Kornelia Ender was quite a swimmer in the 1972 Summer Olympics, winning three silver medals for East Germany as a scrawny 13-year-old.
Four years later in Montreal, Ender strode to the pool with the same slim waist but with the shoulders and upper arms of a wrestler. She swam four events, won four gold medals and set four world records.
Little did the world know it was receiving its introduction to a saga that carries on today and that, if you ask the experts, may never end.
Ender admitted 15 years later that East German officials had pumped her full of unidentified drugs, causing her to gain 18 pounds of muscle in the run-up to the Games. Around the same time in 1991, former NFL lineman Lyle Alzado lay withering and dying from a brain tumor, the first suspected casualty of that league's doping outbreak.
Seven years later, a reporter noted a bottle labeled androstenedione in the locker of mammoth slugger Mark McGwire, who stood a few home runs short of eclipsing Roger Maris' 37-year-old season record.
So began baseball's steroid song, which hit another low note this week with the release of a book excerpt detailing Barry Bonds' alleged heavy use of performance enhancers. Also this week, Dr. James Shortt, physician to several Carolina Panthers, pleaded guilty to federal steroid charges.
Thirty years have passed since Montreal. Steroids have become illegal in the United States, and the governing bodies of most Olympic and pro sports have widened testing policies and toughened penalties. But the sense that doping is somehow intrinsic to athletes' lust for self-improvement is stronger than ever.
"In the world of high-stakes professional sports, you have to assume the incentives make doping irresistible," said John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor who has studied the subject since the 1980s. "To assume otherwise is to assume the whole mentality of athletic subcultures can change overnight. Twenty years has taught me to expect otherwise."
The audience may show outrage at Bonds but shows few signs of wanting deeper change, said Dr. William Howard, a specialist in sports medicine at Union Memorial Hospital.
"The public has gotten used to these cartoon characters, coming out with 18-inch biceps like the Incredible Hulk," he said. "And people like it. They don't want to go back to the 1950s."
Widespread problem
