WADA defines doping as banned drugs plus rule breaches
In elite sport, doping means using banned performance-enhancing drugs to cheat, as framed in WADA's World Anti-Doping Code. Ancient chariot racers drank herbal mixes; 1807 walker Abraham Wood used laudanum to stay awake twenty-four hours. Pedestrian and cycling spectacles later scaled the temptation.
Authorities justify bans on three grounds: health risks, fair competition and the example drug-free sport sets for the public. Performance diets are ancient. Norse legend has berserkers drinking a brew, probably made from Amanita muscaria mushrooms, that brought strength at the risk of madness, and the Spartan Charmis, who won the Olympic sprint in 668 BC, trained on dried figs.
Britain's walking races grew to 840 kilometres at the Agricultural Hall in Islington by 1878, drawing 20,000 spectators a day, and promoters soon staged six-day bicycle races that spread to America. Bigger gates meant bigger prizes and more reason to keep riders awake. Helpers known as soigneurs dosed them with nitroglycerine and cocaine mixtures; exhausted riders hallucinated, and the American champion Major Taylor quit a New York race claiming a man with a knife was chasing him.
In Vienna in 1954, US weightlifting physician John Ziegler learned the Soviet team was using testosterone. He tested it on himself and a few lifters, then worked with Ciba on the oral steroid methandrostenolone, sold from 1960 as Dianabol. That year Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen collapsed and died in an Olympic road race with amphetamines in his system. Olympic shot putters grew 14 percent heavier between 1956 and 1972, and one US study of throwers could not find enough steroid-free athletes to compare.
Over 30 percent of athletes at the 2011 world championships admitted using banned substances, and a WADA-commissioned study put the real figure at 44 percent, yet only 0.5 percent of those tested were caught. Russia's entire track and field team was barred from the 2016 Olympics over state-backed doping. Steroids are the most common banned substance and stimulants second, though caffeine has been permitted since 2004.
Source: Doping in sport
