The pill, capsule, vial and needle have become fixtures of the locker room as athletes increasingly turn to drugs in the hope of improving performances. This trend—one that poses a major threat to U.S. sport even though the Establishment either ignores or hushes up the issue—is explored here in Part I of a series
by Bil Gilbert
Among the less startling assertions one could make today would be that we live in a drug culture. The vast majority of us gobble an aspirin here, gulp an antibiotic there, whiff a decongestant now or a few milligrams of nicotine then. We take a little opiate in our cough syrup, a jab of Novocain from the dentist, caffeine to start the day, alcohol to mellow it and a sedative to blank it out at bedtime. However, after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us. In spite of being—for the most part—young, healthy and active specimens, they take an extraordinary variety and quantity of drugs (see cover). They take them for dubious purposes, they take them in a situation of debatable morality, they take them under conditions that range from dangerously experimental to hazardous to fatal. The use of drugs—legal drugs—by athletes is far from new, but the increase in drug usage in the last 10 years is startling. It could, indeed, menace the tradition and structure of sport itself.
To begin, consider some examples of the role drugs have come to play in sport:
"A few pills—I take all kinds—and the pain's gone," says Dennis McLain of the Detroit Tigers. McLain also takes shots, or at least took a shot of cortisone and Xylocaine (anti-inflammant and painkiller) in his throwing shoulder prior to the sixth game of the 1968 World Series—the only game he won in three tries. In the same Series, which at times seemed to be a matchup between Detroit and St. Louis druggists, Cardinal Bob Gibson was gobbling muscle-relaxing pills, trying chemically to keep his arm loose. The Tigers' Series hero, Mickey Lolich, was on antibiotics.
?"We occasionally use Dexamyl and Dexedrine [amphetamines].... We also use barbiturates, Seconal, Tuinal, Nembutal.... We also use some anti-depressants, Triavil, Tofranil, Valium.... But I don't think the use of drugs is as prevalent in the Midwest as it is on the East and West coasts," said Dr. I. C. Middleman, who, until his death last September, was team surgeon for the St. Louis baseball Cardinals
?After suffering a shoulder injury during the second quarter of the 1969 Sugar Bowl game, Arkansas Quarterback Bill Montgomery went to the sidelines, got a needleful of painkiller in the joint and came back to complete 11 passes and beat Georgia 'The shot helped," said Montgomery "My shoulder didn't hurt bad until the shot began to wear off in the fourth quarter."
?"Give me two sleeping pills," said Los Angeles Laker star Jerry West to his trainer following the first game of the 1969 NBA championships in which West scored 53 points against the Boston Celtics.
?On Oct. 24, 1968 in Grenoble, France, Jean-Louis Quadri, 18, a soccer player, dribbled toward the opposing goal. However, before he could get off his shot he collapsed on the field. He was dead on arrival at the Grenoble hospital. An autopsy indicated he was heavily drugged with amphetamines (pep pills). On Nov. 3, 1968, also in Grenoble, 23-year-old Yves Mottin was the surprise winner of a regional cross-country bicycle race. Two days later he died, and again amphetamines were a contributory factor. On Feb. 5, 1969 two French cyclists, Paul Barnay and Michel Fayolle, were indicted in a Grenoble court where they admitted having furnished Mottin with the fatal drugs, which they had smuggled into France from Italy.
?Amphetamines were among the drugs banned for use by athletes in the 1968 Olympic Games, and for which post-event testing was conducted. A U.S. weight lifter, who admitted most of his colleagues took a few amphetamines before competing in order to get that extra little lift, was asked how the Olympic ban affected performance "What ban?" he asked blandly "Everyone used a new one from West Germany. They couldn't pick it up in the test they were using. When they get a test for that one, we'll find something else. It's like cops and robbers."
?"Are anabolic steroids [a male hormone derivative that supposedly makes users bigger and stronger than they could otherwise be] widely used by Olympic weight men?" rhetorically asks Dave Maggard, who finished fifth in the shotput at Mexico and is now the University of California track coach. "Let me put it this way. If they had come into the village the day before competition and said we have just found a new test that will catch anyone who has used steroids, you would have had an awful lot of people dropping out of events because of instant muscle pulls."
