THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT Ventoux in 1960 after fortifying himself at the bottom of the climb with amphetamines and brandy. Performance-enhancing drugs were only banned from the Olympics in 1967. In 1991, American Harold Connolly, 1956 Olympic Champion in the hammer throw, admitted that he had used anabolic steroids during his career when they were still legal. Connolly: “I was using after 1960. We all were.”5510 The New York Times: “It was after watching American doctors give athletes testosterone injections that Harold decided he could use a little help, too. He started with one or two 10-milligram tablets a day of Dianabol along with proteins. When that had no discernible effect, he moved on to Winstrol and other drugs in ‘stacking’ combinations. It was a standard regimen in the days before testing and prohibition. “As he later told a Senate subcommittee: ‘I learned that larger doses and more prolonged use increased muscular body weight, overall strength, and aggressiveness, but not speed, flexibility or coordination.’ “He had plenty of teammates with whom to compare notes. He remembered that during the 1968 Olympic Trials, many athletes ‘had so much scar tissue and so many puncture holes in their backsides that it was difficult to find a fresh spot to give them a new shot.’”5511 In 1983, when new test procedures were introduced without warning at the Pan American Games, “a dozen American athletes in various events suddenly withdrew from the competition and returned to the U.S., and at least another dozen athletes from other countries also left without explanation.”5512 Performance-enhancing drugs may also have begun to invade the sport of rowing in the United States as early as 1964. In that year, Tom and Joe Amlong encouraged their teammates on the U.S. Vesper Boat Club Eight5513 to take “a host of non-prescription pills . . . some as large as a quarter,5514”5515 that they had received from Bob Hoffman, weightlifter, bodybuilder and influential founder of the York Barbell Company.5516 At the time, the worldwide bodybuilding community was rife with steroid use. Peter Klavora, coach of the Yugoslav Eight that placed fourth at the 1964 Olympics behind the winning Vesper crew: “Those pills certainly were not ‘harmless herbal vitamins,’ as Bill Stowe put it in his book.5517”5518 So this was the situation around the world and in the United States at the time that GDR decided to ramp up its utilization of performance-enhancing drugs. But there was a difference. In much of the West, when athletes took performance- enhancing drugs, it was their personal decision. When a Harold Connolly or a Ben Johnson or a Marion Jones was juiced, they and their doctors and perhaps their coaches 5512 www.cbc.ca/sports 5513 See Chapter 107. 5514 a U.S. coin 2.4cm or nearly an inch in diameter. 5515 Stowe, p. 141 5516 Hoffman was one of the first athletes to receive Dianabol, the anabolic steroid developed by Dr. John Ziegler, the man credited with bringing steroids to America. – Justin Peters, 5510 Robert Lipsyte, An Appraisal, An Athlete With No Illusions About Steroids, The New York Times, August 22, 2010 5511 Ibid The Man Behind the Juice, www.slate.com, 2005 5517 All Together, The Formidable Journey to the Gold with the 1964 Olympic Crew, by Bill Stowe, stroke of the Vesper Eight. See Bibliography. 5518 Klavora, personal correspondence, 2010 1521
