Even though the Olympic creed says that the most important thing is not winning, but participating, Olympic champions have been feted for their achievements since ancient times. In pursuit of the fame and glory that come with the gold medal, more than one athlete has succumbed over the years to the temptation of using performance-enhancing drugs. The cases are numerous, though some stand out in collective memory – Ben Johnson when he became the fastest man alive at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, only to be stripped of his gold medal and 100m world record when a urine sample showed he used steroids; or Marion Jones, who lost the three gold medals and two bronzes she won in Sydney eight years ago, after it was proved that she used the erythropoietin performance-enhancing hormone.
Athletics is by no means the only sport where use of banned substances to boost stamina, strength and speed is rife. Cycling has a long history of similar problems, while the frequent cases of doping had at one point even threatened weightlifting to have its Olympic status withdrawn.
Despite the best efforts of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and improving scientific methods to detect doping, many athletes still try to cheat their way to a medal. Even before the Games have started, Greece and Bulgaria both had to withdraw their weightlifting teams from the Olympics after their competitors tested positive for banned substances.
To fight doping, the organisers in Beijing, together with WADA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), plan to carry out 4500 tests, more than ever before, including blood tests and tests for the human growth hormone. The IOC has threatened to increase the length of the punishments it would hand out to athletes found cheating. If anything, that is likely to prompt scientists to come up with new, as yet untraceable, ways of hiding the use of doping substances, or design new ways of enhancing performance, such as through the use of stem cells, as an undercover investigation by German broadcaster ARD in China showed on the eve of the Olympics.
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