?Dr. H. Kay Dooley, director of the Wood Memorial Clinic in Pomona, Calif., is well known among athletes as one of the few physicians who openly endorse use of anabolic steroids. "I don't think it is possible for a weight man to compete internationally without using anabolic steroids," says Dr Dooley. "All the weight men on the Olympic team had to take steroids. Otherwise they would not have been in the running" Dr. Dooley was one of the physicians in charge of medical services at South Lake Tahoe, the 1968 U.S. Olympic high-altitude training camp. "I did not give steroids at Tahoe," says the California physician, "but I also did not inquire what the boys were doing on their own. I did not want to be forced into a position of having to report them for use of a banned drug. A physician involved in sports must keep the respect and confidence of the athletes with whom he is working."
?On Sept. 13, 1968, Mike R. Breckon, manager of the Canadian national cycling team then preparing to race in Greece, gave team members a memo telling them how and when to take two drugs that were supplied in a separate packet. Breckon closed his instructions with the remark, "You will no doubt note that very small amounts of strychnine are contained in both these preparations. Don't get the wrong idea that the substance is poisonous.... It is on the forbidden list of substances in the CCA [Canadian Cycling Association] rules concerning the use of stimulants, but as you will not be taking it during the race and it is being administered to you under prescription by a doctor, there is no problem."
?"It is not unusual for an athlete to carry his own little kit with hypodermic syringes. Athletes have learned to inject themselves," says Harold Connolly, U.S. Olympic hammer thrower. "Some track athletes," says Russ Hodge, a U.S. decathlon man, "spend $30 or $40 a month on pills, steroids and food supplements."
?Four years ago George Richey, a tennis pro and father of tennis internationalist Cliff Richey, withdrew his son (or got him fired) from the U.S. Davis Cup team because, among other things, Cup Captain George MacCall had wanted to treat young Cliff's sore thumb with a drug called DMSO. DMSO was at that time widely used. It was believed to be a wonder cure for every athletic ailment from cauliflower ear to tennis thumb. A wonder cure it wasn't. In November 1965, the Food and Drug Administration restricted the use of DMSO to controlled clinical testing on the grounds that 1) its use had gotten out of hand, 2) its effectiveness was questionable and 3) its possible dangers had not been determined.
Such a collection of pharmaceutical vignettes can be expanded at will, but while the amount and kinds of drugs used in sports are impressive, the important difference between athletic and nonathletic drug use comes down to a matter of motive. An athlete takes—or is given by his supervisors, medical and otherwise—many drugs that he would not take or be given if he were not an athlete. And the rationale for much athletic drug use is unique, for the drugs are not taken either with the intention or effect of improving or maintaining health, or to achieve a pleasurable sensation, but rather because the athlete or those around him believe he will perform better drugged than undrugged.
For example, the family of hormonal drugs, which are widely known in athletic circles as anabolic steroids, were developed as restorative aids for patients seriously debilitated by age, accident, major surgery or other infirmities. As with any drug, there are risks attendant with their use—in this case, disruption of certain glandular functions, particularly the sexual. However, a physician may reasonably prescribe anabolic steroids to an emaciated 70-year-old man on the assumption that if the drug helps add 10 pounds to his wasted body this advantage will outweigh the risk of decreased sperm production, testicular atrophy or prostate discomfort. On the other hand, there is no conventional medical reason for a healthy 23-year-old, 240-pound shotputter to use the drug. But many do, because they believe the drug will make them bigger and stronger than they are and because they believe they cannot become national or world-class competitors without it. It is their motivation that makes athletic anabolic steroid users unique.
Another example of the same general phenomenon occurs in the case of the broken-legged hockey player. Midway through the sixth game of the 1964 Stanley Cup finals against Detroit, Bobby Baun, then of the Toronto Maple Leafs, was hit on the leg by the puck and carried from the rink on a stretcher. In the training room he received an injection of Novocain. His leg was taped, he returned to play, and he scored the winning goal in overtime. The next day it was determined Baun had a cracked right fibula. Nonetheless, he was shot with painkiller and willingly, probably eagerly, took his regular turn on the ice the following day.
