Sports-Reference, with the help of researcher Greg Spira, is proud to present our definitive, comprehensive reference page regarding the performance-enhancing drug policies in place for various North American sports leagues/associations. In it, you’ll find a list (in FAQ format) of the various PED regulations in pro sports leagues, in addition to lists of every athlete suspended under each league’s policies.

We want this page to be your best source for information about steroid/PED policies in pro sports. However, pages like these are constantly growing and evolving with new information, so if you know of a policy or a suspended athlete not listed on the page, send us an e-mail and we’ll be sure to include it on the site.

A previous blog entry ended with the sentence “What seems sure is that, after three-quarters of a century, Ljubica Gabric-Calvesi is the last active athlete from the Games of 1936”. At the time this seemed a reasonable claim to make. Any track and field athlete who competed would be in their nineties by now and the world is not full of nonagenarian sprinters or pole vaulters.

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Jesse Owens’ victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games are and probably always will be amongst the greatest of all Olympic memories. On the afternoon of the 4th August as Owen continued his campaign by winning the long jump and a heat of the 200m a 21 year old Italian discus thrower by the name of Ljubica Gabric was also in action. Her Olympic exploits may have been modest in comparison to Owens, she finished 10th in her event in Berlin, but her career has continued for a lot longer. Under her married name of Calvesi she returned to the Olympic arena in 1948, without great success, and also competed at European Championships on either side of the war but what makes this story remarkable is that 73 years after that summer day in Berlin she is still competing.

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It’s now nearly 113 years since the revival of the Olympic Games and you might reasonably expect that the trail of some the lesser known competitors might be pretty cold by now. Occasionally an unexpected stroke of luck leads to the discovery of information about Olympians even from as far back as those first modern Games in 1896. The “star” of this blog entry has historically been listed as Dionysius Kasdaglis, usually as a Greek but sometimes also as an Egyptian, but the story of the tennis player who won two silver medals in Athens begins further from Greece than anyone suspected. After searching through family histories, official documents and finally confirming the information with present day members of his family we can reveal that he was in fact born Dimitrios Casdagli in Salford, an industrial suburb in the North of England more famous for being the home of Manchester United Football Club.

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Earlier this month, result of three Olympic “sports” were added to the Sports-Reference.com Olympic database – art competitions, alpinism and aeronautics. With these additions, we are the first site on the internet to have published full results of all Olympic medal events.

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For years the standard fact was that only four nations had competed at all the Summer Olympic Games – Australia, Great Britain, Greece, and Switzerland (whose claim in 1956 was only that they had competed at the Equestrian Olympics in Stockholm, but not at Melbourne). Then in the mid-1980s it was discovered that in 1904, the runner usually listed as Albert Corey, and representing the United States, was actually French. He was born in France as a French citizen, his name actually Coray, and came to the US only in 1901. As citizenship in the United States requires a five-year residency, today and in 1904, he could not have been a US citizen in 1904. That added France to the list, making five nations that had competed at all Summer Olympics.

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With a narrow 1-0 victory over Spain, Germany secured the men’s Olympic (field) hockey title on Saturday. Hockey fans will have noted a familiar surname in the team line-up, that of attacker Florian Keller. His Olympic hockey legacy dates back to 1936, when his grandfather Erwin was a member of the German team that won a silver medal at the Berlin Games, behind the then unbeatable Indian hockey wizards.  

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Dayron Robles won the medal that China had reserved for Liu Xiang, and they’ve won 24 medals as I write this, but Cubans have had less reason to celebrate than usual. Traditionally, Cuba rockets up the medal rankings in the final weekend of the Olympics, when the boxing finals are held. But not in Beijing. 

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On Tuesday, Chris Hoy became the first British cyclist to win the individual sprint title and in the process win his third gold medal of the Games. This was the first time a Briton had achieved this feat since a swimmer called Henry Taylor in the long ago days of 1936. 

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You may have missed it, but Bruno Julie wrote a small piece of Olympic history earlier this week in Beijing. A boxer in the bantamweight class, he won his third fight against Manzanilla of Venezuela and thereby reached the semi-finals. With bronze medals awarded to losing semi-finalists, Julie has ensured his nation’s first medal. Bruno Julie is from the island nation of Mauritius, located in the Indian Ocean. Discovered in the 16th century, it is perhaps best known as the habitat of the now-extinct dodo. Only 1.2 million people live in Mauritius, much less than in the Olympic city of Beijing, which has roughly 15 million inhabitants.

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