The beginning of steroids in sports

Since the release of the Mitchell Report, sports fans are pretending to themselves that this is a scandal with parentage in the early 1990s, as if steroids in baseball, and sports overall, appeared overnight. Drugs, of one kind or another, in various forms from amphetamines to pain-killers to old-fashioned alcohol, have been part of the athletic fabrics for decades.
In 1970, former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton exposed the underbelly of baseball and its rampant pill-popping in his landmark book, “Ball Four.” The baseball establishment, led by then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, labeled Bouton as a heretic and a liar. Today, we might view Bouton’s revelations of drug use, players cheating on their wives and the overt drunkenness of superstar Mickey Mantle as “the good old days.”
However, the problems of steroid usage in baseball and other sports can be traced back to one event and a complete different sport. The year was 1976, the sport was Olympic swimming and the place was Montreal, Canada. What resulted from that competition forever changed the landscape and the methods used to achieve victory.
A small history lesson: prior to those Olympic Games, swimming supremacy has generally contested between two nations – the United States and Australia. And specifically, most of the U.S. swimmers came from Southern California, where the warm weather and long-standing aquatic tradition, allowed hopefuls to begin training at very young ages.
Many of them lived most of their lives in pools and trained for many, many hours each week. It was the training that got them into the upper echelon of American swimming, not any physical superiority. The greatest American swimmer ever, Mark Spitz, was not that physically imposing, less than 6-foot tall and around 160 pounds. But he had the perfect swimmer’s body – long arms, long legs and an elastic, sinewy build. His pectoral muscles were as flat as could be as to offer no resistance while gliding through the water.
In many cases, the contestants resembles their environments – tall, tanned, surfer boys with bleached blonde “Moondoggy” hair and girls, also bronzed, blonde and more mature-looking “Gidgets” – and, yes, you knew they were all California girls, like the song desired.
In the early 1970s, word filtered through the swimming community of world records being shattered by large differentials, from Eastern bloc countries. It became much of the talk around the pool and lockerroom area during such important national competitions as the NCAA men’s indoor, and AAU Indoor and Outdoor championships.
However, the United States was confident in its lineup, especially, the women’s roster, for the Montreal Games. The Americans were led by California sprinter Shirley Babashoff, a striking honey blonde from Whittier, who won the world title in the 200 and 400 meter freestyle. “Babs” was a gold medalist four years earlier in Munich in the 400-meter sprint relay, helping to defeat the East German women, making their initial mark in Olympic competition.
The East German women, including a 13-year-old girl from Bitterfeld named Kornelia Ender, did not take home a gold medal that year. The sports federation officials back home would be determined not to be shut out the next time around.
So in Montreal, something radical happened. Instead of the team and competitors seen at Munich, or even in the World Championships one year earlier, the East German contingent that took to the starting blocks were different – drastically, shockingly and, more important, intimidating.
When Babashoff went to compete in the 200-meter freestyle, next to her was Ender, now 17, and completely transformed physically. She has huge muscles, more like any man, and spoke in an extremely husky voice, more like any man. And many of the East German girls had noticeable hair growth on their face, arms, legs and underarms, more like any man.
Babashoff, at that time, a fairly happy-go-lucky girl, was stunned at what she saw. Ender wasn’t just bigger; she dwarfed the world champion and in the water was no match for any other competitor. Ender proceeded to win four gold medals (a first for women in swimming) and set individual or world records in each event – obliterating the former standards.
Babashoff could only muster second places in all her events until the last race of the competition – the 400-meter sprint relay. Only through sheer will did she out-touch Ender in the final strokes to earn her only gold medal of the meet.
Her lack of success was not due to poor pool performance or times. Her silver medal clocking in the 400-meter freestyle (losing to Ender) was faster than the winning time posted by another American swimming legend, Don Schollander, at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
When the carnage was completed, Babashoff began to voice her suspicions loudly and publicly about possible cheating by the East Germans. She was vilified by many in the international swim community, earning the nickname, “Surly Shirley.” She never again was a major factor in the sport, but was inducted in the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1982.
Only later, was she proven correct when it was revealed that the East Germans had, indeed, used performance enhancing drugs to win all those gold medals. East German doctors were regularly injecting athletes like Ender with newly-developed steroids to advance physical development and super-size performance. In a sport like swimming, power COULD overwhelm form, an din 1976, it did.
Sadly, the epilogue for Shirley Babashoff is inglorious. She became a single mother and wound up as a mail carrier for the U.S. Post Office in Orange County, Calif., home to some of the most successful Olympic training programs in her sport – swimming.
And what has been done about this obvious injustice? Nothing! The International Olympic Committee, that hypocritical “watchdog” over amateur athletics, has never stripped the East German swimmers of their ill-gotten medals. American sprinter Marion Jones was recently shorn of her medals, similar to the old-fashioned Army method of “branding” a disgraced soldier – tearing off epilates one at a time and breaking the man’s sabre.
But what became of all those chemists and doctors who were developing those drugs? What do you think happened to them? Most likely, they were gobbled up by pharmaceutical firms, including the German-based Bayer (with its own dubious history), and went to work on developing … steroids.
Remember, our nation’s initial atomic research program only advances upon the defection of the original nuclear engineers, refugees in the 1930s from Nazi Germany. Without the Werner von Brauns of the world, the U.S. would have been years behind in its program development.
So here we are today with the state of baseball, and other sports, at the mercy of medical and technological advances. The Tour de France has been rendered almost totally illegitimate by its drug scandals, track and field cannot hold a major event without drug scandals and everyone is questioning records and performances from the past two decades in baseball.
And to think, it all began in a swimming pool.