Making Sense of Sport

 Posting 1: Has 'drug use' ever been a problem in Australian sport?

We often hear - especially in the lead up to big international events like the 2024 Paris Olympics, that Australian athletes have never cheated. Apparently, it is not part of our sporting ethos, where taking part and doing one's best is all that matters. It only it was true. Just under 40 years ago two fascinating government-sponsored enquiries into the use of performance enhancing drugs in sport told a different story. They were:

Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts (SSCERA) Drugs in Sport: Interim Report, (Australian Government, 1988)

Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts (SSCERA) Drugs in Sport: Second Report, Australian Government, 1989).

Let's begin our discussion by reminding ourselves that the use of drugs and other medicinal concoctions to enhance athletic performance go back a long time. Dried figs were used to secure a winning edge in the Ancient Olympic games, while Ancient Egyptians used potions containing ground horse's hooves to improve performance. In the nineteenth century caffeine, cocaine, and strychnine were used by European endurance cyclists, swimmers, and runners. Although alcohol had always been part of sporting club cultures since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was only occasionally used to improve performance, mainly because it didn’t. One of the catalysts for the increase in drug use is sport was the production of amphetamines and related stimulants in the 1940s. They were initially used to help soldiers stay awake during battle, but after WWII they were used by truck drivers and shift workers to stay awake at night. It was sometimes used by sportspeople to ‘pep’ up their energy levels.

The other significant pharmacological advance occurred the 1950s when synthetic testosterone was created. It was adapted to sports after John Zeigler, a prominent American sport physician, assisted the CIBA pharmaceutical company to produce Dianabol, which became a favourite steroid amongst the strength-athlete and weightlifting communities. By the 1960s drug companies had developed growth hormones and anabolic steroids. While primarily for use in hospitals and medical clinics, they quickly found their way into locker-rooms and sport training centres around the world. In addition, mood altering drugs, and in particular, marihuana became a feature of the counterculture that swamped most industrial nations in the 1970s. Drug taking consequently became normal practice, and many of the social and moral barriers to their consumption were removed.

Sport was quick to see the performance benefits of steroid use, and the Soviet Union and East Germany provided pharmaceutical support for their elite Olympic athletes during the 1970s. The amazing success of the East German team at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games was mainly the result of the skills of their chemists. Steroid use spread to commercialised sports where strength was important, and the rewards for achieving on-field success were high. At the same time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its Medical Commission, which first compiled a list of banned substances 1967, became aware of these developments, and ramped-up their drug testing program.

By the end of the 1970s the conditions for the rapid diffusion of drug use in sport were in place. On one hand the pharmaceutical industry had developed a product-line of steroid-based drugs that could be applied to sport by improving athlete rehabilitation, making them faster, and building their strength. On the other hand, the sports world itself had become more sophisticated. First, governments were using sport to build national identity through greater funding. Second, amateur competitions were increasingly replaced by professional sport leagues and events where players had a lot to gain materially from improving their athletic performance. According to one critic the amateur ideals of ‘sport as an end in itself’, self-reliance, and fair play, had been overwhelmed by instrumental reasoning and the goal of winning. Drug-use was an inevitable outcome. Finally, sport’s expanding revenue streams enabled teams and clubs to secure the services of physicians, chemists, dieticians, physiotherapists and trainers as a means of improving athlete performance. Sport had not only become politicised and commercialised, but also medicalised.

So, how did Australian sport respond to these developments? The first thing to be said is that the Australian sports community had always smugly seen itself as drug free. It had, though, conveniently forgotten about the endemic use of alcohol, but that is another matter. The belief that Australian athletes were clean was used to explain our poor performances at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1972.

The myth that Australian athletes were drug free was exploded in the 1980s, which ironically coincided with the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in 1981. While the primary role of the AIS was to enhance our international performances in sport through the application of better science, it also provided fertile ground for a drug culture to emerge. The other irony was that the catalyst for the AIS was the superior performances of athletes from communist Europe, most of whom were primed with drugs.

The AIS was officially opened by Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s Prime Minister, who proclaimed that it “would bring together Australia’s most talented youngster guided by the best coaches that can be found”. In addition to hiring a raft of well credentialed coaches the Commonwealth Government also established the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) in 1984. The ASC not only funded programs to help athletes improve their levels of performance, but also put in place an anti-drugs program that complemented the IOC’s regime of testing, sanctions and education.

As it turned out some of these well-credentialed coaches were also prepared to recommended drugs as an aid to performance.

In November 1987 the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (ABC) Four Corners program examined the use of anabolic steroids in sport. While most of the program focused on body-building, it also had a look at weightlifters and track and field athletes. In each case it was alleged that coaches were supplying anabolic steroids to athletes on AIS scholarships. In the following year the steroids-and-sport-performance debate was inflamed when the Seoul 100 metres gold medallist, Ben Johnson was found to have taken illegal drugs, and was stripped of his medal.

This was all too much for the Australian Government, which had been funding sport on the assumption that it would not contravene the IOC’s anti-doping code, and in 1988 with the backing of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC), instructed the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts to undertake an inquiry into the drugs-in-sport problem.

The Standing Committee’s Interim Report found that a number of athletes had taken steroids regularly during the 1980s, and cited Gael Martin, who was a discuss thrower and shot putter, and Sue Howland, who was a javelin thrower, as examples. Both athletes had tested positive for an anabolic steroid. Martin, who won bronze medal for discus throwing at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, estimated that 30% of the AIS track and field team were using steroids. In addition, five weightlifters from the AIS admitted to having used anabolic steroids. They also claimed that every weightlifter on an AIS scholarship was “using steroids at peak training times”. Coaches were also implicated. Howland and Martin alleged that Merv Kemp, a field event coach had given athletes tablets, and injected them with steroids at a training camp in Italy in 1984. Martin knew it was a steroid because it “was the same stuff I was getting”. Kemp subsequently denied the allegation. The Interim Report concluded that the Commonwealth Government should immediately establish an authority to carry out sports drug testing, and Graham Richardson, the Minister for Sport, foreshadowed the establishment of the Australian Sports Drug Agency (ASDA).

The Standing Committee’s Second Report confirmed the scope of the drugs-in-sport problem and gave special attention to weightlifting and its culture of steroid use. Both coaches and athletes were implicated. Lyn Jones, the head weightlifting coach at the AIS, admitted that a number of young weightlifters at the Institute had taken drugs. The Standing Committee found that Jones had also supplied AIS athletes with steroids imported from overseas. In fact, steroid use in weightlifting was endemic, with former weightlifter turned coach, Nigel Martin claiming that at least one club [it was hinted that it was, in fact, the Hawthorn Weightlifting Club] provided young weightlifters with an envelope full of pills to take to assist their training program. 

Notwithstanding protests from AIS officials that the whole drug abuse problem was exaggerated, the Commonwealth Government legislated for the establishment of ASDA and gave it the power to expand the testing regime, undertake research into improved testing for banned substances, and educate athletes about ethics, health problems and sanctions associated with drug use in sport.

So, four decades later, can we safely say that the drugs in sport problem have been resolved, and that sport's reputation for fairness and honesty has been retained? 

 The answer will be provided in subsequent postings.

Bob Stewart

2 September 2024.