Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

PERFORMANCE ENHANCING drugs have been a part of sport for centuries. Whenever winning has mattered, athletes have sought an edge over their rivals, and have rarely been bothered about the ethics involved. Many Olympic champions in ancient Greece, centuries before Christ was born, regularly ingested sheep's testicles - a prime source of testosterone, the male hormone. West Africans have used cola plants since antiquity to stave off fatigue in work and competition. Aztec athletes employed a cactus-based stimulant. Vikings in ancient times ate a fungus called 'Amanita muscaria', a potent hallucinogen, so that they went berserk in battle, and could carry on fighting even when badly wounded.
The first documented modern case of sports doping was in 1865, when Dutch swimmers used stimulants, and by the late 19th century European cyclists were using aids such as caffeine and ether-coated sugar cubes to allay pain and delay fatigue in their endurance sport. French cyclists used 'Vin Mariani'; a compound of wine mixed with coca leaf extract. By the time of the first modern Olympics in 1896, many performance aids were in use, including codeine and the poison strychnine, which is a powerful stimulant in sub-lethal doses. Russian speed skaters favoured minute doses of arsenic, whilst boxers used brandy laced with strychnine or cocaine. Thomas Hicks (USA) who won the 1904 Olympic marathon at St Louis, collapsed after his effort and it took hours to bring him around. He had taken liberal doses of brandy mixed with cocaine to help him win his gold medal. Of course, there were no doping regulations in those days.
At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Japanese swimmers achieved amazing success by inhaling oxygen in their locker room just before competing. Sprinters of the day used nitroglycerine in an effort to dilate the arteries of their hearts. (Today, throwers and jumpers sometimes snort amyl nitrate to give themselves a quick boost just before making a supreme effort). The modern age of doping dawned in 1935, when German scientists isolated testosterone. Nazi doctors injected the male sex hormone into German troopers to make them more aggressive. And they did the same for their athletes at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, in an attempt to live up to their 'super race' billing. Many German Olympians also used Pirvitan, a powerful amphetamine, and Germany won more medals than the USA at those Games, in spite of the widely publicised success of Jesse Owens who won four gold medals in Berlin.
The Germans technology filtered into the newly formed Soviet Union after the second world war, and came back to haunt the West in 1952 when the USSR participated in its first Olympics in Helsinki. By the Melbourne Games in 1956, the Soviets won more medals than anyone else did, and by then it was clear that their athletes were using testosterone. A pharmaceutical cold war was now on, and with it the hunt for more advanced weapons. While straight testosterone helped people improve, doctors and athletes were searching for something even better - a substance with greater anabolic (tissue-building), yet fewer side effects. In 1955, John Zielger, a doctor for the American Olympic Weightlifting team, developed a modified, synthetic testosterone molecule with enhanced tissue-building properties. This was the first man-made anabolic steroid. Its chemical name was methandrostenolone. Its trade name was Dianabol.
Developed by the Ciba Pharmaceutical Company of Basel, Switzerland, Dianabol was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat certain anaemias and skin diseases. The tablets also launched an underground frenzy among power athletes.
They discovered that Dianabol could allay fatigue, increase their muscularity, enhance their self-image and confidence, and boost their performance. Within the body, the steroid worked like the hormone it was modelled after. It heightened ribonucleic acid (RNA) activity and spurred the synthesis of protein, the basic component of muscle, bone and skin. It helped muscles to regenerate more quickly from the stress of training, in order to be stressed again. For sprinters and power event athletes, the drug excited the motor neurons in their muscle fibres, resulting in faster muscle contractions: the foundation for higher speed and improved reaction times. For sprinters and explosive power athletes, this was the Holy Grail.
By the 1960's Dianabol had become indispensable to competitive weightlifters and the new wave of oversized professional American Footballers. Players would scoop out pills by the handful and sprinkle them on their cereal - truly the "breakfast of Champions". Finally, after much scandal, the NFL suspended 17 players for distributing the drug in September 1990.
