Drugs in Sports | Outside Online

Outside Magazine, July 2005

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The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)

A MODEST PROPOSAL
So now, at 67, with his career winding down, Catlin has decided it's time to act. He believes a major upheaval in the anti-doping system is the last best hope for making drugs in sports nothing more than an insignificant irritation. He thinks he's come up with just such an approach, and he's decided to push hard for it in hopes of capitalizing on the recent surge of interest in the issue.

He calls his idea the Volunteer Program. It's driven by the concept of using science, testing, and free-will participation to prove that athletes who sign up are clean, based on thorough biological profiles of their bodies. Catlin would use these profiles to create a

Catlin would try to prove that athletes who take part in his system are clean. Participants would submit to exhaustive biological profiles, for comparison with cutting-edge data on what is and isn't possible in the human body.

set of "biomarkers" that show what is and isn't normal for each athlete. Armed with these indicators, he would institute ongoing, voluntary checkups for any athlete who chooses to participate. In return for entering the Volunteer Program, athletes would receive recognition as members. The public, press, sponsors, and governing bodies would be assured that members of the program were not doping.

In this, the idea resembles one floated in the early nineties by Pat Connolly and Charles Yesalis, a Penn State health-policy professor and scathing critic of the current drug-testing system. They suggested creating a Team Clean. But Catlin would bolster the concept by deploying the latest research and technology to make clean a meaningful word.

First he wants to mount a research project using ordinary weekend athletes, such as college students. A number of biomarkers—blood pressure, cholesterol, total testosterone, hemoglobin, IGF levels, and many others—would be monitored and plotted over time to see how they vary between people and within each person's body. What happens, for example, during a long trip? How does having the flu affect biomarkers? Or doing a workout? The idea is to create a fixed portrait of each athlete so each can serve as his or her own standard.

Then, in a move sure to be controversial, the test subjects would be given safe doses of performance-enhancing drugs for a limited time. Their biomarkers would be monitored to see how the physiological portrait changed.

Using this data, Catlin wants to try the Volunteer Program with one sport, like weight lifting, which has the advantage of a small population that's tested frequently. If it works there, he wants to expand it. Athletes who volunteered would establish a pattern of historical data on their own physiology through frequent biomarker testing. Samples from that testing would be stored and used as reference materials.

For instance, if the monitoring shows a spike in a weight lifter's IGF-1, that probably means he's doping with growth hormone. At that point, Catlin says, a doctor would call the lifter in and say, " 'Joe, we've been following you for six months and suddenly your IGF is way up. I'm worried. Let's talk.'

"You'd approach it as a physician does a patient," Catlin continues. " 'Is something going on in your life? I am worried you are taking growth hormone, and you know we do not have a bulletproof HGH test, but we do have these blood markers, so I want you in here every week. We are going to track you, and I want to see that go down, and if it doesn't go down, a committee of your peers, other athletes, is goingto want to talk to you.' "

That's it. No punishment. If Joe doesn't agree, or his levels stay high, he would revert to the old system and take his chances. But he'd also lose the built-in absolution of the Volunteer Program.

Catlin's explanation reveals two critical ingredients of the program. First, he hopes to rejuvenate the role of the sports physician, to make doctors the system's eyes and ears. (Currently, some athletes avoid physicians for fear of being discovered; this endangers their health.) Second, Catlin believes the enforcement of the program's rules must be left to a panel of athletes. His plan makes athletes the judges, not USADA or WADA.

Under the program, there's no need to prove an athlete is shooting up HGH, so you don't need a complicated test for it. Because athletes booted out of the program won't be banned from competing, there will be no subsequent legal battles. Authorities will never again have to worry about unknown steroids floating around the sports netherworld, because Catlin isn't looking for specific causes—drugs—but instead for their effects. Yet another advantage, Catlin argues, is that fewer legal battles and complex drug tests should mean the Volunteer Program will be much cheaper to operate once the initial research is finished. And an athlete like Lance Armstrong—dogged by doping whispers throughout much of his career—would have the opportunity to trumpet a definitively clean bill of health.

Still, some criticisms of the program are obvious. For starters, the plan seems to rely too much on voluntary actions, and you wonder how it would work with a superstar athlete who says, "I'm clean, but I decline to take part."

This is a risk, of course, but imagine a future peloton of cyclists. Some wear a logo showing they're part of the Volunteer Program; some do not. The press, sponsors, and public would surely question any athletes who did not sign up. What are those riders hiding? Why wouldn't they want to be declared clean? Catlin believes social pressure would lead athletes to volunteer. Another area of concern is the reliance on doctors. After all, it was the Festina doctor who supervised the team's EPO use in 1998. But while Catlin hopes to make physicians the front line, their patients will still be checked by independent biomarker testing.

That testing will be rigorous and frequent at first, then will become more sporadic over time. Athletes would have to be available for sampling to the point that Catlin would hand each one a cell phone that he or she would be obliged to answer. Early on, there would still be drug testing, too, to ensure every athlete entering the program wasn't using. Over time, though, the drug testing would diminish in favor of the biomarkers.

"Cheaters just aren't going to join this," Catlin says. "They'd be crazy to."

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