The Olympics Didn’t Test for Drugs Until 1968

For the first several decades of the modern Olympics, athletes could use performance-enhancing substances with essentially no risk of getting caught, because no formal drug testing existed at all.

It wasn’t until the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble that the International Olympic Committee introduced the first official doping tests in Olympic history.

A problem that grew for decades before anyone acted

Concerns about performance-enhancing substances in sport existed well before 1968, with various reports and suspicions surfacing across multiple Olympic Games throughout the earlier 20th century.

The specific tipping point that finally forced action was the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enevoldsen Jensen during the 1960 Rome Olympics, which some reports linked to amphetamine use, alongside the extreme heat conditions that day. His death and growing broader concern about substance use across multiple sports, pushed the IOC to finally establish a formal medical commission tasked with developing real anti-doping measures.

The first tests were fairly limited

When testing finally arrived at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics, and later that same year at the Mexico City Summer Olympics, the science and scope were genuinely limited compared to today’s testing systems. Early tests could detect only a relatively narrow range of substances, and testing wasn’t applied consistently across every single athlete or every single event.

Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall became the first athlete disqualified from the Olympics specifically for doping, after testing positive for alcohol during the 1968 Mexico City Games, a substance that sounds almost quaint compared to the far more sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs anti-doping systems focus on today.

A slow, ongoing arms race

What followed 1968 has been a decades-long back-and-forth between athletes and coaches looking for substances or methods that testing couldn’t yet detect, and anti-doping scientists working to develop tests capable of catching increasingly sophisticated attempts to cheat.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, established in 1999, eventually centralized and professionalized much of this effort, creating a more unified global testing and enforcement system than the fragmented, inconsistent approach that had existed for the previous three decades.

Testing technology has advanced dramatically since 1968, now capable of detecting an enormous range of substances, sometimes even years after a sample was originally collected, thanks to long-term sample storage and retesting programs that have retroactively stripped medals from athletes long after their events actually took place.

Why the late start still matters

It’s worth remembering that for the first several decades of the modern Olympic movement, from 1896 all the way to 1968, athletes competed with essentially no formal risk of being caught using performance-enhancing substances. Results and records from that earlier era carry a different kind of uncertainty than more recent ones, precisely because no real system existed yet to check what many suspected was already happening.

Does it change how you view historical Olympic records from before 1968, knowing there was no formal drug testing system in place to verify how those results were actually achieved?