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“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.” So said the inimitable and irascible vaudeville and film comic, W. C. Fields. We can assume his statement was made in jest . . . sort of. What we do know is that plenty of athletes have been known to cheat. From Lance Armstrong to Ben Johnson, athletes have shown that they’re willing to go to great lengths—and to stretch the rules to the breaking point—in order to gain a competitive edge. FasterSkier’s series of articles entitled “Bad Sports” is a reminder that, sometimes, those cheating athletes are stars in our favorite endurance sports, including cross-country skiing.
Olympic drug-cheating has been around since 1904, when Thomas Hicks was revived and bolstered during the Olympic marathon by his trainers’ administrations of strychnine . . . thereby becoming the first athlete disqualified from the modern Olympic Games for having used performance-enhancing drugs. While strychnine (in 1904, a widely-available rat poison) may no longer be the drug of choice, the temptation to cheat is still sufficiently enticing to those who would pad their odds in pursuit of Olympic glory. All forms of muscle builders, recovery agents, stimulants, pain killers, and oxygen transfer enablers have been experimented with by numerous generations of eager athletic guinea pigs. It’ a long-standing athletic tradition; one nobody is very proud of.
Back when sport was used as a substitute for politics (during the era when Soviet and East German sport governing bodies would do nearly anything to win), state-sponsored doping programs created and distributed performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) combined with complex and lurid strategies for beating detection. It’s come to light that most Soviet strategies involved creative ways to beat the testing procedures, while East German programs concentrated on secretly creating performance enhancing substances and doping agents so new that they had not yet been declared illegal. And those nefarious strategies weren’t limited to the devious sport-behemouths of the Eastern Bloc, either. When organizations and teams and athletes have felt the pressure to perform in front of hometown crowds, they have often resorted to measures that tested the limits of the rules. As an example, the coaches of the 1984 US Olympic Cycling Team made systematic and team-administered “blood doping” available to American athletes. While it’s well known that the most notable medalists on that team did not avail themselves of this questionable strategy, it’s also well documented that certain notable medalists did. The loophole at the time was that blood doping was still little-understood (and could not be effectively tested for); therefore, it was not technically against the rules. Since then, the IOC has altered the rules, essentially outlawing any attempt to gain an unfair advantage (even if the strategy employed might later be proven to have offered no advantage at all . . . like rat poison in 1904).
