The twists and turns of the long-running race between drug-taking athletes and boffins trying to catch them.
The idea of stimulating the body's performance with all manner of concoction is as old as mankind. The Inca chewed coca leaves to pep them up when doing strenuous work. Nordic warriors munched mushrooms before going into battle to dull the inevitable pain. Ancient Olympians chomped opium, among other things, to give them a comparative edge. It wasn't until the 1950s that such practices became frowned up.
The shift in attitudes was spurred by the emergence of modern competitive sport. Sports authorities, athletes appalled at ungentlemanly behaviour or, more cynically, those who lacked access to stimulants, cried foul. Any artificial enhancement was ゛unfair゛, they complained, and must be eradicated. At the same time, rewards for the boost that drugs can provide ballooned. Sportsmen were increasingly prepare to go to any length to outdo their competitors, and devised novel ways to foil the scientists tasked with catching cheats. An arms race began, and has continued apace ever since, with many twists and turns along the way.
The contest between athletes and scientists was sparked in 1959 when Gene Smith and Henry Beecher, at Harvard University, showed that short-distance swimmers who were given amphetamines did indeed swim faster than those who received a placebo. It was the first study to show that drugs had any real physiological effect. Others reached similar conclusions.
The performance enhancement was small： just 2%. But this was enough to tip the scales, especially in highly competitive events where a photo finish decides the winner. So in 1964 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned the use of performance - enhancing drugs in the Olympics and introduced testing to keep athletes in line. And where the IOC leads, other sports bodies follow. The Olympic games therefore provide a microcosm of the race between dopers and judges.
At the Mexico City games in 1968 the first athlete was nabbed for doping. His drug of choice was ethanol, found in alcoholic drinks and easily picked up in urine sample. Of precious little use to swimmers or sprinters, it can help a pentathlete who needs, among other things, to aim a rifle accurately. Like other so-called depressants, ethanol slow down the pulse rate and reduces muscle tremors that can make a shot go off target. Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a Swede who tried to take advantage of this was disqualified.
Various heart-control drugs have a similar calming effect, a boon to archers and shooters. But they are often not as easy to detect as ethanol. At the Munich Olympics in 1972, therefore, the IOC introduced some newfangled chemical tools： gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. Gas chromatography works by vaporising extracts of urine and passing them through a long tube, along which some constituent compounds move more quickly than others. The mass spectroscope at the end of tube then ionises the emerging substances and measures their characteristic mass-charge ratio. The result is a chemical signature that can be compared with signatures derived from urine samples spiked with known performance-enhancing drugs to see if an athlete has taken anything untoward.
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