The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo were the first Games to feature widespread steroid use by elite athletes from both sides of the Atlantic. It was most prevalent among throwers (male and female), whose world records surged an amazing 12 percent during the decade. The first drug related death in the Games was at Rome in 1960, when cyclist Knut Jensen of Denmark collapsed and died of heart failure. He had been stacking a cocktail of stimulants for the road-racing event. The IOC established a Medical Commission in 1967 and initiated testing for stimulants and narcotics at the following year's Games in Mexico City. But while the IOC banned a long list of drugs, it ignored anabolic steroids. The athletes did not, and by the 1972 Munich Games, the insiders' consensus was that 80 percent of the top male competitors were "using". Leading the way were the state-sponsored athletes from East Germany (GDR), whilst a number of male and female competitors from Western nations, including West Germany and Britain, were well versed in steroid use. The Munich Olympics became known as 'The Dianabol Games'. And drug testing was a joke - not one athlete tainted the Games by testing positive. The same situation occurred at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF, since renamed the International Association of Athletics Federations) finally prohibited steroids in 1975. But there was a huge loophole. Only in-competition testing was carried out. In other words, the IAAF treated the drug exactly like a stimulant, when insiders knew that steroids are training drugs. They enable an athlete to recover faster from severe training, which then results in an increase in performance. Steroids are not magic pills, but a means to an end.
Britain's athletics authorities began a tentative programme of out-of-competition testing during the 1980's after discus thrower Colin Sutherland refused a dope test at the 1978 National Championships. A refusal equals a 'technical positive' under IAAF rules, and he was effectively banned for life, because he never competed seriously again. Ten years later, British Sports Council testing officers had their first true positive: pole vaulter Jeff Gutteridge, whose urine sample yielded the metabolites of Dianabol during an Olympic Training Camp in Lanzarote, Spain. Interestingly enough, another British athlete at the camp received a prior warning by telephone from London that the testers were on their way to Lanzarote; and fled the camp in great haste. But Gutteridge was thrown to the wolves. The inside view was that he had been sacrificed.
The British testing system had to have some credibility after ten years in place. It seems that authorities keen to avoid the scandal of a 'big name' positive will always protect some favoured athletes. Says Charlie Francis, coach to Ben Johnson of Canada, who was infamously stripped of his Olympic 100m gold medal and world record at the Seoul Games in 1988: "A conspiracy of silence governs international track, a see-no-evil world where high-minded condemnations of drug use coexist with the cynical protection of doped-up superstars."
Meanwhile, the IOC and the IAAF, who are served by the same medical personnel, refuse to admit that most of the best athletes are using drugs, and that Olympic qualifying standards - and many world records - are steroid-dependent. Says Francis; "The bureaucrats were boxed in. If they lowered the entry standards, they'd be jeopardising the sport's image by conceding that the records had been set by steroid users. But if they left the standards intact, they would force competitors to violate the ban to qualify for the Games. Without staying on steroids, no athlete could hope to surpass a world record which had been legally drug-aided. In many events, athletes wouldn't even be able to make their nations' Olympic teams. The choice for athletes was clear - they could either break the rules or they could lose."
Only stupid or ill-advised athletes get caught in competition testing. Sports doctors and coaches have learned to 'cycle' drug dosages, leaving plenty of clearance time (21 to 28 days) when their athletes stop taking the pills or injections before a major competition. The drugs clear the athlete's body, but the competitor still retains the full benefits of enhanced performance. For distance runners, this is especially useful for they require only a minimal dosage. A world class 5000/10,000m runner, for example, need consume only one 10 milligram steroid pill per day through the winter; then come off the drug in May, and still race well all through his/her competitive period (June to September) and sail through all in-competition drug tests.
Nowadays cyclists and distance runners are using more sophisticated drugs like EPO (Erithropoeitin) which works directly on the kidneys to stimulate and enhance the oxygen transport chain. This can lead to a 6 percent improvement in performance, a massive advantage to a highly trained endurance athlete. Testing for EPO involves a blood test alongside urinalysis, which has increased the cost greatly to the obvious advantage of IOC approved testing laboratories around the world. But the new system is not entirely sound: the lab technicians look for a raised haemogoblin (red blood cells) level; but this can also occur if an athlete trains for extended periods at high altitude. Morocco's Brahim Boulami tested positive for EPO after setting a sensational new world record for the 3000 metres steeplechase in Zurich on 16 August 2002. Boulami claimed that he had spent three months training at high altitude in France and Spain, and had not taken the banned substance. His protests were over-ruled by the IAAF Medical Commission and he was suspended from competition for two years.
