The first edition of the highly controversial Enhanced Games takes place on 24 May in Las Vegas.
This multi-sport event will see athletes from track, swimming and weight-lifting compete while under the influence of an 'approved' list of doping products banned by WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency.
There's an argument to be made that the Enhanced Games isn't about sport or competition at all, but a shop window for pharmaceutical products at the heart of the anti-ageing and longevity industry.
On the Enhanced Games website, simply called Enhanced, is a sales portal for medical products such as testosterone and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, plus various supplements. This is where investors hope to get returns on their investment.
But all that is for a different article. Here we want to focus on the sports side of things, and pose a reminder of the damage performance-enhancing drugs have done over the years – both for the integrity of sport and the health of some of those involved.
So, here are six sporting performances from history that we knew something was off at the time.
Lance Armstrong, 1999 Tour de France
Who doesn’t know Lance Armstrong’s story by now? The Texan was diagnosed with stage 3 testicular cancer in 1996 and not only survived against the odds but went on to win one of the world’s most demanding endurance events, the Tour de France, less than three years later.
In 1998, pre-Lance 2.0, the Tour de France was almost buried under the avalanche of the Festina Affair, at the time its biggest ever doping bust.
A year later, it needed a hero to make people believe again and, in the cancer-conquering Armstrong, many believed they’d found it.
His win in the 1999 race, which included dominant performances in the opening time trial and the first mountain stage to Sestriere, created cycling’s first true global star.
His star was especially bright back in the US, where cycling’s battered recent history was felt less keenly by a much broader audience.
Irish sports journalist David Walsh, from The Sunday Times, viewed Armstrong’s performances that year with deep scepticism from the start and his dogged reporting over many years played a huge part in bringing him down.
Allegations were never far from Armstrong, but he defended them vigorously, both with lawyers and the force of his brusque personality.
He retired in 2005, having won a record seventh Tour de France, and that may have been that but for a comeback in 2009, which brought old grievances from former teammates and rivals back to the surface.
In 2012, an investigation by USADA saw him banned for life and stripped of all his Tour de France wins, and a few months later, his admission to doping on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa was one of the biggest moments in sports history (this writer had friends over for beers to watch it live, such was the interest back then).
Ben Johnson, 1988 Seoul Olympics, 100m final
If Armstrong’s drawn-out downfall was befitting of an athlete who made his name in a race lasting three weeks, so too was sprinter Ben Johnson’s rapid comeuppance.
The Canadian was the winner of what’s often dubbed the “dirtiest race in history” – the 100m final at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 – with only two of the eight finalists untarnished by doping scandals in their career (Calvin Smith and Robson da Silva).
Johnson, with a time of 9.79secs, broke his own world record in the final, demolishing a high-calibre field that included Carl Lewis and Linford Christie (who both also failed drugs tests during their careers).
Only three days later, Johnson recorded a positive test for the anabolic steroid stanozolol, and while later owning up to it, fell back on that old doper’s excuse that he only took it because everyone else did.
It was indeed an era of rampant experimentation, dubious ethics and lax testing, with track and field particularly tarnished.
That some people still see it as the greatest race of all time, despite the reputations of its antagonists, gives encouragement to the people behind the Enhanced Games.
East Germany swimming team, 1976 Montreal Olympics
State-sponsored doping was part of East Germany policy lasting decades. It was one way of projecting strength to the outside world, by beating other nations on the international stage.
Running deep and wide, the programme – often involving steroids and testosterone – targeted athletes of all types with untested drugs, through early adolescence and often without their knowledge. Repercussions for their physical and mental health could last for the rest of their lives.
While doping artificially enhanced performance of athletes in sports far and wide, from track and field to cycling, perhaps the most infamous single example of how much of a leg-up doping offered was the women’s swimming team for the 1976 Montreal Games.
They won 11 of the 13 golds on offer – seven with world-record times – having not won a single gold at the previous Games over the border in West Germany.
