I very good friend of mine has lost confidence in sport, he says that it will never be drug free and that sports people are one step ahead of the drug tests.
I have to disagree and say that while there are cheats in sport there are many others who don’t take performing enhancing substances, am I being naive?
I can understand where my friend is coming from. We all remember how world records were broken and we were amazed only then to find out that the competitors had failed drug tests. Such events have taken the spectator edge off many sports as more and more people become cynical of our former heros and their motives.
But lets put this another way. Would you take a pill that would make you the best at your job, would help you climb the corporate ladder quicker and make you wealthy and successful beyond belief? I think many of us if answering this honestly would say yes we would consider it.
Now I’m not suggesting that we should all take performing enhancing pills to make us better at our jobs – and I certainly won’t partake in such – but human nature being as it is means that many of us would.
Then look at it another way, what happens if you are in the minority, you are one of the few not taking performing enhancing drugs in the workplace. Your colleagues have a competitive advantage over you and will rise to the top quicker and will deny you promotion. What do you do?
Again I am not defending cheating but examining the argument for legalising such performance enhancers. Can’t say I like the idea.
But will sports bodies ever prevent performance enhancing drugs from being in sport, will sport ever become 100 per cent clean?
The Boston Globe reports on the hunt for drug cheats in advance of the Winter Olympics.
Olympian duel over drugs already underway
Scientists chasing ever-inventive cheatsKay Lazar – Boston Globe
The Olympic drug police are preparing just as hard as the skiers, boarders, and skaters for the Vancouver Olympic Games, armed with more methods than ever to catch cheaters who try to inject or ingest their way to a gold medal.
But just as quickly as scientists develop sophisticated tests, athletes driven to win discover ways around them.
Antidoping authorities readily admit that cheating probably will occur, and that they won’t be able to detect it in all cases. Some of the most promising technologies for discerning banned performance-enhancement activities won’t be ready or in wide use for these Games, which begin next week.
The drug police face a plethora of performance-enhancing drugs and injection techniques. There are pharmaceuticals to boost red blood cells, steroids to pump up muscles, stimulants to enhance speed, and beta-blockers to reduce tremors in finesse sports, such as shooting in the biathlon.
They are also concerned about gene transfer, a method of manipulation that is not even out of research labs yet, in which human genes are injected to build muscles and power. Some specialists believe it is already being explored by athletes.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in these Games will be nabbing athletes who resort to blood doping – boosting their number of oxygen-rich red blood cells to enhance endurance. Some athletes do it by taking medication that is normally used by anemic cancer and kidney disease patients. The drugs are a synthetic version of a substance naturally produced by the body. Others remove some of their blood, store it, then inject it before competition, a technique that specialists say is nearly impossible to catch.
“You raise the bar with more testing, better tests, and you keep driving nails into the whole process so there is not many more ways a doper can move,’’ said Dr. Don Catlin, who founded the first antidoping lab in the United States in 1982. “But I am amazed at their ingenuity.’’
In December, the World Anti-Doping Agency, an independent body that oversees research and regulations for international sports, released long-awaited guidelines for a radically new approach against blood doping. Called the biological passport, it’s a way to catch cheats by establishing each athlete’s normal levels of various blood components and monitoring for suspicious changes over time.
This kind of testing is voluntary for now, however, and there are logistical challenges to using it widely. “How do you get a blood sample from someone who is training in Argentina atop a 14,000-foot mountain? How do you get blood samples from those folks unannounced?’’ said US Anti-Doping Agency chief science officer Larry Bowers.
The biological passport’s potential was demonstrated in November when the international Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld a two-year ban on competition for German speedskater Claudia Pechstein, a five-time Olympic gold medalist who was sanctioned because of abnormal blood levels detected by blood profiling. Pechstein did not fail traditional tests and has denied doping.
In January, the World Anti-Doping Agency acted to limit the use of platelet-rich plasma, a substance some football players and other professional athletes – reportedly including golfer Tiger Woods – have begun injecting to speed healing. The agency banned its use in muscles, but not in joints and tendons, and the agency’s science director, Olivier Rabin, acknowledged there is no way to distinguish between the uses.
Another kind of blood doping test, for detecting athletes who inject themselves with other people’s blood, is being developed by a Maine scientist, Dr. Bruce Davis, but he said it won’t be ready until 2012.
Precisely how many athletes resort to cheating is an open and gnawing question.
The US Anti-Doping Agency reports that fewer than 1 percent of the 8,532 athlete drug tests conducted in 2008, the most recent year available, were potential doping violations. The 2007 results were similar.
But Catlin believes the true numbers are significantly higher. Catlin directed the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory for 25 years before opening his antidoping research center two years ago.
“For every [cheater] that I found, there were probably five that got away,’’ he said, noting that testing methods have to be conservative to ensure athletes are not falsely accused. That means some cheaters may not get caught.
“I had to watch cases go by me every day where I knew it was positive but something was not perfect and I had to call it a negative and that was very frustrating,’’ Catlin said.
Richard Pound, a member of the International Olympic Committee and the first chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said regulators have for years been a step behind.
“Ginger Rogers was every bit as good as Fred Astaire and she had to do everything backwards. That’s what we face with sports doping,’’ Pound said. “We have to discover what they’re using and then develop a test to detect it.’’
Traditionally, testing has looked for direct evidence of prohibited drugs – an approach that has become especially difficult as sophisticated pharmaceutical products now more closely resemble substances already in the human body.
But sports federations continue to rely on traditional blood and urine testing.
For Tyler Jewell, a 32-year-old US Olympic team snowboarder from Sudbury, drug testing is a hugely inconvenient, but necessary, part of life. Under US Anti-Doping Agency rules, athletes must provide their whereabouts for one hour of every day, up to three months in advance, so unannounced drug testers can find them.
“I have been tested at least five times in the last six months,’’ Jewell said in late December.
“I have pleaded with them to just give me a GPS tracking device,’’ he said. “I was living in a tent one summer and I didn’t have an address. A lot of us live a different lifestyle. We’re snowboarders.’’
Still, Jewell said he understands the need for random testing to spot cheaters and “level the playing field,’’ though he said he doubted many snowboarders use performance-enhancing drugs.
Some athletes, however, are so eager to find an edge that they have called scientists who develop treatments for debilitating diseases by boosting muscle power or endurance, seeking information and offering themselves up as research subjects.
Among these scientists is Ronald Evans, a molecular physiologist at the Salk Institute in California, who pinpointed two compounds that dramatically boost endurance and increase fat-burning ability. Even before news of his findings was released in 2008, Evans worked with the World Anti-Doping Agency to develop a test that screens athletes’ blood and urine for the tiniest traces of the substances.
The compounds have not been released commercially – Evans has yet to test them in humans. Still, he routinely receives letters from athletes.
“Mostly it’s runners and cyclists,’’ Evans said in a recent phone interview. “Although I have had some college basketball players write letters being pretty direct: ‘If I take growth hormone and EPO [an anemia drug that boosts red blood cells], will your drug help on top of that?’ ’’