Numbing a broken leg and sending the patient out to play hockey is not a treatment any physician would follow with a nonathlete. It may not cause complications, but the procedure has no known therapeutic value. It is not conceived as a method of speeding up or improving the knitting of bone. The only motive was to enable a man to play a game that he could not otherwise have played.
There are abundant rumors—the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world—about strung-out quarterbacks, hopped-up pitchers, slowed-down middleweights, convulsed half-milers and doped-to-death wrestlers. Nevertheless, it is the question of motive and morality that constitutes the crux of the athletic drug problem. Even if none of the gossip could be reduced to provable fact, there remains ample evidence that drug use constitutes a significant dilemma, not so much for individual athletes as for sport in general. One reason is that the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest? Does it matter, as appreciators of sport have so long and piously claimed it does, that games be played in an atmosphere of virtue; even righteousness? If not, what is the social utility of games—why play them at all? Drug usage, even more than speculation about bribery, college recruiting, spit-balls or TV commercials, raises such sticky questions about the fundamentals of sport that one can understand the instinctive reaction of the athletic Establishments: when it comes to drugs, they ignore, dismiss, deny.
"Somebody should speak out on this subject, and speak out strongly," says Dr. Robert Kerlan, until recently the physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers as well as for a number of individual athletes in all sports. "I'm not a therapeutic nihilist," says Kerlan "Situations arise where there are valid medical reasons for prescribing drugs for athletes. There are special occupational health problems in some sports. However, the excessive and secretive use of drugs is likely to become a major athletic scandal, one that will shake public confidence in many sports just as the gambling scandal tarnished the reputation of basketball. The essence of sports is matching the natural ability of men. When you start using drugs, money or anything else surreptitiously to gain an unnatural advantage, you have corrupted the purpose of sports as well as the individuals involved in the practice."
The view of Dr. Dooley is quite different from that of Dr. Kerlan. In fact, the two men in many ways represent the opposite poles of medical and metaphysical opinion regarding drug use in sports. Nevertheless, both the Los Angeles area physicians share the common belief that this is a serious matter and one that should be aired thoroughly in public.
Dr. Dooley is a wiry, excitable, even a pugnacious man, and also a very busy one. His Wood Memorial Clinic is usually crowded with halt, lame and worried athletes who have come for treatment, information or reassurance. He treats professional, college, high school and even grade school athletes. The majority come from the Los Angeles area, but not a few are from other parts of the country, Dooley perhaps being better known among participants than physicians.
"I don't pretend to be a researcher or a scientist," says Dooley. "I'm a practicing physician who is interested in athletes. A lot of physicians are stuffed shirts when it comes to sports. Athletes do want to perform better, that is what it is all about. If I know of something which may improve performance, a training or rehabilitation technique, a drug that is legal and which I don't believe involves any serious health risk, I see no reason not to make it available to an athlete. I can't see any ethical difference between giving a drug to improve performance and wrapping an ankle or handing out a salt pill for the same purpose. Athletes hear about these things and they are going to get them one way or another."
Between the opposed views of the two West Coast doctors—Dr. Kerlan's that drug abuse constitutes a growing athletic crisis and Dr. Dooley's that the use of drugs is the sporting wave of the future—there are all shades of opinion and all kinds of fancy hedging and dodging. But there is also one thing that is agreed upon—a greater quantity and variety of drugs are being used now than were used a generation, a decade or even a year ago.
Setting aside ethical considerations for the moment, there are obvious reasons why athletes should use so many drugs. The most obvious is that there are more drugs available these days for everyone than ever before. Furthermore, we have all been sold on the efficacy of drugs. We believe that the overflowing pharmacopoeia is one of the unquestioned triumphs of the age. We have been sold on drugs empirically because we have tried them and enjoy the results. We have been sold by countless magazine and newspaper stories about wonder drugs—many of which later turned out to be less than wondrous—by massive pro-drug propaganda campaigns mounted by pharmaceutical manufacturers, by TV actors dressed in doctors' coats and by real doctors, many of whom are very quick with the prescription pad. Generally, we have accepted rather uncritically the central message of this persuasive pitch—drugs are good for you. These days it is a cultural reflex to reach for a vial, an atomizer, a capsule or a needle if you suffer from fever, chills, aches, pains, nausea, nasal congestion, irritability, the doldrums, sluggishness, body odor, obesity, emaciation, too many kids, not enough kids, nagging backache or tired blood.
