Throughout history blood has been imbued with magical properties. Drinking blood was viewed as a source of power for many mythical beasts centuries before the invention of the modern vampire myth. In Greek mythology Odysseus can revive the dead by giving them blood to drink. But all blood is not the same – the blood from the veins on the left side of the snake-headed Gorgon Medusa is deadly, that from the right side is life-giving. In 1489 the Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino, proposed that drinking the blood of healthy young men could rejuvenate the sick and elderly. Indeed it seems that an attempt was made to cure Pope Innocent VIII of his stroke by giving him blood from three ten year old boys. More dramatically the Hungarian princess and serial killer, Countess Elizabeth of Bathory, was alleged to have drained all the blood from over 600 young girls to feed her restorative blood baths.
Drinking fresh blood
was supposed to give you strength, maybe eternal life if you were a vampire.
Even in the post-enlightenment age, the first blood transfusions had nothing to
do with the modern notion of enhancing oxygen supply; instead they were
supposed to heal by replacing old bad blood with strong healthy animal blood.
Sport has long had a fascination
with blood. The blood of the Roman gladiators, moppped by a sponge from the
arena, fed a profitable business; perhaps the athlete’s ultimate commitment to
promoting their brand? Today blood is even more relevant to sport. Indeed
arguably its use and abuse in sport today has come close to destroying the
Olympic movement.
The modern fascination
with blood in the Olympics arose from the new discipline of sports science in
the 1960s and 1970s. A key driver was
the 1968 Mexico City Olympics where physiologists recognized the difficulty of getting
sufficient oxygen to tissue in the rarefied 2km high air. Red blood cells transfusions
increase the amount of oxygen given to people suffering from trauma or anaemia.
It was therefore argued that healthy athletes could be given “excess” blood to
increase their ability to deliver oxygen to tissue, and hence enhance their
performance in endurance sport?
Scandinavian
scientists were first to prove this - in 1972, Björn Ekblom at the Institute of
Physiology of Performance in Stockholm, showed a 25% increase in stamina after
a transfusion. It was subsequently alleged that Scandinavian athletes were
putting this laboratory method into practice. Lasse Viren won double gold
medals on the track in 5,000m and 10,000m at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics.
Unproven allegations of blood doping dogged Viren, who always denied them
claiming that altitude training and “reindeer milk” were the keys to his
enhanced performance. Some of his teammates did later confess to blood doping,
however, most notably Kaarlo Maaninka at the 1980 Olympics. Maaninka received
no sanction, which might surprise today’s readers given that blood doping is
one of the main reasons we will not see the Russian track and field team
competing at these Olympics. However, although in the 1970s and 1980s blood
doping was viewed as morally dubious, it did not break any rules. The anti doping
effort of the time focussed more on amphetamines and anaboloic steroids.
This would change in
the 1980s. The LA Olympics in 1984 was the watershed event. There was extensive
use of blood transfusions including by several members of the highly successful
US cycling team. Again no rules were broken, but the IOC had had enough and banned
blood doping in 1985. However, they had no way of testing for this form of
cheating, so it presumably continued in secret. In fact the ready availability
of genetically engineered EPO in the late 1990s, a difficult to detect drug
that increases the number of red blood cells more gradually and naturally than a
blood transfusion, undoubtedly increased the use of banned methods. I could
fill most of the rest of this article with a list of Olympic athletes who are
confirmed or strongly suspected of using EPO and/or blood transfusions to aid their
performance.
So where are we now? Blood
is a part of the Olympics and always will be. Whilst not imbuing you with the
mythical life giving properties of Odysseus, optimizing your number of red
blood cells is a key part of success in endurance events. I can guarantee that
every medal winner in a long distance endurance event will have had their blood
measured frequently by support scientists to conform the success of their training
program, whether that program uses permitted (altitude training, sleeping in
low oxygen tents) or banned (EPO, blood transfusion) methods.
So much for Rio, what
about PyeongChang and the Winter
Olympics? This is, if anything, an even richer source of stories than
the summer games. There are claims of
athletes chosen for ski teams solely so that are the right blood group to donate
blood to their team leader; in 2006 a disgraced ex Austrian ski coach crashed
his car into a roadblock in the Italian alps, whilst attempting to escape the
police. But that’s a blog for two years time ……..