It was an unbelievable haul, with rivals and fans crying foul. Despite isolated positive tests and revelations by defectors, few East German athletes ever tested positive, with the regime going to great lengths to shield the athletes from doing so.
It was only several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that the full horror and deception of the state on its own people and the rest of the world became known.
Floyd Landis, 2006 Tour de France
Finally free of the chokehold that Lance Armstrong had held the Tour de France in for seven long years, the Armstrong-less 2006 edition was a chance for the race to breathe and start afresh. Right? Wrong.
Whatever Armstrong had been using (and with a later admission to Oprah of EPO, testosterone and human growth hormone use, it was plenty) remained rife in the men’s peloton and it would be an old friend turned foe of Armstrong’s, compatriot Floyd Landis, who would fall foul of testers.
Landis had been Armstrong’s key lieutenant in the mountains for three of his Tour wins between 2002 and 2004, before turning rival with a move to the Phonak team for 2005.
In 2006, the field was suddenly wide open and, despite few victories to his name, Landis was among the favourites, especially after Jan Ullrich (1997 winner) and Ivan Basso, who’d recently won the Giro d’Italia, were withdrawn by their teams after being implicated in a major doping scandal.
Landis was leading the race after stage 15, but a collapse the following day in the Alps saw him lose almost 10 minutes – a race-ending margin 999 times out of a 1,000.
On the next stage to Morzine, however, he blitzed his rivals with a hard-to-swallow solo adventure, going clear on the first of five mountains that day – unheard of in that era of stifled racing.
He put over seven minutes into race leader Oscar Pereiro, which would be enough to secure victory in Paris. Shortly after the Tour finished, that performance to Morzine would be reappraised after it was revealed Landis tested positive for testosterone.
The win was awarded to Pereiro, the American was banned for two years and that, seemingly, was that for Landis.
He would return to the spotlight later – off the road – as a sharp thorn in the side of Armstrong and played a major role in the collapse of the Texan’s house of cards.
Russia, track and field, 2012 London Olympics
You’d have hoped the days of state-sanctioned doping programmes a la East Germany would be over, but Russia’s government – in the early days of its rotten demise that culminated in its invasion of Ukraine – had other ideas.
Again, it was women’s endurance sport, this time in track and field, where eyebrows were raised, with Russian women cleaning up medals left and right, and rapid improvements in unexpected areas.
It wasn’t regime collapse this time that exposed it, but whistleblowers, and the resultant independent report commissioned by WADA found that sample tampering and destruction at Russia’s only WADA-accredited lab was rampant.
The report recommended athletes be banned from competing for Russia in international track and field indefinitely, which the IAAF, the governing body, accepted. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that was extended to many other sports.
Bjarne Riis, 1996 Tour de France
It’s hard to think of a single performance more symptomatic of professional road cycling’s EPO-fuelled malaise than the Danish rider Bjarne Riis’ ride on the Pyrenean climb of Hautacam at the 1996 Tour de France.
Riis was a tall (6ft), heavy rider of over 70kg and – grinding a huge gear – he rode away from much smaller rivals to cement his place at the top of the general classification.
He won the yellow jersey in Paris, becoming the first Dane to do so, but suspicion of his performance, certainly among insiders at the race, was strong. These were the early days of EPO, the blood-boosting drug that turned endurance up to 11.
EPO is produced naturally in the body, helping to create red blood cells and deliver oxygen around the body.
Tests to detect when people had taken it didn’t exist in 1996: that wouldn’t come until the year 2000 and even the haematocrit test (the thickness of blood rises with EPO use) didn’t arrive until 1997.
It would be another 11 years before Riis confessed to using this drug, among others, during the period in which he won the Tour, following a string of other confessions from within the team he was riding for at the time.
His win was stripped, then reinstated, and like many others from this era who confessed to doping, he went on to a long (and successful) career in cycling team management, influencing the next generation.