It would be surprising if athletes were not influenced by the same trends and tendencies that have the rest of us so high on drugs. A Pepper Martin, if plunked in the ribs by a Schoolboy Rowe fastball in 1934, would have trotted down to first base without doing anything about his injury because 1) there was nothing he or anyone else knew to do about it, and 2) he would have thought it a little sissified to have taken medicine for a bruise. In 1969 when a hitter catches one in the side, the game is likely to be stopped while he is sprayed with ethyl chloride to freeze the area, takes an enzyme or (if his medical attendant has come by some on the black market) has some DMSO slathered on the bruise. If he is a particularly sensitive jock he might even take a sedative or a painkilling pill. All this is done, and even demanded, because such aids are available and the consensus is that it is the smart, scientific, modern thing to use them.
On the other hand, if you fell down the front steps and bruised your ribs, you would not use ethyl chloride, an enzyme or DMSO. Athletes do because they have far more access to drugs than most of us. They do not have to stand around in waiting rooms, at pharmacy counters or on street corners for their fixes. Drugs are brought to them, and usually provided free of charge. The athlete gets free professional advice from physicians and assisting trainers as to what drugs to take, and when and how. Of all vocational groups, athletes are probably under the closest medical supervision. While physicians and trainers will often bridle at the suggestion (drug has become a four-letter word for them as well as others), the general pattern seems to be that the more closely one is associated with the medical profession the larger one's drug consumption is likely to be. Increasingly a major role of athletic medicine men is to keep the athletic Establishment informed about what drugs can be used to what advantage, and to serve as drug dispensers. Most drugs—good and bad, safe and risky, effective and ineffective, legal and illegal—used by athletes are supplied directly by physicians or indirectly by physicians through trainers. If drug usage in sport is a developing scandal, then it is a scandal that involves the medical Establishment as well as the sporting one.
"Exuberance, our own exuberance, is something we physicians in sports have to guard against," says Dr John Finley, a team physician for the Detroit Red Wings. "Most of us work with teams as sort of a labor of love, because we are fans. I know I am. I root hard for the Wings. I'm trying to think of what I can do to help them win. Maybe there is a drug that will help, I try to watch myself, not let my emotions influence my medical judgment, but it is something to keep in mind."
"I obviously don't care to be quoted," says a New York physician close to the sporting scene. "However, as a generality, team physicians tend to be men of action, not scholarly, speculative types. They are interested in immediate problems: making somebody strong, relaxed, mean or quick and in getting a player back in the game as soon as possible. If somebody tells them there is a drug that might do the trick, they are apt to try it They are not likely to wait around for a double-blind control study to find out if the drug is effective or what it will do to the liver three years later They are interested in today."
"Quackery. That is the bane of sports medicine," says Dr Daniel F. Hanley of Bowdoin College, Me., who has been a physician for three U.S. Olympic teams. "We've rid ourselves of some of the worst, but there are still too many people handing out get-good-quick pills, touting machines that send out blue sparks and make big muscles or advising athletes to drink superduper seaweed extracts. There is a time and place for certain drugs in sports, but each situation has to be evaluated individually. For example, I was with the Pan American team in 1967. One of our wrestlers, Wayne Baughman, a middleweight, severely pulled a muscle in his chest during a semifinal bout, which he won. He was in a lot of pain, virtually incapacitated. Before the finals I injected Novocain and taped him, and he won the gold medal. I am normally opposed to this type of treatment. I would never use it in high school or college competition. But this was a special case. The injury did not involve a weight-bearing area, such as a knee or ankle There was little risk of aggravating the injury. And Baughman was a grown man competing for an international gold medal, an opportunity he might never have again. You balance risk against reward."
"Could he have wrestled without the shot?"
"No, he could hardly stand up," recalled Dr. Hanley.
