No Olympics, but real consequences
There were no Olympic Games in 1967. The Summer Games were in Tokyo in 1964 and Mexico City in 1968, and the Winter Games at Grenoble in February 1968. Yet 1967 mattered for the sports world because three connected developments occurred in or around that year: the creation of an Olympic body to deal with drugs, an argument over competing at altitude, and a death in the Tour de France that put doping on the front pages.
The IOC Medical Commission
The International Olympic Committee set up its Medical Commission in 1967, under the chairmanship of the Belgian Prince Alexandre de Merode. Its first task was to deal with the use of banned drugs, a problem that had been growing as sport became more intense and more nationally prestigious.
The Commission produced a list of prohibited substances, the first such list for the Olympics, and worked toward testing at the 1968 Games, with checks at both the Grenoble and Mexico City Games. This was the start of formal drug testing at the Olympics. The tests were limited by the science of the time. Detection methods were basic, and the list was short compared with later decades.
One well-known early case came in 1968, when a Swedish modern pentathlete lost a team bronze medal after a positive test for alcohol, which had been on the list for that sport. It was a small incident, but it showed that the new rules would be enforced. The Commission also began to consider other topics, including sex verification for female competitors, which was introduced in athletics in the mid-1960s and spread to the Olympic Games soon after.
The Commission has continued under different names and structures since, and the role of anti-doping bodies grew considerably. In 1967 it was a modest committee with a new and difficult job.
The altitude debate
The second issue was altitude. Mexico City lies at about 2,240 metres, and in 1967 the question was how athletes would cope. Scientists and coaches were divided. Some argued that endurance events would be slow and risky for sea-level athletes, and that the Games should have been placed elsewhere. Others said that a few weeks of preparation would be enough, and that the effects were manageable.
The pre-Olympic sports week in October 1967 gave the first real data. Many athletes found distance events hard, and some competitors from high-altitude countries performed well. The test events fed a flood of research and training advice. Teams planned camps at altitude well before the Games, a practice which became standard in distance running. Debate on whether this is fair has never fully gone away. Distance stars of the day, including the miler Jim Ryun, were reported to be preparing at altitude ahead of 1968.
For sprinters and jumpers, thin air was an advantage, which is why 1968 produced so many records. That outcome was not obvious in 1967. At the time, the focus was on risk to health, and officials reportedly worried about the possibility of collapse among endurance athletes.
Tom Simpson and doping
The most visible event came on 13 July 1967. The British cyclist Tom Simpson collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France. He had been world champion in 1965. The day was very hot, and the climb was long and exposed. Reports at the time said that amphetamines were found in his belongings and in his body, and that heat and exertion played a part, though the exact mix of causes was discussed for years.
Doping was not new in cycling, and testing had been tried before. Riders had reportedly protested against controls in the 1966 Tour de France, and France had passed an anti-doping law in 1965. But Simpson’s death made the issue impossible to dismiss as a matter of individual choice. It became a turning point in the public debate. In the following months, governing bodies in cycling and other sports moved toward formal testing, and the sports world’s own understanding of risk shifted.
It is worth noting a similar earlier case. A Danish cyclist, Knud Enemark Jensen, collapsed and died at the 1960 Rome Games, and doping was widely suggested as a factor. Simpson’s death in 1967 revived those memories and added urgency.
What changed
By the end of 1967 three things were true that had not been true before. The Olympic movement had a medical body with the authority to regulate drugs. Mexico City had been tested as a venue and shown to be controversial but workable. And the public had seen a famous athlete die of what many believed to be performance drugs.
None of these produced a clean solution. Testing remained incomplete for decades, and arguments about altitude, fairness and enforcement are still with us. But 1967 is a reasonable place to start the history of modern sports medicine and anti-doping, even though the Olympics themselves came the next year.