Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Today we know that cocaine is a dangerous and addictive drug, but that knowledge wasn't shared by those in the past.

In this episode, David Musgrove investigates the use of coca leaves and cocaine in late

Victorian Britain. He does so in the company of Dr Douglas Small, author of cocaine, literature

and culture. David kicked off the conversation by

asking Douglas about an event that's been described as sports first doping scandal.

Well, I mean, was it even a scandal? Is kind of the underlying question to this. So what we're

basically talking about is an event which happened in 1876,

and this is an instant where a man named Edward Weston,

who is one of the kind of great sporting celebrities of the Victorian age,

famous for what we now think of as a pretty bizarre sport,

the sport of pedestrianism,

which is essentially

competitive, long-distance walking. And he's an American athlete, and he comes over to Britain

to sort of spread his fame and make a name for himself in Europe. And one of his first races in the

UK is revealed that he has been chewing coca leaves to boost his endurance

and to give himself strength in this 24-hour long marathon race that he's been doing against

a British athlete. Regular listeners to the podcast might remember that Weston the Pedestrian

featured in my six-part podcast series on Bob Carlisle, the Tiger Tamer who went to sea,

who did some remarkable feats of pedestrianism himself. So just super quickly, how big was

pedestrianism in the 19th century? It sounds so strange to us now, but it's a huge sport. These

matches regularly pull in crowds in the thousands or even the tens of thousands.

...