointed out that the USCF had only hired it's first coach 18 months earlier— Play Polish junior champion named Eddy Botysewicz. Pg 170
As UCSF coach, Borysewicz guided the 1984 U.S. Olympic team to nine medals, four of them gold. He nurtured Nevada teenager Greg LeMond onto a path that ended with three Tour de France victories—America’s first. No figure has been more influential in making the United States a global force in pro cycling than Eddie B. Pg 171
On French television, Anquetil once told a politician it would be idiocy to attempt a 350-mile race like Bordeaux—Paris on bread and water alone.
Gledhill conducted three tests and found that blood doping led to a 5 percent improvement in V02max among runners. That is, adding red blood cells allowed the tested runners to carry more oxygen—and more oxygen delivered to muscles equals more energy. The same test also found that blood doped runners could run 35 percent longer than when running with their body’s normal level of blood. Pg 179
… when news broke after the 1984 Olympics that medical commissioner Merode could not locate the doping test records that fingered meal-winning athletes, she realized that some athletes are truly protected by the USOC and IOC to shield Olympic sponsors and national prestige.
The emphasis on winning creates an inducement for coaches to embrace the same doping practices that their competitors are using. Medals mean job security for coaches. “They don’t care about the athletes,” LeMond said, adding that the same system of reward and punishment affects the pro peloton’s team directors. “If they’ve got an athlete, juice him to the gills so he can keep his job and sponsors,” LeMond observed. Pg 185
The IOC also moved quickly. At its annual session in June 1985, the IOC Medical Commission banned blood doping. It also altered the definition of doping to encompass banned procedures, in addition to substances. As John Leaves explains, he blood-doping incident galvanized the IOC Medical Commission and turned it into a body that began to express itself as an active force “intent on eradicating doping of any kind in sport.” Pg 186
When Ferrari demurred, Route pressed on. “In any case, it is dangerous!” he said. Ferrari would have none of it. “EPO is not dangerous,” he retorted. “Its abuse is.” Ferrari then added, “It is also dangerous to drink ten filters of orange juice.” Pg 190
Ferrari was a protege of Italian blood-doping pioneer Francesco Conconi—a man whose groundbreaking research into autologous blood boosting helped Francesco Moser shatter the hour record in 1984. Pg 190
As historian Paul Dimeo explains, through the 1980s, “the construction of doping as an evil, a plague, a cancer or a temptation” was kept alive by the myth that sports were inherently good and drugs were a corrupting temptation that had to be beat out of the athletic garden of Eden. Pg 191
This process also works in healthy people, only instead of fooling an ailing body into boosting its flagging red-blood-cell count back up to normal, injecting EPO into a healthy human causes the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells than are normally needed. The resulting surplus of these oxygen-carrying cells can increase endurance by as much as 10 percent. The ideal adult hematocrit percentage varies between individuals and genders, but it is generally in the 40 to 54 percent range at sea level, and about 5 percent higher than that for people who live at altitude. Pg 192
… cyclist Tyler Hamilton said in his 2012 book, The Secret Race, “That holy place at the edge of your limits gets edged out—and not just a little.” EPO talk pg 193
When Goldwasser’s lab finally isolated the EPO gene in the early 1980s, an infant biotech startup called Applied Molecular Genetics approached him, and Goldwasser began sharing his three decades of knowledge with the company that would later rename itself Amgen. The company was funded by Montgomery Securities, an investment bank found by Lance Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team backer Thomas Weisel. Pg 193-194
By 2006, annual EPO sales were $13 billion worldwide. Pg 194
Although no evidence exists to support the claim that EPO caused any of the cyclists’ deaths in the early 1990s, Lopez’s research led him to conclude that the rumor had ossified into received wisdom through media repetition. Pg 199
AS Lopez sees it, the story of EPO killing loads of cyclists became a “flagship myth” for anti-doping interests. Pg 199
Moreover, the articles cited athletes dying from EPO beginning in 1970, even though EPO was not produced for clinical trials until 1986. Pg 200
As Lopez sees it, the role of the EPO deaths in the war on drugs in sport is analogous to the role fictional weapons of mass destruction played in the justification of the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. “There was a war to be waged, and the people waging the war needed justification, an excuse, a solid reason.” “The best reason for waging that war is that doping kills. ‘We honest men, we must stop athletes from taking drugs because we are interested in saving their lives.’” Pg 201
In December 2006, Danish researchers reported that 10 percent of a clinical trial group of 516 head and neck cancer patients on heavy EPO doses experienced accelerated tumor growth. And 10 years earlier, a 1996 study of dialysis patients was halted because patients on high EPO dosages suffered more heart attacks than a control group on lower amounts of EPO. Pg 202
