Drugs in Sports | Outside Online

Outside Magazine, July 2005

Page:

The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)


	(Photograph by Jeff Minton)

HOW ATHLETES CHEAT
I pose that question to Hatton, who laughs at the idea that athletes can't beat these tests. "People always say, 'I have always tested clean,' not 'I do not dope,' " she says. "We hear that and giggle." Her reaction confirms what other experts have told me: Dopers evade detection all the time.

Take the case of Tim Montgomery. According to press reports, Montgomery told the BALCO grand jury he used THG.

Testing experts seem certain that athletes who cheat often evade detection. "People always say, 'I have always tested clean,' not 'I do not dope,'" says Caroline Hatton. "We hear that and giggle."

But he has never tested positive, even though he was tested four times in 2001, three in 2002, and five in 2003. Another example is British cyclist David Millar. Though he never failed a drug test in eight years of riding, he admitted in 2004 that he'd used EPO.

THG itself was invisible to testers until Graham mailed the infamous syringe. Making such a designer steroid isn't even difficult. The UCLA lab reverse-engineered its THG sample and determined that its manufacturer had probably taken an existing steroid and bubbled hydrogen gas through it to slightly alter its structure. The ease of such tinkering matters, because Catlin's machines are tuned only to watch for known drugs. Introduce an unknown and the machines can go blind.

Thousands of such combinations are possible, and in a globalized world, these drugs can be made anywhere. In fact, long before BALCO, Catlin argued that clandestine chemists were busily supplying designer steroids to jocks and bodybuilders. Notmany people listened. But all they needed to do was scan the Web, where the underground experts talked about exactly what they were doing. As if to further prove Catlin's argument, another designer steroid, dubbed DMT, was discovered at the U.S.-Canada border in December 2003. Like THG, it was found only because of a tip.

As difficult as finding steroids can be, they're a snap compared with the class of drugs based on natural human proteins. The most famous of these is EPO. Because EPO stimulates the body to make more red blood cells, which carry oxygen, athletes who use it get an endurance boost. This makes it especially popular in cycling, cross-country skiing, and distance running.

Another drug based on a natural human protein, human growth hormone (HGH), joined EPO as a doping agent about ten years ago. As its name implies, HGH helps athletes build muscle and bone, adding strength and power. HGH accomplishes this by stimulating the release of yet another protein, insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1).

These protein drugs are a challenge because they occur naturally in all of us. For more than a decade, testers have been researching ways to tell the difference between natural and artificially introduced proteins. EPO was knocked off first, thanks to a 2000 test developed by scientist Françoise Lasne, of France's National Anti-Doping Laboratory.

The Lasne test is an extremely complex procedure involving a biology lab full of ingredients. It requires nearly three days and dozens of steps, most done by hand. The time factor is one reason why the Tour de France relies more heavily on a simpler hematocrit test, a measure of the volume percentage of red cells in the bloodstream. If a rider's hematocrit exceeds 50, the cyclist will be banned from starting that day.

The Lasne test exploits the difference between natural and exogenous ("out of the body") EPO. When drug companies make EPO, the sugar molecules in it are subtly altered from the natural form. The test measures this difference by using a technique called isoelectric focusing, in which an electric charge sends the EPO scooting through a gelatin slab. Exogenous EPO will stop in a slightly different position than natural EPO. The slab is then blotted, and the blotting material is "developed"—not unlike a photograph. This creates an image of small black blobs aligned in rows. If blobs appear in the range where exogenous EPO is known to stop, that means the athlete doped.

Sounds good, but the test can detect exogenous EPO for only three days after the last time an athlete injected it. Unfortunately for the testers, the performance boost can last several weeks, and new red blood cells can survive for about 120 days. So a cyclist could use EPO, stop four days before a test, and still reap benefits.

This brief window also helps defeat surprise sampling. A doping-control officer has to physically find an athlete to collect a sample. Though athletes are supposed to tell anti-doping authorities where they live and where they'll be, Catlin argues that "any good athlete can wriggle out of that and be somewhere the tester isn't. We are chasing the cheaters around." USADA statistics support Catlin: In 2004, the agency recorded 507 missed tests.

Still, as the case of Tyler Hamilton seems to indicate, some athletes have already decided to shift away from EPO. Hamilton is accused of boosting his red-cell count by transfusing somebody else's blood. Such cheating is detectable because, even if you transfuse blood matched by type—A positive, AB negative, and so on—the blood will have slightly different immune properties from person to person. The test uses a machine called a flow cytometer to sort cells according to these differing properties. But this test has a weakness, too: It can't be used to tell if an athlete has blood-boosted by extracting his own cells during training, storing them, and then injecting them before competitions.

Because there are so many complexities, architects of the anti-doping system may be hurting their cause by trying to keep up with every new technology. For example, in 2003, Kenyan runner Bernard Lagat—later the silver medalist in the 1,500 meters at the 2004 Athens Olympics—was refused entry into the track-and-field world championships after a urine sample from him tested positive for EPO. He denied doping, and his attorney asked German cell biologist Hans Heid to observe his B-sample testing. Lagat's B sample was negative, which didn't surprise Heid. He declared the EPO test "error-prone" and told WADA that "the development of totally new urinary EPO tests should be encouraged and funded."

Heid says WADA authorities told him they knew the test was flawed but were happy to have a test at all. Catlin believes the EPO test was introduced prematurely. WADA clearly saw the need for refinements, too: Last year, four years after the test was first used, WADA issued a refined protocol for performing it.

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.