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Diuretics are yet another group of forbidden drugs. The Bulgarian weight- lifting team was withdrawn from Seoul after two of its medalists tested positive for the diuretic furosemide. By flushing water from the body, these drugs help athletes reduce weight to compete in a particular class. They are also useful as masking agents, since along with the water, evidence of other drug use is eliminated.
There are rumors of other, still unpublicized, masking agents. At least one nondiuretic that achieves the desired effect is known: probenecid, a gout drug, has been banned by the I.O.C. It became instantly infamous during this summer's Tour de France. Spain's Pedro Delgado, the eventual winner, tested positive for the drug. But probenecid did not become prohibited in international cycling until August, so Delgado got away with it.
The index of the athletic pharmacopoeia is long and gets longer. Rare and expensive human-growth hormone can, some say, turn children into massive competitive machines and aid muscle growth in adults. Stories circulate about puberty suppressants that allow gymnasts to keep their finely balanced girlish bodies. But no drugs pose as much of a threat to the fairness and legitimacy of athletic competition as anabolic steroids do. And as the Johnson scandal shows, nothing has so obscured the efforts of honest athletes or has contributed as much shame to the Games.
They are the class of drugs that mimic the effect of testosterone in the body, and they are by far the most widely used performance-enhancing agents in sports. Among other things, testosterone causes the development of male secondary sexual characteristics -- facial hair, deep voice and muscle building -- and it is to promote the last that the use of steroids has become popular and, in such sports as weight lifting and field events, ubiquitous.
Steroids provide legitimate treatment for certain hormonal and blood disorders, among others, but they have also been put to other ends for decades. Developed in the 1930s, they had their first known non-medicinal use not long after -- by Nazi doctors who gave them to soldiers in the hope of enhancing their aggressiveness in battle. After World War II, Soviet sports officials reportedly noted the Nazis' use, and in the 1950s began giving steroids to athletes. U.S. doctors found out about this and introduced them to American athletes, initiating a kind of chemical cold war.
Steroids do not build muscles directly but rather allow the body to bulk up with training beyond the degree possible with natural levels of testosterone. Or so it is thought. Their actual value is hotly disputed, in part because there are few large-scale studies. Athletes take the steroids in doses much larger than those used for therapeutic purposes, and doctors have been reluctant to conduct research that would in any way condone a practice they consider unhealthy. Athletes have fewer doubts. Dr. Forest Tennant, a California researcher, estimated in the New England Journal of Medicine that "as many as 1 million athletes" in the U.S. alone are using anabolic steroids. Sprinters like Johnson, who rely on large muscles for bursts of power, are believed to be turning more and more to steroids. In football, the remarkable rise in the size and strength of linemen is often attributed to extensive steroid use. In weight lifting and bodybuilding, steroid consumption is pandemic.