The report pointed out that when a meritocrat level exceeds 70 percent, the amount of oxygen reaching the brain decreases, which in itself can be dangerous. Pg 204
These vignettes are not meant to argue that EPO abuse is safe. It’s not. IN their write-up of the case, the physicians took the opportunity to warn other doctors to be on the lookout for athletes who self-administer EPO: “It seems likely that an erythropoietin-induced increase in hematocrit, coupled with the dehydration that develops during prolonged exertion, would increase blood viscosity and cause impaired muscle perfusion and possible fatal thrombosis.” Pg 204
The 158 million pounds worth of EPO sold in Italy in 2000 did not include amounts brought in from Switzerland, nor the EPO distributed by the Mafia—much of it stolen from pharmacies or obtained from illicit distributors. Donati also cites a 1999 French study that indicated that only one-sixth of global EPO production went to patients with pathologies, with the rest being distributed through underground markets. Pg 205
As it turned out, EPO was accelerating tumor growth; the American sales-and-marketing incentives that got more patients to take more EPO had the unintended effect of killing them off more quickly than in Europe, where patients were shielded from the pharmaceutical company’s aggressive sals-and-marketing efforts. While there is no evidence directly linking EPO to any competitive cyclist deaths in Europe, in the United States, there are ample data showing that heavy EPO use incentivized by the oddities of the American health care system was shortening cancer patient lives. Pg 205-206
An honest examination of the true risks of doping would be harmful to both the business of ant-doping and the business of sports media. As Lopez wrote in a 2011 paper on the EPO death fable, “Examining the mythical nature of these stories is bad news for the anti-doping campaign, because athletes, policy-makers, media and public opinion would be less convinced by the health-risk arguments if the history of doping were short of victims.
Following sports gives us a plot-twisting lift from the predictability of daily life. Watching heroes fall is part of that entertainment product.
Guimard raced in the 1960s and 1970s, and in his autobiography, he explained that amphetamines were a “main course” in the pro cyclists’s race-day diet. He went on to call the doping of his era “quite trifling,” “minimal,” “nothing serious,” and, prior to the 1980s, “do-it-yourself.”
Eliciting a mythic, moral past as an impossible (and fictionalized) ideal that today’s world should follow as a model, these nostalgia-infused retired riders demand radical, if not impossible enforcement crackdowns on the modern moral and chemical scourges corrupting cycling.
Doping policy laws are always going to be based on clinically unverifiable assumptions about both harmful and performance-enhancing effects of drugs.
And while it’s difficult to link an absence of deaths to any media campaign, the fact that no rider has ever conclusively died from EPO might indicate that books like Parisotto’s did scare athletes into either not using EPO or into making sure they used it with medical supervision.
From the Physician and Sportsmedicine titled “Erythropoietin: A Dangerous New Form of Blood Doping,” the piece by Virginia S. Coward explains that EPO was approved by the FDA earlier in 1989 and cites the opinion of former USOC medical director Robert Voy. Warning athletes away from the synthetic hormone, Voy cautions, “If it overshoots what is physiologically tolerable for the cardiovascular and pulmonary system, some athletes will develop heart failure and pulmonary edema. We may see deaths.” Hoy’s warnings were reasonable—taken without doctor’s supervision, EPO could kill.
The Dutch scientists tracked the hematocrit levels of 18 male and 28 female Olympic-level athletes over 16 months. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, these athletes were not taking EPO. The scientists found that six of the subjects had naturally occurring hematocrit levels above 50 percent. They also found that some athletes had hematocrit levels as low as 34 percent. Marx and Vergouwen concluded, “Although everything possible should be done to protect athletes against any kind of doping that may be harmful and that may falsify competition, in the case of EPO the IOC and UCI might consider whether taking a nondetecable substance that is able to correct a physiological inequality among competitors should be considered as doping.”
The sport’s administrators at the UCI began the march toward drug prohibition in 1965, yet cyclists died from head injuries for another 38 years until the UCI took steps to slow the carnage by making helmets mandatory for racing in 2003. Emotion, not logic, controlled the sport’s response to the risks threatening its athletes.
In fact, for the Nixon presidency, drug use equated to domestic terrorism. In a June 17, 1971, speech asking Congress to fund a new Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, Nixon argued that the drugs office was necessary to confront substance abuse and addiction, a scourge with “dimensions of a national emergency” that “frightens many Americans.”
To address the human and economic costs of these addictions and growing voter unease with hedonistic, antiwar youngsters, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. Signed into law by Nixon on October 27, 1970, this act became the cornerstone of what we now know as the War on Drugs. The legislation also came a monumental to a moral panic that in turn helped accelerate the rejection of drugs in sport.
