1 Aug 2007
Drug Games: The International Politics of Doping and the Olympic Movement, 1960-2007 / Thomas Mitchell Hunt. - University of Texas: Austin, 2007
The widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs among elite athletes is the most important policy problem in modern Olympic history. Although several works have addressed the subject (a few of which are admittedly excellent), they have been limited either temporally or by a lack of access to archival sources of information. Based on research in both American and foreign archives, this dissertation complements earlier, path-breaking works by tracing the evolution of Olympic doping policy from 1960 to the present.
Olympic policymakers first seriously considered the subject of doping after suspicions arose that the death of Danish cyclist Knud Jensen at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games was triggered by the use of amphetamines. For most of the next decade, these officials attempted to define the doping problem and struggled to formulate a program for its solution. An international politics of doping consequently developed, under which the various bodies of the Olympic governance structure failed, due to their divergent interests and jurisdictions, to implement a coordinated plan. Until recently, administrators working at all levels of this organizational system tended to formulate doping policies with the idea of dampening the effects of public controversy. In addition, the influence of the Cold War on the Olympics exacerbated the situation, as national governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain, believing that success in the Olympic medals race was essential to their images abroad, condoned the use of ergogenic aids among elite competitors. It was not until Canadian track star Ben Johnson tested positive for an anabolic steroid after setting a new world record in the one-hundred meter sprint at the 1988 Seoul Games that a different policy direction was initiated. The involvement of national governments after the scandal led eventually to the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in November 1999. The consolidation of regulatory authority in this agency has transformed the issue of doping in the Olympics from a combined political and scientific problem to one based more appropriately on the latter.
If elite sport has developed as a “vast, loosely coordinated experiment upon the human organism,” then the efforts to regulate doping within that experimentation have been decidedly dysfunctional. Since the subject first became an issue of public concern in the 1960's, Olympic policymakers, whichever the individual organization to which they belonged, confronted doping issues on ad-hoc bases with little long-term planning; substantive measures were, as a consequence, rarely undertaken outside times of crisis. This was in part due to the diffuse governance system under which the Olympic movement operated; regulatory power over doping was divided among several levels of international and national federations, national Olympic committees, and organizing bodies for individual competitions. At the same time, failures among public and private policymakers to recognize the salience of the doping issue and to fulfill responsibilities for its effective regulation ensured that this structure remained intact for multiple decades.
To be fair, there were successes in the struggle to curtail performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics; at the same time, not every individual in the Olympic community was personally culpable for the movement’s failures. Few would argue, as an example, that Dick Pound was willing to overlook controversial subjects for individual or organizational gain. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Olympic leaders with Pound’s integrity remained far too few for much too long. During his presidency of the IOC, for instance, Avery Brundage was too enmeshed in notions of amateurism to spend much time on “insignificant” matters like doping; his successor, Lord Killanin, bumbled his John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: Free Press, 1992) way through eight years of leadership, accomplishing little; perhaps worst of all, Juan Antonio Samaranch chose to largely ignore the issue in pursuit of ever more lucrative economic rewards. Even during the last several years, those willing to take a stand against the status quo were often punished; it was no accident that Dick Pound finished third in the 2001 IOC presidential election. If one wished to dampen the prospects for success in the battle against doping, organizational decentralization, venality, and individual indifference therefore provided a potent mixture.
Even when progress was made, plans for reform were usually prepared only after the occurrence of some “focusing event” that frightened policymakers into action. This shortcoming was perhaps best articulated at a November 2000 meeting of the WADA Foundation Board by member Paul Henderson, who observed, “No good lesson was ever learnt except through the eyes of disaster.”2 Although the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics was known to occur prior to 1960, serious dialogue regarding the subject did not begin until the death of Knud Jensen in that year’s Rome Olympic Games.
While regulations against doping were gradually instituted over the next decade, the powers to enforce them remained dispersed among the various components of the movement’s governance system. Despite periodic efforts at reform, this framework was maintained until public authorities threatened to intervene after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for an anabolic steroid at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Even then, it took policymakers over a decade to implement a more integrated regime through the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in November 1999. To their credit, anti-doping authorities, freed from the problems created by the previously fragmented regulatory system with the creation of WADA and the ratification of the World Anti-Doping Code, began to plan in advance for the scientific advances that will collectively constitute the future of doping. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, for example, several conferences were held regarding the possible applications of genomics to athletic enhancement. Speaking to the anticipated benefits of this early start, WADA member Theodore Friedmann thus asserted, “There is a much greater level of awareness, and that’s the starting point. The World Anti-Doping Code even included a provision that “the use of genetic transfer technology to dramatically enhance sport performance should be prohibited as contrary to the spirit of sport even if it is not harmful.
The tragedy is that however admirable, these developments are too late to definitively “win” the war against doping in the Olympics. The fact is that we live in a performance-enhanced society. Examples of this abound: the stimulant Dexedrine was used by military pilots in the Gulf War of 1990, college students regularly take amphetamine-based psychiatric drugs in pursuit of higher grade-point averages and an increasing number of non-elderly individuals are prescribed testosterone and human growth hormone to counteract the effects of aging. In the Olympics, this “medicalized” environment has led to acceptable forms and levels of “soft doping.” Under current WADA guidelines, for example, a competitor’s testosterone to epitestosterone ratio must exceed 4.0 before a urine sample is submitted to isotopic ratio mass spectrometry.
Because this ratio far exceeds that which is ordinarily found in the human body, athletes are consequently allowed to “cheat” within arbitrarily-constructed limits.6 The genetic revolution will only make matters worse; alluding to novelist Aldous Huxley’s gloomy vision of the human future, Pound thus stated, “The drug problem is the devil we know . . . and here we are at the beginning of a brave new world.
The dilemmas presented by these prospects were perhaps best put in March 2002 by Joseph Glorioso, director of the Pittsburgh Human Gene Therapy Center, in a question that cut to the heart of the future of doping. “How do we distinguish enhancement from treatment?” he wondered. Elucidating the answer will be the central challenge for future Olympic policymakers.
