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The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)
WADA's rules demand abundant caution before declaring a test positive, and during my visit to Catlin's lab, I see why. When Allison Evans, who runs many of the EPO tests for Catlin, shows me the results of one test, I think it looks positive. But after applying a statistical analysis, she declares it negative. Catlin says he thinks his lab, owing to caution, exonerates ten guilty EPO users for every one it declares positive. He says he's so fed up with the politics of the test that he's decided not to reapply for a USADA grant that supports the EPO research in his lab. Heid says the whole idea of routine testing for proteins is worrisome. "Analyzing tiny amounts of samples belonging to the protein field gets really complicated," he says.
This bodes ill for WADA's ongoing effort to develop a test for HGH and IGF-1. After a decade of research, experts don't even agree on whether or not a validated, usable HGH test exists. WADA says it does. Catlin and other sources say it doesn't. The test in question may prove useful one day, but Catlin says "there is a big gap between having a test and having a bulletproof test," adding that, as of now, the proposed HGH test results would never withstand a legal appeal. Even if the test did hold up, it suffers from the same flaw as the EPO test—a short time frame of detectability. The next big challenge will be gene doping—a theoretical procedure that's probably years or decades away, whereby genes would be transferred into muscle or bone marrow—which might be impossible to test for. The advance of technology places WADA and USADA in an impossible situation. Both take heat from legislators, for failing to get ahead of the cheaters, and from athletes and their lawyers, who say the rules are burdensome and unfair. Yet they're armed with dime-store budgets and asked to defeat doping even while science creates new avenues for it. Catlin is almost militant in his view that the system is grossly underfinanced. The testing program in his lab runs on about $2 million per year, supported by fees. (The standard steroid panel I watched cost USADA about $82.) Catlin can reinvest some of these proceeds back into the lab, but the rest is turned over to UCLA, which owns the facility. If Catlin wants to do research or buy new machines, he's dependent on grants, mainly from USADA or WADA. He estimates the worldwide research budget at somewhere between $20 million and $25 million per year, about what Barry Bonds will make this year ($22 million) and a pittance compared with the billion-dollar TV deals for major sports. The IOC may be a huge multinational business, but WADA still has to beg money from it, and, Pound says, outside agencies that could kick in, like government health institutes and philanthropists, "are far more interested in finding a cure for cancer or diabetes rather than analyzing urine of perfectly healthy athletes." No wonder Catlin says there's no way to win.
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