Drugs to restore health were good. Drugs to enhance performance beyond a natural state or to recreate were bad. With that distinction made, Cooper said, “drug abuse in athletics is not an isolated event but mirrors a widespread problem, particularly among the youth of our communities.”
He explained that the source of marijuana’s unsavory reputation was “literally fiction,” not science—a reputation sullied by prohibition campaigners like the Anti-Saloon League, whose religious objectives found it useful to lump marijuana in with alcohol as a threat to American schoolchildren.
In 1936… made the counterintuitive discovery that the amphetamines made usually rambunctious kids calmer.
On April 10, 1937, the New York Times reported on “the extraordinary energy-stimulating powers of benzedrine sulphate.”
President John F. Kennedy received regular methamphetamine injections together with vitamins and hormones. His doctor was German-trained physician Max Jacobson. Nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, Jacobson also administered pep-me-up treatments to the Rolling Stones, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and an anti drug campaigning congressman from Florida named Claude Pepper.
The drugs also allowed the teenager to keep pace with a merciless six-day-a-week film production schedule of The Wizard of Oz. Actors had to be on the MGM lot before sunrise for consuming. [Judy] Garland recalled. “Then after four hours they’d wake ups up a nd give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row.”
Amphetamine use peaked in America in 1969, a year before President Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act put drugs into distribution-restriction classifications. In 1969, drug makers stamped out between 8 and 10 billion 10-milligram amphetamine doses for a U.S. population of about 200 million. Four billion doses were prescribed by doctors and dispensed by pharmacies. This was enough to supply every person in America—child and adult—with 20 doses for the year.
Today, the United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers.
As Edward Shorter puts it in his History of Psychiatry, this explosion of people now eligible to take amphetamines to normalize-their behavior represents “a pathologizing of essentially normal if irksome behavior” that is unparalleled in history.
College-educated Americans earn 70 percent more than those who only graduate high school.
Pitted against one another for a bigger piece of a finite funding pie, an incentive system emerged in which it made logical sense to get energetic, distracted kids on test-performance-enhancing drugs. Focused, calm kids do better on standardized tests, and they don’t screw things up by disrupting the rest of class who also need to concentrate and stay calm to do well on tests.
“To a certain extent, we are all hanging on for the ride,” he told me, referring to the continuing effects of the FDA’s 1997 decision to allow drug makers to advertise their products directly to consumers.
Nearly a century after Gordon Allen discovered the cognitive and physical effects of amphetamines, the drug remains a staple of the American pharmaceutical diet. And unlike drugs in spots, Americans remain torn as to whether their embrace of stimulants for better living is a virtue or a vice.”
In 1843, Joseph Smith told a Mormon congregation that doctors don’t know much. “They want to kill or cure you to get your money,” he preached. Reject modern medicine with its deadly potions and bloodlettings cures, the Mormon prophet urged his flock. Smith admonished his disciples to “take some mild pycic [purgative] two or three times and then some bitters [herbs]. If you can’t get anything else, take a little salt and cayenne pepper.”
In 1916, the act ended sales of Clarks Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment, an elixir supposedly made form oil from snakes bursting with the capacity to “oil dry joints” and remedy strains, bunions, sore throats, and dog bites. Americans had been snapping up this wonder salve since 1897. When government scientists test Stanley’s product, they learned that it held little more than mineral oil and a bit of beef fat. The product was shut down and the supplement industry had a new nickname.
However, the potion makers found an ingenious rhetorical out by claiming that their products were not designed to directly target illness in the manner of chemical-based pharmaceuticals but rather were meant to supplement the diet. Drugs target disease. Food and food supplements just provide energy. The difference was crucial, and its opened a back door to the supplement industry we know today.
Threatened by accountability, the supplement industry had a fit. When you traffic in snake oil, the last thing you want is a federal chemist testing the purity and efficacy of your potion. With the dietary supplement industry and the lawmakers on its payroll spinning the FDA proposal as an example of jackbooted federal forces trampling sacred constitutional rights, retailers urged customers to tell Congress to halt the looming clampdown on American freedoms.
The law was called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).
Without the DSHEA, Hatch said the FDA would “continue its life and death grip on products which have been proven to enhance public health.”
In an October 5, 1993, editorial, “The 1993 Snake Oil Protection Act,” The New York Times blasted Hatch’s ploy. The fight the supplement industry billed as a matter of protecting consumer choice was really “about the right of unscrupulous companies and individuals to maximize profits by making fraudulent claims,” the paper wrote. But the supplement industry was too powerful to be halted by worries over consumer protection. On October 25, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the DSHEA into law; the industry was given a federal blessing to carry on its traditional ways.
