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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)


	"The system has failed, and it will fail now": Catlin inside his lab. (Jeff Minton)

THE STATE OF THE ART
Catlin has no intention of giving up, though. Instead, he's decided to mount a campaign to radically change the way sports go about fighting drugs—an idea that he's revealing publicly for the first time in Outside. Catlin's vision is to replace the current law-enforcement model—in which all athletes are treated as suspects who are monitored and tested to find evidence of specific drug use—with a reward model, one driven by a new voluntary system that, he hopes, would enable officialdom to actually prove that the athletes who take part in it are clean.

As we'll see, there are serious questions about this scheme's practicality, and Catlin knows that, for his idea to gain traction, sports leaders and drug testing's entrenched power structure will have to accept that the current system is fatally flawed. That's a tall order, but whatever the outcome, Catlin's pending crusade is a notable attempt to debate and reform what has become a complex, expensive, and inefficient system for detecting performance boosters. A startling figure shows just how costly the current system really is. Last year, USADA charged 38 athletes with doping violations, including some from the BALCO scandal; based on its 2004 expenses for testing, legal costs, research, education, and administration, each violation it discovered cost USADA $320,404—a huge per-person tab.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sits at the top of this pyramid. It was created in the wake of a famous 1998 scandal that dramatically exposed the warts of the old system, in which various sports federations, as well as the Olympics, ran their own anti-doping operations. During that year's Tour de France, French customs officials stopped a car driven by Willy Voet, a masseur for the Festina team, and found a stockpile of EPO. Festina director Bruno Roussel admitted to doping riders, and he, Voet, and a team doctor were charged with drug-law violations and briefly jailed. Festina star Richard Virenque later confessed and was suspended from competition for nine months.

While the scandal threatened to collapse the Tour, it also frightened officials at the International Olympic Committee (IOC). They had long known doping was rampant, but aside from the occasional high-profile enforcement action, like sprinter Ben Johnson's expulsion from the 1988 Seoul Olympics for steroid use, they'd failed to institute a rigorous protocol for catching cheaters.

The following February, then–IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch convened a meeting at the IOC headquarters, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Two days later, officials emerged with a plan to create WADA as an independent anti-doping agency. WADA's 2005 budget is $23 million, half of which comes from the IOC. The rest comes from governments around the world.

Not all sports fall under WADA's jurisdiction, of course. Major League Baseball and the National Football League set their own drug policies, and these leagues have to negotiate terms with their players' unions. But the dozens of sports federations that have signed on to WADA—the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), for example—must abide by its decisions.

WADA establishes banned methods (such as blood infusion) and the roster of prohibited substances, a list of nearly 200 steroids, stimulants, beta-blockers, diuretics, narcotics, and human hormones that can be dispensed as drugs. All active, elite-level WADA athletes are considered to be part of the "testing pool," and at any time they may be required to provide a urine or blood sample—either during competitions or by surprise while they're traveling, training, or at home.

Based in Montreal, WADA is run by a foundation board and its chairman, Canadian lawyer Richard Pound. It does no testing on its own. Rather, it has accredited a global chain of 33 laboratories like Catlin's to conduct doping tests. National anti-doping agencies, like USADA, are responsible for actually collecting samples, requesting tests from labs, and charging and prosecuting athletes. USADA is financed by American taxpayers, who pay about two-thirds of its $11 million annual budget, and the United States Olympic Committee, which pays about a third.

As it goes about its business, USADA often performs surprise sampling, with names chosen by an automated draw. So, for example, an American cyclist training in this country might hear a knock on his door from a USADA doping-control officer. In a typical procedure for male athletes, the officer follows the cyclist into a bathroom, then asks him to raise his shirt and drop his pants so he can get a close look at the athlete's penis. (Cheaters have used bizarre tricks to fake out control officers, including hiding containers of clean urine up their rectums and releasing it through a hidden tube.) The cyclist then urinates into a bottle and divides that sample between two more bottles, labeled A and B. USADA sends these samples to Catlin. The A sample will be tested, the B used to confirm any positive results.

When the same rider shows up for events like the Tour de France, the UCI takes over. It will choose which riders to test—typically the stage winner, the overall leader, and two chosen at random—and what to test for. It then ships the samples to a WADA-approved lab.

Athletes accused of doping can fight the charges by contesting them before a panel of three arbitrators from the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Supreme Court of sports doping. Should a test turn up positive and be confirmed, punishment can range from a warning or suspension to a lifetime ban, depending on the drug, the circumstances, and the athlete's past record.

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