The Biggest Doping Scandals in Sports History

Sports like baseball, football, boxing, Olympic sports, etc., are all significant sources of entertainment that people turn their TVs on for day after day. Unfortunately, the players on the screen may not always play fairly, turning to performance-enhancing drugs to gain an edge over their competitors. Read on to learn about some of the biggest doping scandals in sports history.

Russia Doping

One of the biggest doping scandals that is also one of the most recent is the Russian Olympic doping scandal. It took some years to come out, but between 2011 and 2015, over one thousand Russian athletes had been doping with the help of state agencies that would undermine doping tests. Consequently, the IOC banned Russia from participating in the 2018 Winter Olympics and stripped 51 Olympic medals from their record. The 2017 documentary Icarus explores just how Russia got around testing and is a must-watch if you want to learn more about the scandal.

Lance Armstrong

Armstrong was one of the most accomplished cyclists of his time, and it took a long time before his doping became public. He won seven consecutive Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005, and while many accused him of doping, he didn’t reveal his PED use until after he retired. Testing was rudimentary when competing, but the testing methods would only advance as time passed. If sports organizations at the time had used high-performance liquid chromatography to detect doping agents and opioids as they do now, we would have known of his PED use sooner.

Tom Simpson

Apparently, a lot of cyclists were fans of performance-enhancing drugs. In 1967, the cyclist Tom Simpson was in the middle of the Tour de France when he collapsed from a heart attack and died as he pedaled up Mont Ventoux. It was a hot day, and many initially thought it was due to dehydration, but doctors later uncovered that there were tubes of amphetamines in his jersey, and then these amphetamines were found in his system. Surprisingly, PEDs were legal before this. His death sparked outrage in the community, and ultimately, the International Cycling Union would ban the use of PEDs in its competitions.

These biggest doping scandals in sports history temporarily derailed the entire sports world, but soon the players got their penalties, and everything carried on like normal. There will likely be some more doping scandals in the future, but for right now, the testing technology has gotten so advanced that finding a way around it seems more labor intensive than the actual doping would be rewarding.