ABSTRACT
For as long as human beings have competed with each other, they have used means designed to make the best of their capacity. Many books about doping start by talking about the ancient Greeks. Robert Voy, for instance, writes: ‘The earliest accounts of doping among human athletes actually go far back to the ancient Olympic Games, whose documents reveal that athletes drank various brandy or wine concoctions or ingested mushrooms to enhance performance’ (Voy 1991: 5). He then goes on to deal with some of the classical accounts from literature. We learn that ‘Roman gladiators are said to have taken drugs to enhance performance in the arena and medieval knights frequently ingested stimulants to prepare them for their jousts’ (ibid.: 5f). In the second half of the eighteenth century ‘canal swimmers racing in Amsterdam were charged with taking dop as were a number of cyclists competing throughout Europe’ (ibid.: 6). The measures taken were somewhat different from today. Among the substances used were strychnine, cocaine, ether, alcohol or pure oxygen. The purpose, however, was the same – to exploit potential and overcome fatigue and pain. In the literature of doping, there are a number of stories that are frequently
repeated, among them accounts of collapse and death, but they are used exclusively as a prelude to a subsequent analysis of the doping problem from the 1960s onwards. The essential information contained in the old narratives, of which some will be evaluated later in this chapter, has so far been overlooked. In the first place, these narratives drive a stake through the heart of the
widespread perception that the use of such measures is relatively new. This means that we can cast aside the thought that the use of doping is a perversion that has become prevalent due to the dizzying sums of money that have flowed into sports with the burgeoning interest shown by commercial television in the spectacle they provide. These stories puncture the notion that filthy lucre – or some other external force – has fundamentally altered noble sportspersons and turned them into monsters. As a result we can prepare to bury any idea that sport can be redeemed if only the forces of good stand together and drive out the evil that has possessed them. These old stories can instead open our eyes and allow us to understand that sport is not possessed by demons, but that it can itself become a demonic force capable of
possessing others. A second and more noteworthy aspect of the history of the use of stimulants for competition before the anti-doping campaign is, however, that it contains astonishingly few examples of performance-enhancing substances having had fatal results, despite the fact that the use made by sportspersons of stimulants prior to the 1960s was completely unregulated.1
This aspect is worth looking at in some detail.
