Long before the restrictive doping rules of today's professional sports world, athletes were eagerly and unashamedly loading up on whatever could boost their performance. Many of them still do, but the difference was that nobody thought of it as cheating, and the secrecy kept by the riders and their doctors was not to avoid disclosure, but to keep their valuable trade secrets.
Alcohol, cocaine and amphetamine, strychnine or caffeine, often in various combinations, were standard accessories in the world of professional cycling until the late 1950s, when the first rules and regulations regarding doping were adopted.
One of the greatest Italian legends of cycling, Fausto Coppi, was an avid user of amphetamine - “La Bomba" -as he used to call it, and he once stated in an interview that he would have liked to be a chemist just to discover drugs like that. And apparently it worked for him: Coppi was the first rider in history to win Giro D'Italia and Tour De France in the same year, 1949, earning him the the Italian nickname Il Campionissimo.
The later years of Coppi's career, from the late '50s and onwards, were less glamorous: A scandalized romance with a married woman brought the rage of the Catholic Italians upon Coppi, and eventually the Pope himself tried to meddle in the adulterous affair and even refused to bless the 1954 Giro D'Italia if Coppi attended.
Coppi died in 1960, officially from malaria. Strange rumours of poisoning surfaced as late as 2002, but no substantiated conclusions have been drawn from the claims so far.
More on the subject here.
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