Bad Sports, Part I

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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).

Recently, the International Biathlon Union (IBU) settled the case of accused Russian biathlete, Evgeny Ustyogov (not to be confused with notable Russian cross country skier, Sergei Ustiugov). It was a decision more than ten years in the making, the conclusion of a long series of appeals, and a re-confirmation of decisions handed down by the IBU’s Anti-Doping Hearing Panel and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Abnormalities recorded in Ustygov’s Athlete Biological Passport indicated the use of a performance enhancer, ultimately resulting in disqualification, suspension, and reallocation of his medals from the 2010 and 2014 Olympic Games.

In the tennis world, current Men’s French Open finalist, Jannik Sinner, faced a doping investigation—and three month suspension—earlier this season. In March 2025, he twice tested positive for clostebol, a banned anabolic steroid. The investigation attributed that substance to an ingredient in a spray utilized by his physiotherapist, and found that Sinner bore “no fault or negligence” for those positive tests. Still, Sinner received a three month suspension . . . fortunately for Sinner, that suspension fit neatly between Grand Slam tournament events. Ironic, then, that Therese Johaug made nearly identical claims when she tested positive for a banned substance (attributed to ingredients in a lip balm provided to her by a team physio), but her suspension cost her two years, and a shot at Olympic history.

It’s always a conundrum: whom to believe? Whom to penalize? And to what degree? Even athletes who successfully defend their assertions that they were unaware of the infraction—or that they were victims of unknown ingredients in foods or supplements they ingested—have found themselves penalized. It’s kind of fair: they may have derived a performance benefit from the substance, so their successes should not be allowed to stand. It’s also kind of unfair: they never knowingly did anything wrong, never attempted to cheat the system. Still, they may find themselves with disqualifications and suspensions. And then there are those who cheated knowingly and got caught, high profile athletes like numerous Olympic champions and multiple Tour de France winners. Even in 2025, the skiing world was shocked to learn of the discovery of systematic cheating (via the altering of uniforms) undertaken by five Norwegian ski jumpers, their coaches, and numerous team officials at the FIS World Championships in Trondheim.

In the final analysis, W. C. Fields’ words have proven prophetic: these things that are worth having, it seems that they have been worth cheating for. And with another Olympic season about to begin, the stakes will be higher than ever.