Efforts to ensure fair play in sports have not proved an outstanding success, says John Duncan
It is one of the biggest contests in world sport: the prize for winning, and the cost of taking part, are measured in millions of dollars. But it takes place not on a track or in a swimming pool or a soccer pitch but in laboratories in all five continents. And according to insiders, using performance enhancing drugs is a closer battle than it has ever been.
“Let’s just say it’s a diminishing horizon,” said Thomas Reilly, of the John Moores University, Liverpool, a leading authority on drugs in sport. “Procedures have been tightened up from what they were and people who want to get round the tests have to be an awful lot smarter than they used to be.”
The drugs spotlight wanders regularly from sport to sport as loopholes close or national federations decide to bite the drugs bullet and get tough on the cheats within, who have either been tacitly tolerated or, in some cases even protected, from outside attention. Drug testing has always been the responsibility of those who have most to lose from the dirtying of their own sport, and it is hardly surprising that sports bodies have sometimes been loath to see their own patch defiled.
“Allowing national governing bodies, international federations and national Olympic committees to govern the testing process to ensure fair play is terribly ineffective,” says Robert Voy, former chief medical officer of the United States Olympic committee. “In a sense it is like having the fox guard the hen house.”
While drug abuse has been traced back to the ancient Greek games, it is relatively recently that anyone has decided to do anything about it. Testing in any form for drug abuse wasn’t introduced until the Fifties and Sixties as a response to widespread reported abuse of amphetamines, which had been implicated in the death of the cyclists Knut Jensen and Tommy Simpson. Drug abuse was then so widespread that many of the urine samples tested were bright green.
But the testers were way behind. Tests were predictable, and techniques were unsophisticated and couldn’t detect the increasingly popular anabolic steroids. The Olympic movement was ponderous and slow in its response to concerns, and steroids were not banned until the 1976 Montreal Games because there wasn’t a reliable test for them – eight athletes were disqualified for using them that year.
The next great leap forward came in the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas when gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) was used for the first time at very short notice. “The adoption of the GCMS method led to the disqualification of 19 athletes,” says David Mottram, of the John Moores pharmacy school. “However, many athletes withdrew from the Games, presumably to avoid the testing programme.” For the first time guilty competitors could feel the testers breathing down their necks.
By then, however, the battle was already moving away from stadiums and tracks to the training fields and gyms where athletes prepared themselves, privately and away from the threat of the sample bottle.
To understand why, you have to understand how drugs work. Apart from stimulants, most drugs don’t immediately enhance performance: you don’t just nip into the toilet before a race, take steroids and become a winner. Steroids enable athletes to train harder and recover more quickly from their exertions, aiding the transport of oxygen around the body and assisting athletes in building muscle. Other doping methods affect the number of red blood cells produced or the way that the body deals with carbohydrates. These produce a benefit noticeable on competition day, long after evidence of the drug itself has been expelled.
From the early days of drug testing until the 1980s, all athletes needed to do was to choose schedules carefully to avoid traces of banned substances in their urine at competition time.
The testers responded. Norway introduced random out-of- competition testing in 1977, and British athletics started a pilot scheme with the help of the Sports Council in 1985. Now athletes who travel away from home for more than five days must leave an address with the testers so they can be surprised anywhere at any time. Not to do so is an offence, as is failure to give a sample.
The steps that must be taken to avoid being caught have become ridiculous, with anecdotal evidence that some athletes use a process called catheterisation to insert someone else’s urine into their own bladder at short notice if they have been warned that a tester is on the way.
The personal cost of cheating is now higher than ever. Springbok and Northern Bulls lock Johan Ackermann, who was banned for two years last year after testing positive, and Bennie Nortjie, who played scrumhalf for the then Transvaal, are two South African rugby players who are unlikely to ever play again.
Many of the risks also remain unknown. The documented long-term effects of steroids include liver and kidney damage, acne, growth of facial hair and the loss of breasts in women. The effect of other steroids and drugs on the heart, nervous system, brain and bones are suspected. But no one is quite sure how high the cost of drug abuse really is, and there is no ethical way to find out.
For example, when the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the US was determining how much cannabis it was possible to take in as a passive smoker, the test involved five people in a room being exposed for an hour a day to smoke from six marijuana joints. Steroids are just too dangerous to allow that to happen.
But some athletes are still prepared to pay any price for success. EPO (erythropoietin) is, anecdotally, a fashionable drug, but according to Gabriele Rosa, an athletics coach who used to work with cyclists, it slows night-time heart rate so much that cyclists who use it sleep hooked up to heart-rate monitors that wake them up when their rate slips below a certain level.
The most recent challenge to the testers has come from drugs that are hard to ban because they occur naturally, and in varying concentrations, in the body. This makes them theoretically detectable and, therefore, prohibitable. Human growth hormone, dihydro testosterone and human chorionic gonadotrophin are naturally occurring substances which are taken artificially to improve stamina and endurance.
Testosterone levels between individuals vary massively, and one drugs insider says that internationally acceptable standards for testosterone have been set so high that it allows women cheats to “get away with murder”. But the intractable problem for the authorities is that any test that can’t be applied uniformly isn’t worth the test tube it is conducted in. And any governing body that doesn’t accept that will face a legal challenge.
“Governing bodies are lagging behind the legal support that top athletes can muster to challenge findings,” says Reilly. British athletics is still recovering financially from the cost of Diane Modahl’s successful legal campaign to clear her name.
The professionalism required of competitors is still not always matched by the professionalism of the governing bodies in dealing faultlessly with drug procedures. The leaking last week of the result of one of two samples taken from Irish swimmer Michelle Smith, the triple Olympic champion, will give her ample opportunity to sue someone somewhere if she is ultimately found not guilty. An athlete’s reputation is at the heart of his or her earning capacity, and drugs are the darkest stain that can be incurred in the pursuit of success.
“I’m not convinced that the scientific solution is all that it is cracked up to be,” says Michele Verroken, head of the United Kingdom Sports Council’s doping control unit.
“We need clear commitments from federations, sponsors and governing bodies on their approach to the subject. We won’t get the confidence of athletes if federations just dive in and speculate as to the guilt of athletes before they have been given a proper hearing and proper procedures have been followed. The athletes are the key to this.”