"Sure, you can defend that," says Joe Kuczo, veteran head trainer of the Washington Redskins and Georgetown University, upon being told of the Baughman incident. "You do things in the big game you might not do otherwise. But the catch is that everything is getting to be a big game. The one you win or lose in September is just as important as the one in November. A pro football training camp used to be a fairly relaxed place. Now they are banging a week after they get there. What goes on in July or August is real important to a rookie trying to make the team or to an older fellow struggling to last one more year. The coaches get worked up to the point that it is a life or death matter whether Joe Zilch is ready for a Tuesday practice," says Kuczo.
While his own exuberance or ignorance may cause a physician to recommend or permit questionable drug practices, he is by and large immune from outside pressures in the matter. An obvious reason is that most team physicians are not financially dependent upon their sports medicine practice-Therefore, short of withdrawing his complimentary passes, there is not much leverage a player, a coach or even an owner can exert on a physician to give, say, Benzedrine if he doesn't want to. But the situation with trainers is quite different. They are full-time employees of the club and usually paid less than the lowest-salaried player or coach. They lack a physician's authority and status. They are with athletes and coaches every day, all day, while physicians are not. They have, or are thought to have, the keys to the drug cupboard. For most physicians the problem of ethical drug use is an academic one, like that of virtue in a nunnery, their principles never being seriously challenged. Trainers, on the other hand, work in the athletic streets, and they are frequently tested
"I know of a case," says Gene Donnelly, trainer for the Anaheim ( Calif.) High School athletic department, "where a coach came to his trainer with Novocain and a needle. He had this hotshot halfback, a high school kid, with a real bad ankle. The coach did not have guts enough to ask the doc to give the shot, but he wanted the trainer to stick a needle in that ankle. The kid could really have been hurt, it was that bad. He might have been finished for good in sports."
"And what did the trainer do?"
"In that case," says Donnelly, "he told the coach to go to hell. He said he didn't need any job that bad,"
Not so long ago a trainer for a large, athletically prestigious university quit or was fired, depending upon who is telling the story off the record. The trainer's version is that a new football coach coming to the institution brought along with assistants and playbooks a contraband supply of DMSO. The trainer was not consulted or informed about the drug. The coach simply administered it himself. By and by, the trainer was looking for a new job.
"I had this kook who coaches or does something with a girls' track club come up to me," says a West Coast trainer. "He's got these kids—grade school and high school girls—running in little two-bit AAU meets. He wants to see if I can get him Benzedrine. Can you believe it? I told him if I had a daughter I'd punch him in the mouth. Maybe I should have anyway."
An example of how athletic pressure, ambition or maybe just ignorance at a sub-medical level can result in what charitably can be called dubious drug practices occurred a few years ago at the training camp of the San Diego Chargers. The story was told by Dave Kocourek, now an offensive end for the Oakland Raiders, but then a member of the Charger team.
"I guess this anabolic steroid business must have started on the Chargers around 1963 or right in there somewhere. One guy I can remember who got involved was Howard Kindig. He came to us as a highly touted center and linebacker from Los Angeles State. He was long and lean and very quick, and they wanted to put weight on him, so in addition to using the weight program run by our weight coach, Alvin Roy, they started pumping him full of Dianabol [a popular anabolic steroid], and sure enough he gained about 30 pounds.
"They were also passing out the stuff to the rest of us. They called it just 'pink pills.' We started taking it as a matter of course, but I wasn't too keen on the idea because I've never been much for this sort of thing—even the weight program. But, since I was the player representative, one day I asked Alvin and Sid Gillman, our coach, if the team physician had okayed these pills. They gave me sort of a vague answer. I don't remember what the answer was, but I do remember that it didn't satisfy me. As it happened, I lived next door to a physician and I asked him about anabolic steroids.
"The doctor told me, 'Listen, Dave, I don't think these things were intended for people who do the kind of work you people do. I think they were made for Milquetoast-type guys, people who sit in chairs all day long and never get a chance to build any healthy muscular tissue.'
"I told the other guys this and a lot of them quit taking them. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't ever any great big deal, or any cause for rebellion or mutiny. But a lot of the fellows just started throwing them away."
Kindig says he was still a student at Los Angeles State when the Chargers gave him Dianabol. He took the pills until his own doctor advised him that they might be dangerous.
"I didn't take them regularly," says Kindig, "but some other Chargers were taking them; Earl Faison and Ron Mix, I remember."
