Rio 2016: From MLB to Balco – other sports and organisations tainted by doping scandals

The Russia doping scandal is shocking for the scale on which it operated, as well as the brazen way in which it was conducted. In that it matches the infamous East German doping regimes, except that it has occurred during an era of supposedly more stringent dope-testing techniques and policies.

Though its repercussions might be greater, it is not a unique instance of the uncovering of wide-scale doping. Here are a few of the most shocking before this:

The Mitchell Report

The quintessential American summer pastime, Major League Baseball was shocked by the report of a former senator George J Mitchell, released in December 2007. Over 409 pages, Mitchell named 89 players, past or present and including the legendary Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, who had used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs over the years.

Mitchell found that steroid use had set in in the MLB around 1988 but that there was “a collective failure to recognise the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on”. It took 15 years after that for the sport to introduce random testing.

The Festina Affair

This was the first scandal that really lifted the lid off the doping problems inherent in the world of professional cycling. It occurred just before the start of the 1998 Tour de France, when a large quantity of doping products was found in a car belonging to the Festina team.

The team manager, Bruno Roussel, confessed a few days later that he had organised systematic doping within the squad and the team was eventually thrown off the Tour. It changed the course of cycling, though sadly not necessarily of a reduction in the incidence of doping in the sport. More significantly, it was the Festina Affair which eventually led, over a year later, to the creation of the World Anti Doping Agency (Wada).

Balco

It was not the size that was so shocking in the Balco scandal as the names involved. Balco – or Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative – was a San Francisco-based nutritional supplements company.

The investigations into Balco, suspected of selling performance enhancing drugs to athletes, began in 2002 but it was the following year that it blew wide open. A syringe filled with a new kind of steroid was sent to the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) by Tim Graham, a former coach of Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones.

The case against the lab was eventually proven and alongside Jones and Montgomery, the baseball player Barry Bonds and British sprinter Dwain Chambers were also found to have used steroids.

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