At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, snowboarding made its debut as an Olympic sport. No longer relegated to the fringes, snowboarders took to the snow-capped peaks of Mount Yakebitai, and 26-year-old Canadian Ross Rebagliati rose to global fame. But shortly after he won gold in the giant slalom event, a drug test revealed 17.8 nanograms per milliliter of THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, in Rebagliati’s system, which he still attributes to secondhand smoke.
“Cannabis back then was seen as being for losers and lazy stoners,” Rebagliati told The New York Times. “The big corporate sponsors didn’t want to sponsor me. I became a source of entertainment, a joke. I went from hero to zero overnight.”
Rebagliati was initially stripped of his medal, but because cannabis had not been officially banned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), he was ultimately able to keep the gold. Two months after his failed drug test, the IOC officially banned cannabis due to its illicit status as a social drug.
The politicization of pot
As the war on drugs was waged on America’s streets, it was also playing out in sports arenas around the world. “We had to draw a lesson from Nagano,” IOC Director General Francois Carrard told the Associated Press in 1998. “The IOC wants to take a stand against a social drug."
Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission at the time, added that cannabis should be banned even though it does not act as a performance-enhancer like steroids.
Roger Pielke Jr., an expert in sports governance and a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, claims that “the deeper reality was that the Clinton administration’s focus on anti-doping regulations helped serve its domestic policy agenda, which was focused on waging a war on drugs.”
In 1998, the United States pledged an unprecedented $1 million to assist the IOC in its mission to eradicate drugs from elite sports. Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, was adamant that recreational drugs such as cannabis should be just as much of a priority for the international sports community as performance-enhancing drugs.
“We raise Olympic athletes up on international pedestals for all the world’s children to look up to as role models—it is vital that the message they send is drug-free,” McCaffrey wrote in a 10-page memo to the IOC. “The goal of this whole effort must be to prevent Olympic medals and the Olympic movement from being tarnished by drugs.”
According to Pielke, Rebagliati’s case gave the U.S. government the leverage it needed to lobby U.S. anti-doping leaders to include marijuana on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Prohibited List.
WADA was established in 1999 through a collective initiative led by the IOC, and maintains the World Anti-Doping Code and prohibited list. Its key role is to standardize anti-doping regulations globally for Olympic sports. Director McCaffrey led the U.S. delegation at the first official meeting of WADA, after which “WADA looked far more like the institution the United States and its other international partners called for, than the original IOC-formed WADA” according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) on the agency’s actions and accomplishments from 1993-2000. The United States is also the largest individual contributor to WADA, which receives half of its funding from the IOC, and half from governments around the world. In 2020, the U.S. pledged over $2.7 million of the $37.4 million WADA budget.
Despite the U.S. government’s stance on social drugs, the ONDCP acknowledged that the athletic community itself was less concerned about cannabis than about performance-enhancing substances, like anabolic steroids, which can promote tissue growth and muscle generation and shorten recovery time after a workout.
“In the course of our efforts to put in place an IOC ban on marijuana, athletes and sports officials at all levels—ranging from Olympians to high school coaches to youth athletes—informed ONDCP that they felt that the more urgent drug threat within the sports world was the use of performance enhancing drugs,” the ONDCP report stated. These concerns, the report notes, were “scientifically grounded” by the results of the 1999 Monitoring the Future survey, which concluded that youth steroid use increased roughly 50% over the prior year’s study.
Why is cannabis banned?
According to WADA, any substance may be included on its prohibited list if it meets two of three criteria: it has the potential to be performance enhancing, it poses a potential or actual health risk to the athlete, or it violates the “spirit of the sport.”
WADA did not respond to questions from NOVA about the prohibited list or cannabis’s status on the list. But several recent studies investigate whether cannabis has performance-enhancing qualities in athletic competition. A 2020 literature review by researchers not associated with WADA concluded, “there appears to be no reason based on current data to believe that cannabis has any significant ergogenic [performance-enhancing] effect.” An independent 2021 review echoed that conclusion, saying cannabis “does not act as a sport performance enhancing agent as raised by popular beliefs.
“In no circumstances is (cannabis) ever a performance enhancing substance. It is a net negative in terms of athletic ability and performance,” says Jeff Anderson, a professor of radiology and imaging sciences at the University of Utah who studies how the brain responds to compounds found in cannabis. “On the whole, people under the influence of THC are not able to perform as well on cognitive tests, they have slowed reaction times, decreased executive function, decreased attention.”
