Editor's note: David Potter is a professor of classics at
the University of Michigan. He is the author of "The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to
Byzantium" and the forthcoming biography "Constantine the
Emperor."
David Potter
(CNN) On Wednesday, nine athletes were tested positive
for "sophisticated
doping" and banned from the 2012 Olympics. This shouldn't surprise
anyone. For as long as there have been games, there have been stories of
cheating.
Competitive sports -- an open-ended contest for a prize --
started in antiquity. The Olympics, which were held every four years at
Olympia, a sanctuary to the god Zeus in the western Peloponnese, became the
most prestigious venue for athletics by about 600 B.C. and spawned a whole
series of similar events in the next century.
Managing the Olympics or any other athletic event was never
easy. In the first surviving set of rules at Olympia, breaking your opponent's
fingers in wrestling was strictly forbidden. Rules like this point to a main
worry among the people who ran games in the ancient world -- "performance
suppression."
While there were no ancient rules against performance
enhancement -- our chief concern today -- there is lot of evidence for both the
theory and practice of getting people to do less than their best.
Some forms of performance suppression were more effective
than others. The most colorful was to place a curse on an athlete so he would
not do his best (or the gods of the underworld would drive him mad). This often
involved the burial of a lead tablet containing the curse in some place that
mattered -- ancient racing venues have produced a fair number of these items.
Another method, typical in
the ancient and modern worlds, involved hidden payments to athletes to take a
dive. In one famous case, the man who promised a bribe to his son's opponent
refused to pay because he decided that his boy would have won anyway -- and was
stupid enough to say so where people could hear him.
Perhaps there is not a lot here that has changed, as a
British paper is reporting that the father of the only woman on Australia's
archery team has had a restraining order lifted because he convinced a judge
that he had not tried to intimidate one of his daughter's rivals in a
qualifying round.
There there's the route of buying an official, a scheme well
known up to this day. It's an athletic nightmare that entails a series of dead
heats being declared until the favored contestant could win.
Sometimes the open prejudice of management would come into
play. One easy way to get to the desired result was to arrange an especially
easy draw for the favored athlete so he could reach the final round against an
exhausted opponent. This seems to have been so common that one man actually boasted
that he had never won through the Roman emperor's favor.
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