The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement

7. Enhancements in Sports

u Chapter 7 Enhancements in Sports Listening to the critics, you would think that the use of biomedical enhancement in sports was a recent phenomenon. Before the development of synthetic steroids, you would be led to believe, sports were “natural” and “clean.” As we saw in chapter 3, nowhere was this impression created more clearly than during the 2005 congressional hearings on steroid use in major league baseball, where Jim Bunning , Republican senator from Kentucky, was contemptuous of the current career-lengthening practices that players of earlier generations did not have access to. Another witness was North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan. “Tragically,” he lamented, “what once was a ‘field of dreams’ may deteriorate into a quagmire of controlled substances.”1 But Dorgan’s “field of dreams” is a pipe dream. The history of sport is a chronicle of enhancement use. Greek athletes in the third century b.c. are reported to have taken mushrooms to enhance performance.2 Philostratos describes how Olympic athletes ate bread laced with the juice of opium poppies. Pliny the Younger (61 b.c.–112 a.d.) mentions runners who swallow a decoction made from hippuris, which may be related to ephedrine.3 Even the World Anti-Doping Agency acknowledges that Greek athletes at the ancient Olympics drank herbal beverages to give them energy.4 A. J. Higgins, who heads the medical advisory 122 the price of perfection group of the Fédération Equestre Internationale, tells of a first-century b.c. physician and pharmacologist named Pedanius Dioscorides who promoted an infusion of rosemary before exercise and reports that the ancients also used dog and sheep testicles, ginseng, hallucinogenic mushrooms, hemp, opioids, kava, plant seeds, and dried figs. “The swallowing of a stone taken from the stomach of a cockerel that had won a cock fight was said to be popular,” Higgins continues, “although eating the cockerel itself in the hope of ingesting some of the bird’s high levels of testosterone would probably have been more helpful. This same empirical aim may, at least in part, explain the penchant of some athletes for drinking urine collected from ‘strong animals.’”5 During the late nineteenth century, the substances of choice were narcotics, amphetamines , and various patent preparations.6 (A number of sources claim that cyclist Arthur Linton died in 1886 from an overdose of a stimulant called trimethyl, and call this the first fatality from doping.7 In fact, Linton died after winning the Paris-to-Bordeaux race in 1896, and his death was attributed to typhoid.) In a famous incident in 1904, a Stanley Steamer drove alongside Olympic marathoner Thomas Hicks, serving him egg whites, sponges of warm water, French brandy, and strychnine. (Hicks came in first.)8 After winning the Tour de France in 1924, Henri Pélissier displayed to journalists the cocaine, chloroform, and various pills in his medicine bag.9 Science journalist Karen Birchard claims that “amphetamines came into their own in the Berlin Olympics of 1936.”10 From a historical standpoint, in fact, what is striking is not that athletes are using enhancements but that people are objecting to it.11 There is no record of any objection to athletes’ use of biomedical enhancements before the second decade of the twentieth century. Until then, the attitude seems to have been: if something allows you to perform better, go ahead and take advantage of it. And even though the attitude toward doping in sports began to change in the late 1920s, the change was slight, and no effective measures were taken to stop it for the next 40 years. Only among horseracing enthusiasts was there opposition to doping before the 1920s. By 1912, Britain had made the doping of horses illegal , and all major countries had instituted saliva testing for drugs such as theobromine (a diuretic compound similar to caffeine and found in chocolate), caffeine, cocaine, morphine, and strychnine. When the United States in 1933 legalized parimutuel betting—which determines the amount of the winnings by the amount betted rather than by a sys- tem of fixed odds—doping became rampant and included stimulants, heroin, and local anesthetics. According to A. J. Higgins, it was estimated at the time that half of the horses racing in the United States had been given either stimulants or anesthetics.12 This led to stringent testing standards. When it came to enhancement by human athletes, the first stirrings of hostility did not appear...