Drugs in Sports | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine, July 2005

Page:

The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)


	TOOL OF THE TRADE: a mass spectrometer, used to identify suspect substances (Jeff Minton)

INSIDE A DRUG LAB
Catlin's lab is the business end of this system, and his team is exquisitely good at finding drugs on the WADA list. The facility has handled about 300,000 tests over the past 21 years, and it has never produced a false positive. If Catlin says you've doped, you've doped.

Approaching the lab from the outside, you wouldn't know to be impressed. It's housed in a drab off-campus building that looks like a converted Quonset hut, and it sits next door to an auto-repair shop. Just inside the front door, there's a tiny reception foyer where I wait for Caroline Hatton, a forty-something Ph.D. chemist who helped organize the lab and who will escort me through the complete cycle of a drug test. While I wait, a UPS man arrives with a load of boxes. A Huggies carton sits right on top, so mundane as to be incongruously funny—inside are several of that morning's urine samples.

Hatton appears and we walk back to the large, equipment-jammed lab, where we watch technician Yvonne Chambers heft the Huggies carton onto her work table, slice it open, remove several smaller boxes, unseal them, and lift out two bottles marked A and B. They come with a form identifying the sample by gender and sport, with a list of tests to be performed. The sample belongs to a male weight lifter who falls under the jurisdiction of USADA. There's no name; he's just a number. During A-stage tests, Catlin's lab never knows the identity of the athlete.

Chambers labels each bottle for tracking purposes. Using a hand pipette, she places some of the A sample in smaller glass tubes, each for use in a separate test. While Chambers works, Hatton explains that the B sample will be stored, to be opened only if the A is positive. For a doping charge to stick, both A and B must be positive. Under the rules, an athlete has the right to observe B-sample testing or send a representative. When this happens, the athlete is first ushered into a waiting room across the hall from Catlin's office and shown the B sample.

Hatton, a small, thin woman, tells me she once met with a male athlete in that room. When she handed him the B sample, she recalls, "he dropped his bottle accidentally on purpose, but it failed to break. After a few seconds of stunned silence from both of us, he picked it up, then smashed it on the floor." Incidents like that explain the taped line on the lab floor around every workstation. Witnesses to B-sample testing are forbidden to cross it.

The lab offers a package of tests for the most commonly abused steroids, like nandrolone and stanozolol. Since the lab's decoding of THG, the standard workup has included it as well. USADA also wants this sample tested for such things as human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone women generate when pregnant. Dopers sometimes use it to prevent their testicles from shriveling—a side effect of taking steroids.

As the sample moves through various stations, the urine is processed, or "derivatized," so it can be put through a gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry machine, known as a GC/MS. The steps include several refining and filtering procedures that reduce the sample's volume to a tiny amount of liquid at the bottom of a bullet-shaped vial.

This vial is loaded onto the carousel of a GC/MS, which is about the size of a large microwave oven. The machine heats the sample to between 284 and 356 degrees Fahrenheit, turning it into a gas. The gas is driven through a column, a coiled silica tube a quarter of a millimeter in diameter. As the gas moves through the coil, the various ingredients in urine physically separate like school kids marching single file.

Next, the urine's components enter the mass-spectrometer portion of the machine. This device measures the atomic weight, or mass, as well as the prevalence of various atoms or molecules, and it scans the components one at a time. Since every molecule has a signature molecular weight, the machine can create a personal snapshot of each, depicted as peaks on a computer readout. Years of experimentation have yielded a collection of telltale peaks for drugs of interest and their by-products.

Notably, the procedure I'm watching wouldn't work for THG. By luck or intent, the steroid's designer—whose presumed identity is widely known but who hasn't been publicly named by investigators—created a molecule that disintegrates when heated, so using a GC/MS destroys it, making it undetectable. Instead, the lab has to use a related technique, liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry, which analyzes the material in a liquid state. Both GC/MS and LC/MS are accurate to within one part per billion.

Seeing Catlin's team at work is impressive, but the experience also raises a question. The people here clearly know how to find drugs. A complex international network has been set up to collect samples from athletes. The whole operation looks like a pretty tight net. So why can't it work?

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.