The use of other aids such as hGH (Human Growth hormone) and IGF (Insulin Growth Formula) have also boosted the need for blood tests. Ben Johnson was stacking hGH with steroids when he was surprisingly caught in-competition at the Seoul Olympics. But many big name athletes have been protected by their national federations. It has recently transpired that Carl Lewis, the 'Mr Clean' of track & field, was not penalised by American authorities for a positive test in 1988, and when Britain's Linford Christie was nailed for a nandralone positive in 1999, he was cleared of any offence by UK Athletics. CEO David Moorcroft and his administration were perhaps scared stiff of another lawsuit similar to that launched by Diane Modahl. (After failing a drug test in Portugal in June 1994, Modahl eventually won her case for reinstatement, but was refused compensation). Christie is a British sporting icon, and UK Athletics was not prepared to antagonise him. To its' credit, the IAAF was not so spineless, and suspended the 1992 Olympic 100m Champion for two years at the fag end of his career. It is interesting to note that though Christie tested positive at an indoor meeting in Dortmund, Germany in February 1999, the British authorities sat on this explosive news until August that year.
Doping will remain prevalent in all modern professional sport as long as there is big money to be won. Sports stars are feted throughout the world like royalty as they become multi-millionaires. Yet there remains a certain hypocrisy: the media and millions of TV viewers virtually demand sporting excellence, only to scream in self-righteous horror on discovering that athletes are doping in order to achieve the standards required. Excluding joke events like professional Wrestling, sport is the only unscripted public entertainment available these days, and society pays a high price for it. (Research: 'Speed Trap' by Charlie Francis and Jeff Coplon, Grafton Books, 1990).
HYPROCRISY CORNER: Two of the greatest anti-drug campaigners in sport admitted to being dopers in their active days. The late Doctor Manfred Donike of Germany, the IAAF Chief Medical Commissioner, admitted taking stimulant drugs during his career as a professional cyclist in the 1960's. And Britain's celebrated Harold Abrahams, Olympic 100 metres Champion at Paris in 1924, revealed that he used strychnine to help him get through the qualifying rounds at those Games. Shortly before his death in 1978, Abrahams ruefully told sports journalist Neil Allen, "I suppose that I would have been stripped of my medal under today's rules." Abrahams' feat is celebrated in the 1981 Hugh Hudson movie 'Chariots of Fire'. Scotsman Eric Liddell also won the 400 metres at those Games, as the film depicts vividly. Ben Cross played Abrahams whilst Iain Charleson took on the role of the Bible-punching Liddell, who sadly died from malnutrition at a Japanese POW camp in China in 1945.
MOVIE QUOTES - Heng: "I thought you liked London, sir." Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine): "I do. But I like it just where it is. I don't want to bloody well go there." ('The Quiet American', 2003).
"I'm not asking you to kill him; I'm just asking you to bury him. If he dies in the process, that's his problem." (Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin) to Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) in 'Romeo is Bleeding', 1992).
WHY IS it that every Yorkshireman you have ever known has always been a know-it-all? There is an old saying: "You can always tell a Yorkshireman. But not much".
THE ULTIMATE stalker's song? 'Every breath you take', by The Police (1983).
THE FIRST Victoria Cross for gallantry in battle was awarded to Lt. Charles Lucas on 21 June 1854 during the Crimean War. The honour was named after Queen Victoria.
DUELLING IS still legal in Uruguay, provided that both participants are blood donors. Just as in 18th century Britain, any gentleman who feels mortally insulted can challenge his opponent to a duel by pistol or sword at dawn on an appointed day. Seconds act for both men, and a referee will appeal to the protagonists to settle their differences before battle commences. There are always rules to follow in affairs of honour. *MORE WORLD'S shortest books: 'Particle Physics' by Victoria Beckham. 'Marine Corps Training Exercises' by Boy George and Julian Clary. 'Hints on Child Rearing' by Keith Trevallion. 'Making the most of your Savings' by Nick Leeson. 'The Art of Celibacy' by Bill Clinton. 'Good Table Manners' by Sir Les Patterson (Barry Humphries). 'Great Professional Wrestling Bouts' by Doug East.
QUOTES: "I'm the football coach around here, and don't you remember it." (Florida State Coach Bill Peterson).
"I want all the kids to look up to me. I want them all to copulate me." (Chicago Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson on being a role model).
"This is an operative statement. The previous operative statements are all now inoperative." (Ron Ziegler, Nixon-era Press Secretary).
"It's more than magnificent. It's mediocre." (Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn).

AMZANIG HUH?

The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh?

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