The hassle in the Chargers' camp might be viewed as an example of innocent athletes resisting the advances of higher-up drug pushers, but such situations are rare. Generally, as Dr. Dooley says, modern athletes know a lot about drugs, or at least have a lot of opinions about them, and are willing to experiment with drugs about which no one knows very much. There are probably as many cases of athletes demanding drugs from trainers and physicians as physicians and trainers ordering athletes to take them.
The whole matter has been succinctly summarized by Hal Connolly, a veteran of four U.S. Olympic teams.
"My experience," says Connolly, "tells me that an athlete will use any aid to improve his performance short of killing himself."
Information about new drugs for athletics, new athletic uses for old drugs and where to get and how to use exotic pills and shots, flows into the sports world from above, from medical meetings and publications, as a result of shop-talk between coaches, trainers and physicians and because drug men are actively pushing their preparations. However, it also wells up from below, because there is an athletic communications network of sorts that connects the locker rooms of the world.
While no sport has a monopoly on drug use or curiosity about drugs, in this country weight lifters and trackmen seem to be natural, eager couriers for information about get big, well, fast or mean pills and shots. There are several reasons for this. Trackmen and weight lifters compete in individual sports. They are among the most introspective of athletes, figuratively spending a lot of time watching their navels and literally watching their weight, muscle tone, respiration, pulse, bruises, strains, aches and psyches. Therefore, they tend to be especially susceptible to any suggestion that there may be some secret aid—animal, vegetable or mineral—that will jazz up their vital functions. In addition, they are cosmopolitan, competing all over the world, and thus able to trade more inside dope, so to speak, than stay-at-home football and baseball players can.
The case history of the anabolic steroids, drugs that 10 years ago were almost unknown to American athletes but now are used and/or gossiped about in virtually every sport, serves as a classic example of how drug fads spread. By his own account, the anabolic steroid pioneer in the U.S. sports world was Dr. John Ziegler, an Olney, Md. physician. In 1960, after hearing that Russian athletes were using hormones to "bulk up," Ziegler, in cooperation with the Ciba Pharmaceutical Company (the maker of Dianabol) began giving these drugs to weight lifters at the York (Pa.) Barbell Club. Dr. Ziegler eventually became concerned about anabolic steroid use. "The trouble was that the York men went crazy about steroids," says the Maryland physician. "They figured if one pill was good, three or four would be better, and they were eating them like candy. I began seeing prostate trouble, and a couple of cases of atrophied testes."
The weight lifters themselves were quickly convinced that anabolic steroids made them bigger and stronger and began to tout the drugs. (Some doctors were—and are—far less sure about their strength-building characteristics.) Track weight men were early converts. By the mid-1960s most of the top-ranking weight men had tried anabolic steroids, including Randy Matson (who used them while preparing for the 1964 Olympics), Dallas Long, Hal Connolly, Bill Toomey and Russ Hodge. Footballers, many of whom are as interested in trying to make themselves as big and strong as any weight lifter or shotputter, were also obvious anabolic steroid candidates. Though the Chargers' experiment may have been a bit abortive, the drug has since caught on in football. It is an assumption, based on reasonably good but unverifiable reports, that some players on almost every NFL and AFL team have used anabolic steroids. It is a fact, according to physicians or players, that, in addition to the Chargers, members of the Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Falcons and Cleveland Browns have taken the drug. Ken Ferguson of Utah State University, who went on to play professional football in Canada, has said that 90% of college linemen have used steroids. "I'd say anybody who has graduated from college to professional football in the last four years has used them," said Ferguson in 1968. So widespread is the faith in hormones that there are verified incidents where pro scouts have supplied the drug to college draftees, and college recruiters have given it to high school players.
In this matter of how and why drug habits get started, the case of the anabolic steroids is far from unique. There are many other drugs—amphetamines, strychnine, cocaine, morphine, DMSO, tranquilizers, barbiturates, vasodilators, painkillers, anti-inflammants, enzymes, muscle relaxers—that have enjoyed sudden athletic popularity and whose use has spread quickly through the sporting world, despite official dampening admonishments.