The DSHEA locked out the FDA by formally classifying supplements as food rather than food additives or drugs. In the United States, foods are presumed safe until they cause harm. Drugs and food additives are presumed unsafe until the manufacturer proves them harmless.
As Pray put it in 2002, the “DSHEA provides that manufacturers can sell dietary supplements for virtually any medical condition without pretesting for safety on humans or animals. Patients who purchase dietary supplements take the place of the laboratory rats used in legitimate safety research.
The DSHEA was in fact so artfully designed to protect Utah’s “Cellulose Valley” of herbal supplement makers that they have no legal obligation to turn over adverse findings to the FDA.
Every year, Utah companies do over $7 billion worth of business selling vitamins, testosterone boosters, and herbal remedies. In the six-year election cycling leading up to 2012, some of those billions sloshed back to Hatch as $1.1 million in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and nutritional products industry.
For instance, analysis of GNC ginkgo biloba supplements turned up asparagus, rice, and spruce, but no ginkgo biloba.
And they did. In advance of the 2002 Olympics, American bobsled team ember Pavle Jovanovic was disqualified when he tested positive for traces of the steroid norandrostenedione. He blamed it on a contaminated supplement, and IOC and USOC tester Don Catlin agreed that the metabolites found in the rider’s system were probably from a tainted nutrition booster.
In 2000 and 2001, University of Cologne researchers tested 634 supplements purchased randomly in shops, online, and by phone in North America, Europe, and Australia. Of these, 14.8 percent contained steroid prohormones.
While the IOC medical commission was worried about supplements ruining athletes’ careers and Olympic sponsor reputations, the USOC did not mind. In advance of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the SLC Organizing Committee and its fellow benefactor, the U.S. Olympic Committee, cashed $20 million in sponsorship checks from Utah-based anti-aging-elixir sales company Nu Skin.
… Nu Skin microdistribution businesses. It’s a pyramid structure in which salespeople are measured as much by their ability to bring in more salespeople (who have to purchase $1,200 starter kits) as by their ability to sell to end consumers.
… and a devastating 1991 expose on the ABC news show Nightline. In that news program, reporter Barabara Walters asked her American audience, “Is Nu Skin nothing but a scheme promising the American ream while for many delivering on the nightmare?”
Enlisting American athletes as TV pitchmen for Nu Skin demonstrated the U.S. Olympic movement’s reluctance to spit in the financially nourishing but ethically curdled soup of supplement industry support.
With the nutritional supplement company underwriting the 2002 and 2004 U.S. Olympic teams, the United States Olympic Committee signaled that supplements were not only ethically acceptable in elite sports but essential to Olympic performance.
As Francis recounts, Canadian track and field athletes labored “ in a chronic state of nervous system exhaustion.” While Canadian coaches would run athletes into the ground, Mach understood that to expand an athlete’s performance load, he had to stress him by alternately increasing and reducing workloads and shifting stress between muscular and aerobic systems.
… human growth hormone—an injected drug originally developed to treat dwarfism. HGH
Indeed, the United States Committee had created its drug-testing lab at UCLA to help American athletes dope to the last possible minute, then ensure that the drugs were out of their systems before any event-day tests.
The preemptive drug screening worked; no U.S. athletes tested positive at the 1984 Games, and the Americans thumped the medal count, taking 83 gold medals to Romania’s runner-up total of 20.
The 1990 law reclassified steroids and human growth hormone as Schedule III controlled substances, lumping them in with the same “hard drugs” Nixon declared war against in the 1970s.
Joining Schedule III drug club as a number 15 on the list of 25 substances was methandrostenolone.
Some 32 years after Cuba Pharmaceuticals had marketed that chemical under the name Dianobol and U.S. weight lifting coach John Ziegler had encouraged his young American athletes to take it to prepare for battle against the Soviets, the steroid was officially unwelcome at the sporting training table.
The genesis of the 1990’s Anabolic Steroid Control Act is important to the story of bulked-up baseball players in the late 1980 and the 1990s for two reasons. For players incorporating steroids into their weight training regime in the 1980s, there was little criminal risk in using steroids—none if they had a team doctor’s order for them. AS for baseball’s internal regulations, MLB drug policy simply demanded player compliance with federal drug law.
Creatine is the drug East German molecular scientists created as a performance-enhancing and drug-test-evading bridge between precompetition anabolic steroid doping and the day of an event.
The supplement industry grew fat on baseball-inspired sales of androstenedione and creatine. One android seller promoted its wares as “The Product Behind Mark McGwire’s 70 Home Runs.”
