Bread & Circuses #3: Pick your poison: Doping in sport used to be cool

BREAD & CIRCUSES | COLUMN | RONGOA / DRUGS

Written by Luke Fisher (he/him) | @lukefish7__ | Contributing Columnist

There’s a fine line between what is and isn’t considered doping in sport. In 1991, footballing great Diego Maradona was handed a 15-month suspension when he tested positive for cocaine after a match. And yet when I chug a V and take a 30 minute power nap before dropping an unprecedented 7.3/10 performance on a cold Wednesday night in Forrest Hill I get off scot-free.

Sport has always been about getting that extra edge over your competitors. By all means necessary. Athletes dating back to the beginning of organised competition have known this and have since tested those waters in ways that have been both spectacular, mediocre, and sometimes deadly. The word ‘doping’ dates back to the late 1800s, when people were whipping up opioid cocktails for their horses. Fast-forward, and the past several decades have shown there are no limits to what humans will put in their bodies to win a race — or finish an essay. 

The 2025 World Anti-Doping Agency’s blacklist covers hundreds of unique substances and variants. There is a never-ending arms race between those who manufacture performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to be effective and untraceable, and those who seek to regulate and control them. Researching this article made me somewhat happy about my lacklustre athletic ability and dawdling competitive spirit because… well, you’ll see. Let’s just say I’m grateful the only thing I’m forced to do against my will is pay registration fees.

Ancient Greece and the Liver King

It doesn’t take a genius to realise the Greeks were majorly juiced up. If you want a demonstration of the negative side effects of steroid use, just look at one of their male statues. Hypocritical dong jokes aside, the Greeks actually got pretty freaky with their performance enhancement techniques. Just check out this quote from ancient Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia:

“For it is the semen, when possessed of vitality, which makes us to be men, hot, well braced in limbs, well voiced, spirited, strong to think and act…But if any man be continent in the emission of semen, he is bold, daring, and strong as wild beasts as is proved from such of the athlete as are continent…Vital semen, then, contributes to health, strength, courage, and generation.”

The hormone testosterone wasn't formally identified until the 20th century, but they were on the right track. They linked the consumption of certain foods with strength, potency and virility. But instead of the needles and syringes used today, the Greeks initially settled for animal hearts and testicles, which we now know have at best a minimal effect on athletic performance. Unfortunately, this memo never got through to Liver King.

With the common aim of Olympic glory, they also tried dried figs, herbal medications, hallucinogens, and “the rear hooves of an Abyssinian ass, ground up, boiled in oil, and flavoured with rose hips and rose petals”. However, even back in the earliest Olympic Games, athletes caught cheating were banned from competing, and their names carved in stone to be shamed by the public.

Pick your poison

This PED has more of a scientific basis, but is equally loopy. Strychnine is a chemical compound that, when consumed, stimulates the central nervous system, leading to increased muscular contractions and improved endurance. It was also a common ingredient for rat poison over the 19th and 20th centuries. The first recorded instance of strychnine use was during the 1904 Olympic Marathon, the most absurd race in the history of the games.

It took place in 33 degree heat, and featured athletes coughing up blood and one being chased off the course by a stray dog. Maybe the best story from that race was Andarín Carvajal’s. The Cuban mailman gambled away all the money he’d raised to compete in the event in New Orleans, had to hitchhike over a thousand kilometres to St Louis, arriving just before the race started. He was still in formal attire and had not eaten for around 40 hours. Fast forward to the middle of the race, and in desperate need of some fuel, he raided an apple orchard. Unfortunately, the apples he ate were a bit dodgy and gave him a stomachache, so he had a power-nap under one of the trees. And after all that, in one of the greatest athletic performances of all time, he still managed to finish fourth.

But, back to the rat poison. The rodent, in this case, was American athlete Thomas Hicks. With 10km to go in the race, Hicks was really struggling. The water supply he’d been drinking from was likely contaminated, the heat was stifling, and stomach cramps were killing him. Since the invention of Powerade was still 84 years away, his handlers decided to give him the next best thing: strychnine, washed down with some egg whites. This got him back up and running for a little while, but he soon began to flounder again. The handlers briefly tried to motivate him with the news of the guy in front of him being disqualified for taking a car ride to the finish line, but verbal encouragement was no match for rat poison. This time, instead of just the egg white chaser, he followed everything down with a big old swig of brandy. This vile concoction kept him going all the way, and although he began hallucinating 2km away from the finish line, he eventually won. He had to be carried over the finish line by his support crew, legs still running in mid-air, presumably on a planet far, far away from ours.

The decidedly boring modern day

When we make the jump to the modern day, doping just isn’t as cool. Don’t get me wrong, it became far more widespread. But it stopped being rad. It is no longer about ingesting the raging spirit of a majestic beast via its cojones, or seeing how much rat poison the human body can truly handle. Rather, it is about which scientist can make the most discreet little injection, so the athlete - despite the shrinkage - can attack their urine test with confidence. This cringe-worthy quote from American weightlifter Ken Patera speaking about competing against Russian world champion Vasily Alekseyev shows how ubiquitous doping became in the latter stages of the 20th century: 

“Last year the only difference between me and him was that I couldn't afford his drug bill. Now I can. When I hit Munich next year, I'll weigh in at about 340, maybe 350. Then we'll see which are better—his steroids or mine.”

Nice one bro. 

And if you thought it couldn’t get any worse, politics got involved. From 1968 to 1980, thousands of athletes from communist East Germany were forced into doping, with some being told they were taking vitamin pills. A secret government law specified that performance-enhancing drugs had to be a part of every training regime. One East German swimmer said, “The training motto at the pool was, ‘You eat the pills, or you die.’ It was forbidden to refuse.” All that to prove to the world that communism was the way to go. And while they were eventually caught out, it happened again with Russia in the Olympics from 2014 to 2018. 

Doping opens up a wider conversation about the sports-industrial complex. In most places around the world now, professional sport is more than just a form of entertainment. It involves huge sums of money and is deeply intertwined with politics. A moment comes to mind from FIFA President Gianni Infantino in a 2022 press conference where he was attempting to defend the selection of Qatar as host city for the Football World Cup. The selection process was riddled with corruption, and the deaths of migrant workers shipped in to build the stadiums numbered in the thousands.

“Today I have very strong feelings,” he said. “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.”

Professional sport should be about glory. Connection. The underdog story. The indomitable human spirit. But as the influence of money and out-of-touch billionaires like Infantino grows — and science and technology continue to undermine the humanity that makes sport great — we are at risk of losing sight of these things. Professional competition should be about the athletes and the fans. When those two are brushed to the side, well … the game is well and truly gone.