Don Catlin never intended to become America's top doping detective. He just wanted some new laboratory equipment. In 1981, Catlin—a University of California, Los Angeles medical school professor and former U.S. Army officer who had cut his scientific teeth researching drug abuse by American soldiers during the Vietnam War—was asked by the International Olympic Committee to run a drug testing program for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
Catlin said no. Cocaine and heroin? Sure. Addiction was a serious social problem. But doping? Catlin had grown up rooting for Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox. He considered himself a sports fan, but PEDs weren't on his radar. At the time, that wasn't unusual. For most of history, doping has been viewed more as something athletes did than something they shouldn't be doing; only recently has it become a matter of widespread concern.
The history of sports doping goes all the way back to the ancient Olympics, where athletes chewed on raw testicles in the hopes of enhancing their performances. In the modern era, 1904 Olympic marathon runner Thomas Hicks downed a concoction of egg whites and strychnine—a rat poison that also acts as a stimulant in small doses—en route to victory. Tour de France riders during the 1920s relied on the same drug, and also nitroglycerine, the primary ingredient in dynamite. Following World War II, amphetamine use spread from fighter pilots to professional baseball. In the 1950s, American and Soviet weightlifters were gobbling steroids; by the next decade, the same anabolic muscle-building drugs had spread to college and professional football.
Following the death of a Danish cyclist Knut Jensen at the 1960 Rome Games—he passed out during a race, cracked his skull, and ultimately died of heatstroke, a series of events blamed on amphetamines he may or may not have been using—sports officials began to view doping as dangerous. Nine years later, Sports Illustrated published an influential three-part cover story titled "Drugs: A Threat to Sport." The frame was set. When East German female swimmers fortified by a systematic, state-sponsored drug program crushed their American rivals at the 1976 Montreal Games, the notion that PED use equaled cheating was given a Cold War boost. No wonder those dirty, underhanded Commies beat our girls. By the early 1980s, the sports doping war was beginning to take shape, right alongside the larger War on Drugs. Each was informed by the cultural and political conflicts of the late 1960s, and a burgeoning sense that drug use of all kinds was both symptom and cause of moral decay.
None of that crossed Catlin's mind when the IOC reached out. However, the analytical chemist had a problem—he needed a gas chromatograph and a mass spectrometer, sophisticated machines used to analyze chemical compounds. Together, they would cost about $500,000. "The IOC offered to pay for it," Catlin says. "So I said yes. It was a good deal for me. All I had to do was test the athletes at the Olympics, and I'd get to keep the equipment. I didn't see what all of this would become."