Olympic leaders have shied away from tests which would expose those using human growth hormones
Gavin Evans Let’s say you’re a sprinter on the verge of world class. Until now you’ve played it clean – gallons of creatine, glycogen and nitrogen, obviously, but you’ve resisted offers to take the tempting banned performance-enhancers that you just know have helped half the sub-10 men out there. Then someone – your coach, training partner, physician – sidles up: “Listen, without a little help you’re not going to cut it, and I promise you, this one is undetectable because the International Olympic Committee [IOC] is too chicken to test for it. The side effects are laughable, and it will not only build your muscles, improve your recovery time, and fight fatigue better than steroids, it will also give you a potent pre-race boost.” Perhaps, if you’re a Jonathan Edwards or Carl Lewis, the idea wouldn’t cross your mind, but I would guess it takes a rare breed not to feel tempted. This current elixir of enhanced performance is the synthetic variant of human growth hormone (HGH), originally designed to treat dwarfism but today rapidly replacing anabolic steroids as the illegal performance-enhancing drug of choice for elite-level, power sport performers. Like the blood-boosting endurance aid erythropoietin (EPO) it is only detectable through blood analysis. Last week’s IOC announcement that it will introduce blood (and urine) tests to bust EPO cheats has helped firm up its flaccid image when it comes to illegal chemicals. The truth, however, is rather more ambiguous. Amid all the hyperbole around EPO and anabolic steroids, a rather muscular fact seems to have escaped public scrutiny: the brave new IOC has backed off from introducing a blood test for the synthetic variant of HGH, even though an effective test could have been ready in time.
Five years ago British endocrinologist Professor Peter Sonkssen headed a team of scientists who were sponsored by the IOC to come up with a test to cleanse the Olympics of the HGH scourge. “Our project was very successful,” said Sonkssen. “We were on time, on budget, and successfully developed a blood test to detect HGH abuse. When we presented our results to their outside assessors in March 1999 they concluded we had indeed developed a viable test, but that we needed more development work with athletes who were not white Europeans before it would stand up in court if challenged.”
Olympic supremo Juan Antonio Samaranch offered an extra $2-million to complete their work. “We budgeted $5-million for this final stage but we felt the $2-million would at least enable us to go some way towards this goal. Then at the end of last year they just pulled the plug.” With billions of dollars sloshing around Sydney the sudden withdrawal of funds raised eyebrows through the drug-testing world. “There is no doubt that we could have had a test in place for Sydney,” says Sonkssen. “The IOC knows it and their lack of action makes cynical people think cynical thoughts.” Cynical thinking tends to concentrate on the terror from officialdom and sponsors about what, or who, will come out in the blood wash. More specifically, they fear that there are too many top runners, swimmers and lifters using the stuff for these sports to survive the fallout. They can just about cope with a few low-profile marathon runners and cyclists getting busted in EPO tests, but the contemporary Ben Johnson? That would be too much. But Sonkssen holds back on feeding this suspicion: “I have to give the IOC the benefit of the doubt by saying that its anti-doping research is a relatively new concept – they’d previously put their efforts in trying to counter those exposing the cheats – so perhaps they haven’t yet got around to accepting their funding responsibilities. If they operated like a commercial organisation they wouldn’t have given it a second thought, given what is at stake.”
The IOC’s medical director, Dr Patrick Schamasch, insisted that there was no basis for this cynicism. He acknowledged the IOC was “very happy” with the GH2000 research presented to them, and that this had motivated Samaranch to offer the additional $2-million, but said that in the end it came down to a choice between a test for EPO and one for growth hormone. Until the IOC’s EPO announcement public attention was focused on alleged nandrolene cheats like Linford Christie, which was really missing the point. Steroids like nandrolene are detectable through urine analysis and are therefore rapidly becoming yesterday’s little helpers. For the power- based sports the current drugs of choice are HGH, insulin growth factor – a synthetic version of liver extract which is often taken with HGH – and clonidine (said to stimulate the body’s own production of growth hormone), none of which are currently detectable. In 1992 a survey of United States high school athletes found that 5% used HGH and 25% knew someone using it. Since then the use of HGH has escalated dramatically. Its cost ($300 for a single injection, $6 000 for a six-week course) is prohibitive for adolescents, but less so for elite professional athletes. Michele Veroken, the United Kingdom Sports Council’s anti-doping director, says that without testing it is impossible to be sure how widely HGH is used at the elite level. “We hear that there are huge quantities available on the streets and in the body-building gyms, but we don’t know how common it is among Olympic-level athletes.” It now appears that in addition to its role in building muscle (and increasing the height of children), HGH acts as a potent stimulant. Dr Richard Godrey, chief physiologist of the British Olympic Medical Committee, explained: “It improves the body’s ability to cope with fatigue through enabling it to tolerate higher levels of lactate, as well as regulating the metabolism by increasing the amount of fat used up, therefore sparing muscle and carbohydrate.”
Tell-tale signs among abusers include a lengthening of the jaw, a thickening and coarsening of the skin, the enlargement of fingers and toes. More serious side effects can include impaired glucose regulation, diabetes, arthritis, impotence, the enlargement of internal organs and death through cardiomegaly. However, most anti- doping experts concede that the risks are lower than with anabolic steroids, and are certainly not enough to put off an athlete bent on success at all costs. Veroken points out that unless athletes “are caught red-handed or feel driven to confess all”, they will be free to use HGH in Sydney without the fear of detection. Only one competitor has been bust for HGH in the history of international sport. In 1998 a Chinese swimmer, Yuan Yuan, was stopped at Perth airport by customs officials who discovered 13 containers full of HGH. Yaun and her coach Zhou Zhwen claimed it was intended for an Australian friend but the quantities involved were enough to provide a pre-race boost to the entire Chinese women’s team, and the pair were banned for 15 years by their country’s swimming federation. The next surprise came when it emerged the HGH was produced not by some secrecy- shrouded Beijing laboratory but by Danish drugs giant Novo Nordisk, which sells more than oe1,5-billion worth of HGH to 130 countries each year, including Britain. “Yes, it was ours,” said their representative Anders Rosbo. “We traced the serial numbers on the vials to a batch sold directly to China. Since 1986 we’ve been selling HGH to the Chinese.” He said the quantities increased dramatically after 1997 and that the purchaser was a “Chinese state wholesaler”, but was not permitted to reveal their name or the precise quantities sold. Another Novo Nordisk representative, Soeren Chestensen, said: “There is only one, single Chinese state distributor we deal with, but for competitive reasons they don’t wish to be named.”
There are other sources for what passes as synthetic HGH: counterfeit placebos, adulterated or spiked HGH, growth hormone of animal origin and the natural human form, extracted from the anterior pituitary gland of corpses (withdrawn from medical circulation after it was discovered that it carried the risk of contracting various diseases, but still sold on the black market). But the most common starting point is invariably transnational drug companies like Novo Nordisk, Upjohn and Genentec, and from there to hospitals and doctors who ordered it, and finally to the coaches and agents who supply it. As Rosbo explained: “Some quantities of our HGH go missing although we don’t have a lot of theft. But the big problem is the weak morals of doctors who misuse it.”
n China dropped 40 members from its Olympic squad this week, and confirmed seven of them had been using EPO. It did not say whether the other 33 had failed drugs tests or failed to make the standards set for participation.