Peter is a veterinarian, brought up in a horse-loving dairy industry family in Bendigo Victoria.
Peter is also a keen and competitive sportsman, and was once in contention for Olympic selection in water polo before a brain aneurism put a stop to those plans.
He came to WA initially to teach at Muresk in the Equine Stud Management course, and he later became a member of the WA Turf Club Veterinary Panel of stewards. Perhaps they had heard that his father had once a runner in the Melbourne Cup.
Peter was invited to join the Drug Detection panel for the Sydney Olympics and this provoked some comment in the sports media – a vet overseeing the performance of human athletes.
His quick response was that humans had been trying to increase their odds of making money by doping racehorses for many years,. Now that there was big money in human athletic performance, it was only logical that performance enhancing (or limiting) drugs would become part of the “bigger picture” at the Olympics, and other sports events where we are being continually encouraged to gamble responsibly!
Vets first noticed organised efforts to improve the results of horseracing with the use of “Speedballs” pushed down the mouth of horses just before they raced. To detect this, saliva swabs were taken from the winning horse’s mouth and wiped on frogs. Because the cocktail in the speedballs included heroin, strychnine and caffeine, the rapid change of behaviour in the frogs was taken to indicate that the horse had not raced on its merits! Fortunately drug detection is more sophisticated now as animal welfare considerations would no longer allow frogs or other living animals to be used in this way.
The financial incentives to interfere with the performance of human athletes didn’t get going until the 1960s when serious money became part of the game. The answer to the question of why is doping common in cycling and not field hockey, why in cross country skiing and not marathons, is explained by the presence of mountains in the former versus flat fields and roads in the latter sports. You need extra help to conquer those mountains!
The excuses given by those caught or who confess include the oldest schoolboy defence – well Sir, everyone else was doing it so I wanted to compete on a level playing field, and smooth away those mountains! Other possible reason is a desire to be Livin’ the Dream.
The current doping methods include the use of endogenous drugs – using or enhancing naturally occurring hormones in the human body, like growth hormone or testosterone. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is a naturally occurring hormone secreted by the kidney to stimulate red blood cell production, so increasing the level of EPO will increase the number of red blood cells and oxygen carrying capacity of the athlete’s blood before an event requiring increased muscle function.