American lawmakers could not easily wave away the miasma of social deviance and ethical toxicity gathering around doping in general and steroids in particular. And in the midst of it all, Mark McGwire was nine home runs away from tying Roger Maris’s 1961 record of 61 homers in a single season.
According to a 2006 ESPN magazine report on drugs in baseball, androstenedione sales rose 1000 percent, up to $55 million, after McGwire’s success in 1998. Nike also milked the chemically fueled home run race, running a cheeky TV advertisement in 1999 in which blonde actress Heather Locklear and an attractive brunette pass on Cy Young Award winners Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux for the more muscular—and hard hitting—Mark McGwire. The tagging? “Chicks dig the long ball.”
President George W. Bush: 2004 State of the Union address: So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.”
As was the case when Nixon launched his war against recreational drugs in the 1960s, Bush’s call to purge the nation of drugs that. Had long been part of elite sports was at once about capitalizing on social anxieties to protect his own political power and about shielding America’s performance-minded youth from pharmaceutical substances—many of which Congress had successfully argued Americans should be able to buy whenever they liked.
After all, these were the same legislators who had long agitated for the unregulated sale and distribution of a cornucopia of supplements, including androstenedione and L-tryptophan, the amino acid sold as a food supplement that killed at least 37 people before the FDA had enough evidence to pull it from health food store shelves in 19990.
Not long after Bush’s 2004 State of the Union speech, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004. Sponsored by Senator Joe Biden and co-sponsored by Orrin Hatch, the act tightened the earlier 1990 Anabolic Steroids Control Act by reclassifying some steroid precursors like androstenedione as Schedule III controlled substances.
Enhance with legal and illegal drugs, Gonzalez and Rodriguez resurrected Bush’s team in its hour of need. Season revenue of $25.5 million in 1996 suddenly made the Rangers’ stadium the best-performing ballpark in the MLB.
In 2001, Major League Baseball generated $3.5 billion in revenue. The 10 years that BALCO spent manufacturing and distributing steroids and human growth hormones coincided with the best decade of ticket sales in MLB history.
Sports fascinate because unfairness is their essence. Irish law lecturer Eoin Carolyn writes, “Elite athletes represent inequality at its most refined, revered by the public not for their normalcy but rather for their ability to achieve that which the ordinary athlete, let alone the average citizen, cannon.”
Sports are a theater of war, nationalist striving, commercial enterprise, and personal ambition.
A 2010 study the company did with researchers at the University of California-Berkley found that Tibetans who lived above 14,000 feet had some 30 genes with mutations different from the lowland ancestral group they split from 3,000 years earlier. Half of these mutations were related to how the highlanders metabolized oxygen.
“To me, sport was a religion with its church, dogmas, service,” Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin wrote.
Maintaining the useful illusions of chemical purity and the inherent evil in drug-using athletes allows us to blame individuals like Lance Armstrong and Ben Johnson and saves us from dealing with the more difficult reality that doping is a social and political problem, not just a matter of weeding out dishonest individuals.
Every year the pharmaceutical industry spends an average of $61,000 per American doctor marketing its wares to physicians. Drug companies conduct and ghostwrite research as much to create sales arguments for existing drugs as to invent new ones.
The authors note that sports today are rigged to reward those athletes who win the genetic lottery. The athlete with the naturally occurring 52 percent hematocrit is a born winner, and the slob with the 42 percent just has to suck it up.
Among 18- to 44-year-olds, these mood enhancers are the most-used drugs in America. Eight percent of anti-depression drug users do not have symptoms of the disease, suggesting that many use the drugs in an additive fashion, rather than a restorative one. That is, instead of using drug therapies to get back to normal, they are doping to be better than normal.
The WADA results are “not representative of the wider usage of doping drugs within international sport,” Dimeo and Taylor concluded. Their research suggests doping rates are more in line with data from a study that revealed that 43 percent of a large sample of elite Australian athletes showed probability of doping.
The WADA working group that wrote the analysis noted that if positive tests for marijuana and asthma medications were taken out, the number of positives would be less than 1 percent.
When a team of French medical researchers studied the 786 French riders who raced the Tour de France in the years 1947 to 2012, they found that the Tour riders had a 41 percent lower mortality rate than the overall French population.
As I hope this book has shown, anti-doping rules and regulators have caused governments, sports governing bodies, athletes, fans, and sponsors to twist themselves into contortions that condemn doping in public while embracing it in private.
Having a California baker snatch the entire stable of Olympic symbols from IOC control jolted the Olympic organizers from amateur fantasyland into commercial reality.
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