the very period in which sports-governance organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, officially banned and tested for performance-enhancing drugs, in response to widespread dissemination of synthetic anabolic steroids to professional and amateur athletes, in the 1950s and 1960s. Olympic drug testing began unofficially at the 1968 Games in Mexico City and was institutionalized in 1972. Performance-enhancing substances were really nothing new, having been known as early as 776 BC and throughout the modern history of the Olympics, beginning in 1896. One view of the 1972 rule was that it was a fool's errand that pumped up sports-governance bureaucracy:
Born out of the misguided notion that it was possible to restore a drug-free playing field when, in fact, one never existed, testing soon evolved from idealism to cynicism. Drugs had no ethical disposition; they were no more disdained than spiked shoes or rubber tracks. They became unethical only after they were banned.
What changed in 1972 was not that performance enhancers had suddenly entered athletes' experience but that Olympic competition officially criminalized them. Nevertheless, the GDR constituted a special case within that scheme because of the extent of its state-sponsored performance-enhancing research and its programmatic concealment of that research. Moreover, as the record of the program demonstrates, the GDR's performance-enhancing protocols were ethically troubling because they were pursued irrespective of physical and psychological effects visited by long-term use of the drugs on the athletes themselves.
The whole matter was further complicated by the fact that, absent the GDR's public ownership of its drug-enhanced sports program, many published reports attributed the extraordinary performance of GDR athletes to virtually every other aspect of GD
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