Medicine and science aside, an underlying reason for this is that athletes and their attendants are flaming faddists. The sports world is full of fetishists, gamesmen who swear by the efficacy of nuts, raisins, pancakes, dirty undershirts, voodoo rituals, numbers, words, coins and medals. There is a rational explanation for this irrational belief in magic. More than perhaps any other group, the reputation and salary of an athlete depends on luck, a puddle of water, a gust of wind, a bounce of a ball. It is therefore understandable that athletes should be quick to experiment with any available magic potions.
Vitamin B-12 injections are an example of the athletes' craving to have magic worked on them. Professional football players are among the most devout B-12 believers, and there is many a Sunday hero who would no more go out to battle without having his shot than he would without his cleats. Athletes (football players are not alone, B-12 shots being fancied by baseball, basketball, track, swimming, hockey and weight lifting performers) believe that the shots prevent cramps, muscle pulls and general fatigue, cure hangovers and give you the jollies. The opinion among medical professionals is almost unanimous that the only real therapeutic use of B-12 is as a corrective for pernicious anemia. Otherwise it has little if any effect, since excess B-12 is quickly eliminated from the system. "American athletes have the most expensive urine in the world," says Ray Baldwin, trainer at Xavier University and formerly with the Cincinnati Royals.
By bringing together athletes from all over the world and dumping them into the most formidable sporting pressure cooker yet devised, the quadrennial Olympic Games have traditionally (it took four physicians to revive the marathon winner of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, an American, Tom Hicks, who proved to be loaded on strychnine and brandy) served as an exchange for drugs and drug recipes. This was particularly true in 1968, when everyone's attention was forcibly fixed on drug usage by the new anti-doping regulations and dope-detection tests instituted by the International Olympic Committee.
Shoe money and drugs were the two hottest conversational topics in the Olympic Village. A West German super steroid was much discussed. Olympic scuttlebutt also had it that African runners chewed kat, an anciently used herb from the Red Sea coast which supposedly masks fatigue, increases endurance and turns on the libido. An extract from the Tree of Life (a Korean bush) was rumored as being used for the same purposes. Bill Toomey believes one of his chief rivals in the decathlon had a shot of anti-inflammant (illegal according to Olympic drug rules) in his elbow prior to making a mighty javelin heave. "I did not see it, but a British coach said he saw it," says Toomey. The Russians, according to Americans, had a new wonder, anti-tension, pro-concentration pill. Some East Europeans were said to be taking a caffeine concentrate as a pick-me-up before competition. This was done presumably because amphetamines, which are traditionally used for this purpose, were illegal, and also presumably because they had not found the undetectable amphetamine that certain weight lifters boasted about having discovered.
An almost universal article of athletic faith is that the other side (the Humpty-Dumps, the Russians, the Jones Junior Highs) is 1) using drugs and 2) getting drugs that are better than our drugs. The oftentimes bitter confrontation between the United States and Communist teams has understandably produced a lot of such feelings. "We are usually a long way behind the Russians in drug use," says U.S. Weight Lifter Bill Starr. "They make a scientific study of it. If they come up with something good, their teams all get it. Here it is a hit or miss thing."
But East Europeans believe the same thing about Americans. Foreign athletes find it inconceivable that American athletes, coming from the land of towering pill factories, are not the most thoroughly doped competitors in the world.
The notion that someplace there is a compound, a formula or a food that will automatically convert bronze medals into gold is a general one confined to no one nation, sport or class of competitors. This conviction that there is the athletic equivalent of the philosopher's stone sought by ancient alchemists, and the terrible fear that somebody else may have already found it, is the rationale—or irrationale—behind many of the current athletic drug practices. It is used as a justification by physicians and trainers for prescribing drugs that cannot be justified on conventional medical grounds. It is the excuse used by coaches and trainers ("There might be something in it") for pushing pills the effectiveness and safety of which are unknown. It is the reason athletes carry their own little black drug bags, endanger their health, risk their reputations and break oaths and laws to get and use bizarre pharmaceuticals. It explains the ever-multiplying rumors about records being set and games being won by doped competitors. Finally, the belief in the existence of the ultimate pill, and the unrelenting search for it, is why many doctors share Dr. Kerlan's fear that athletic drug practices are leading to a sports scandal of major proportions.
