Cold War Drugs

Drugs have always been part of sport, used by athletes to help them train, compete, and heal. Pharmacological potions were used by athletes in the ancient Greek Olympics. In the nineteenth century athletes in endurance sports like cycling and long-distance running regularly used drugs.

Athletic drug use was part of a society-wide drug habit — at least until the 1920s when opium, heroin and other opiates were banned from sale to the general public. Indeed, Coca-Cola, now a major corporate sponsor of the Olympics, was originally based on a cocktail of cocaine and caffeine.

Nor did the IOC always oppose drugs, as can be seen in the official report of the 1904 Olympic Games:

The Marathon race, from a medical standpoint, demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road . . . As [the eventual winner Thomas] Hicks passed the twenty-mile post, his color began to become ashen pale, and then another tablet of one-sixtieth grain strychnine was administered him, and two more eggs, besides a sip of brandy.

The use of drugs in sport became a major issue during the Cold War. Following the Soviet bloc’s stunning success at the 1952 and 1956 Olympic Games, Western fears about a growing “muscle gap” between East and West began to focus on the use of drugs by Soviet athletes.

US Cold War propaganda insisted that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian society that vigorously suppressed individual talent and initiative, so sporting Cold Warriors claimed that Soviet athletes must be using “performance-enhancing” drugs. But, of course, both Soviet and American athletes were experimenting with drugs throughout this period when drugs were still legal and viewed as legitimate sports science.

“Clean” Sport

Despite modern moral panics about drugs, there are no substantive scientific studies into the long-term athletic use of drugs because the IOC and other sporting bodies will not allow serious research. Sports administrators often point to the damaging physical and psychological effects of drugs like anabolic steroids, but of course the long-term use of any type of pharmaceutical without medical supervision or quality control, as occurs in sport, would also lead to serious health problems.

Many high-school and college athletes are coerced into taking drugs by coaching staff, but this is a consequence of the abusive culture of coaching that exists in many sports, a culture that also leads to widespread bullying and sexual abuse. Such abusive coaches are empowered by the fact that anti-drug rules prevent young athletes from seeking medical intervention.

As in all other walks of life, proper medical supervision of the use of drugs can be beneficial to athletes. We know that drugs such as anabolic steroids can enable athletes to train for longer and recover from injury more quickly. And contrary to the idea that athletes who take drugs are cheats who want to cut corners, the athlete still has to train at the limits of human physical endurance to benefit.

More importantly, so-called “clean” sport is not necessarily the healthy lifestyle choice that anti-drugs campaigners claim. Researchers in 2006 discovered that NFL linemen had a 52 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than the general population. They also found that 56 percent of all active NFL players were medically obese. The incidence of head trauma leading to depression, early-onset Alzheimer’s, and other serious medical issues in football and rugby is also well-documented.

A 2009 study showed that even healthy marathon runners had high rates of coronary heart disease. Nearly half of ex-soccer players in their fifties surveyed in the United Kingdom in 2000 had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis, a rate two-and-a-half times that of the general population. High-jumpers, javelin-throwers, and handball players have all recorded above-average rates too.

And, of course, a blanket ban on drugs greatly increases the chances of unforeseen health complications due to the lack of medical advice for those who do take them. Any drug that is taken for a long period of time without medical supervision or guidance has deleterious side effects, not just anabolic steroids.

Instead of writing off performance-enhancing drugs as the domain of liars and cheats, we should reconsider their purpose in the sporting world — the pharmacological equivalent of the sophisticated scientific training expertise such as customized running shoes, high-altitude training camps, and hyperbaric chambers, all of which are available to the richest elite athletes. Medicine should guide athletes’ use of pharmacology, not morality.

But sporting organizations like the IOC reject medical science in favor of their own moral certainties. The campaign against drugs in sport is not a debate about health, but an attempt to define and command the moral high ground by self-appointed sports administrators.

Control

Sport as we know it today emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, based on the “Muscular Christian” morality of “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” It was an ideology aimed exclusively at young males, designed to purge them of the moral impurities of sex, effeminacy, and homosexuality, and teach them how to be the rulers of the emerging imperialist nations. Sport created a binary world of the pure and the dirty.

By giving sport a moral purpose, its leaders sought to raise the status of games above what they had always previously been — entertainment, thrilling and spectacular, but nothing more than simple entertainment. One of those leaders was the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1894 created the modern Olympic Games as the international showcase for this new athletic philosophy.

To justify its belief in its own moral mission, sport needed a villain against which to measure its superiority over other forms of entertainment. So, just as the so-called “drug cheat” is public enemy number one in twenty-first-century sport, for Coubertin and his fellow thinkers the enemy was the “veiled professional” working-class athlete whom they saw as corrupting their values of amateurism. Later, in the Cold War, the “other” was the Soviet bloc “shamateur” or the mythical female shot-putters who were “really” men.

Indeed, the war on drugs is closely connected to the obsessive concern of sports organizations in policing their arbitrary boundary between male and female. So-called sex-testing became widespread in the 1960s alongside drug-testing as women athletes became stronger and quicker, defying the traditional stereotypes that are embedded in sport culture. As female athletes such as Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya have painfully discovered over the past few years, women who do not conform to the stereotype are quickly labelled as cheats or worse.

The war on drugs has imposed a totalitarian regime of rigid control and discipline on athletes. In 2004 WADA introduced its “whereabouts” system that effectively turned elite athletes into prisoners on parole. Athletes had to nominate one hour per day, seven days a week, to be available for unannounced drug testing. Being somewhere else, failure to complete the paperwork, or providing incorrect details were punishable offences.

At the 2012 London Olympics cleaning staff and security guards working in the athletes’ village were “educated” to spy on competitors for “behavior that is untoward” and report it to the IOC. These unapologetic police-state measures were justified as being necessary to stop so-called cheats.

The long arm of Big Brother stretches into the past too, as Maria Sharapova recently discovered when she was barred from professional tennis for taking medication that was previously allowed but then arbitrarily banned by WADA. The IOC is now also retrospectively retesting athletes who passed drug tests in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, a clear violation of the legal principle of double jeopardy.

Many leftist and liberal commentators have rightly highlighted the social devastation wrought by the Olympics on the host cities it imposes itself upon. But the problem with the Olympics, and sport as a whole, go much deeper. Sport governing bodies like the IOC seek to impose a reactionary morality on athletes based on arbitrary definitions of cheating, gender, and social conformity that is enforced by police-state methods. This is what today’s “war on drug cheats” represents.