ATHLETES WHO RISK DEATH FOR GLORY

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32975, 22 July 1972, Page 4

ATHLETES WHO RISK DEATH FOR GLORY

Never have the Olympic organisers been s o determined to clamp down on the athletes who are taking drugs to improve perform ances . . .

Once, just being considered good enough to be picked for the Olympic Games was glory enough. Not any longer. Now national prestige is at stake—and that means victory at any price. So great is the pressure that more and more athletes are resorting to pep pills and stimulants—in spite of the enormous risks to their health. Some have been crippled for life, others blinded. And some have even died.

Athletes have been killed, blinded, and crippled for life in their search for ways to make themselves into the kind of supermen and women who carry away the prizes, and the glory’, in the modern Olympic Games. Today, so great is the pressure on the athlete to do well —both for himself and his country—that outstanding natural ability is sometimes just not enough. This is why, according to the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission, the use of pep drugs and stimulants among Olympic athletes ha's grown a hundredfold since the Rome Olympics in 1960.

So serious has the situation become that the 1.0.C.’s medical commission has already warned of an unprecedented and merciless clamp-down on every form of dope-taking at the forthcoming Munich Olympics. If a culprit is discovered, the entire national team in that sport will be disqualified. “There are some people who will go to any lengths —even risk death—to win Olympic glory for their country,” says Professor Arnold Beckett, Britain’s representative in the team which will supervise the dope tests at Munich.

“But we are determined that the Olympics will not degenerate into the equivalent of the ancient Rome games where athletes laid down their lives for their country.

“We are not threatening athletes, their doctors or their trainers. We are promising them. If they are thinking about using drugs to win, they can forget about it. They will certainly be discovered.” It was only in 1960 that the 1.0. C. got around to recognising how serious the Olympic dope problem had become. They began their investigations after a Danish cyclist collapsed during the road team trial, and were appalled at what they found. For instance, it was estimated that around 60 per cent of cyclists were taking some form of stimulant. Next came track athletes, soccer players, boxers, oarsmen, and squash and badminton players. Field athletes, weightlifters and wrestlers were found to take hormone drugs for body-building, while sedatives and psychotherapeutic drugs steadied down archers pentathlon competitors and rifle marksmen. During the next two Olympics, the use of pep drugs increased dramatically, in spite of 1.0. C. warnings. The search for gold had become such a high pressure business that ath-

letes seemingly disregarded all personal safety in their efforts to get to the winner’s rostrum. The outstanding Italian cyclist, Eugene Tamburlini, who took a drug before an event, was struck blind and later committed suicide. The British cycle ace. Tommy Simpson, died during the mountain stage of the 1967 Tour de France, probably from a combination of altitude and pep drugs. Yet that did not stop the world’s cyclists from continuing to find superhuman strength and endurance from the use of drugs and, only months after Simpson’s death, France’s most famous cyclist, Jacques Anquetil, was barred from racing for publicly defending the use of dope. Led by Sir Arthur Porritt, who later became Gov-ernor-General of New Zealand, the Olympic Committee cracked down sharply on all forms of drugs taken by sportsmen and produced a long list of banned products. But just what is a drug? Dr Neil Phillips, doctor to England’s World Cup soccer squad, defines it as the introduction of a foreign substance not normally present in the body, or a substance given in excess to improve performance. Some of the most hazardous—and still most widely used—are the hormone drugs, like anabolic steroids derived from sex hormones, which enable athletes to put on weight and muscle at astonishing speed. This is the crying need of hammer-throwers and

shot-putters, who use from five to 10 times the prescribed medical dose to put on anything from 30 to 70 pounds in a year. The treatment can also cause impotence, but many athletes seem willing to pay that price. At least four of the United States field events team at the Mexico Olympics admitted having used hormone drugs.

The problem is that it is not always easy for Olympic medical teams to catch the drugged athletes, in spite of Professor Beckett’s claim that “we can now detect any per-formance-improving drug.” To prove that an athlete has been taking hormone drugs involves complicated bio-chemical tests, and

many medical experts argue that some natural metabolic disorders can be confused with the effects of drugtaking. If that happened, a team would be in danger of being disqualified because of some tiny error on the part of a bio-chemist sitting at his microscope.

Even a tot of whisky—which stimulates and then sedates—taken by a longdistance runner before a race, is breaking the Olympic law. Hypnosis, too. is banned, ever since a Russion athlete was claimed to have been helped by it in the 5000 metres finals in Rome. Yet it is no secret that nations who set great store by Olympic success, notably America and Russia, are spending enormous amounts of money on medical research to produce drugs which will aid athletes without breaking the Olympic rules. Such a project is “slow sodium.” a new type of salt tablet, used by England’s World Cup team in Mexico, and the apparent answer to cramp and heat exhaustion. Marathon runners and cyclists, who have tried slow sodium. report astonishing results. Says one: “We’re not quite sure what it does for us, but if you think you’ve got something which your opponents haven’t ’ got, it keeps you going.”

What slow sodium does is to replace salt lost during violent activity, and its supporters claim that it doesn’t violate the Olympic drug laws. But already some countries have objected. The Polish soccer club, Gornik Zabrze, for example, ac-

cused Manchester City of "taking dope" when thev beat them in the European Cup contest. Some experts believe it’s the boredom and tension of waiting for the Olympics to start that makes many of the athletes turn to drugs. Others say that nations make such impossible demands on their representatives at the Games that pep-drugs hate become a way of life But the Olympic Committee’s medical commission has no sympathy. In a recent report, it hit out at “unethical sports doctors, unscrupulous officials and stupid athletes” and warned: “At Munich, any medal-winner or any runnerup can expect to be tested And if they have taken drugs, they will be disqualified.” Yet coaches and competitors reply that, while the pressure on Olympic athletes goes on increasing —as it has since the war—the temptation to help nature with the use of drugs will increase too. The American national athletics coach, Wilbur Canyon, says: “An Olympic medal has now become an international propaganda weapon. If it takes drugs to win it, then a country is going to see that its athletes get the best. “The day of the Olympics as a proper sporting event is over—l’d say for good . .

This is the second of three articles by BRYAN EGAN on modern Olympic competition.

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