Banning doping in sport: An impossible dream: CrossCurrents Winter 2004/05

CrossCurrents

The Last Word

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Over the past several years, the fight against doping in sport has picked up steam. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WAD) was created in 1999; a new World Anti-Doping Code has been signed and an international treaty on doping is being negotiated through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-zation. There is more out-of-competition testing and improved in-competition testing. At the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, this past summer, a record number of athletes tested positive. Track and field times were sluggish - fueling speculation that previous records had been set with the help of performance-enhancing drugs. Is the fight against doping finally achieving some success?

I believe the answer is no. As long as sport remains part of a highly commercialized entertainment industry, the temptation to dope remains enormous. We can test athletes more often, but there will continue to be a time lag between the development of new doping techniques and the ability to test for them. Moreover, issues of privacy and cost may overwhelm the anti-doping authorities.

The Olympics began as an amateur event. Today, we have full-time athletes - this is their livelihood, their career, the goal toward which they devote so much of their lives. The pressure to succeed is enormous. A gold medal can provide athletes with millions of dollars in sponsorships, and top athletes do everything they can to improve their performance. They carefully control their diet; a survey by Brian Corrigan and Ray Kazlaukas at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, showed that athletes were ingesting as many as 20 different supplements a day (many of which may be contaminated with forbidden substances). Athletes buy the best equipment they can, including, in some cases, personal altitude tents to increase their red-blood cell count. When the difference between a gold medal and fourth place is 0.04 seconds - as it was in the men's 100m dash in Athens, athletes understandably try to gain any edge.

Medicine provides athletes with an array of options - anabolic steroids to increase muscle mass, substances such as erythropoeitin (EPO) to improve oxygen delivery, human growth hormone to promote growth. In the near future, scientists warn, new techniques such as gene therapy and stem cell transplantation may be used to enhance athletic performance. wada is encouraging researchers working on these substances and procedures (all of which have legitimate medical uses) to include markers in them that will make testing easier.

But in the meantime, doping agencies have a hard time keeping up with substances already on the market. It takes several years before substances are added to the anti-doping code, and there has been a 10- to 20-year lag between the use of substance by athletes and the development of tests. Anabolic steroids were widely used to improve sporting performance in the 1950s and 1960s, but the first tests didn't take place until the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Quebec. epo first came on the market in the 1980s, and is believed to be responsible for a number of cyclists' deaths in the late 1980s. Officials first tested for EPO at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. A synthetic version of human growth hormone was first marketed in the 1980s, and its use among athletes spread. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) claimed to be testing for it at the Athens Olympics, but failed to release any details, and reported no positive tests.

Designer drugs pose another problem. In June 2003, the United States Anti-Doping Agency received a used syringe from an anonymous coach who claimed that athletes were using a new steroid produced by Victor Conte's Balco Labs in California. In September, Don Caitlin's UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory confirmed that the substance in the syringe was tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a new anabolic steroid, similar to others already on the banned list. The lab found that "several" athletes at the 2003 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships had the substance in their urine. Conte and four others have been charged with distributing anabolic steroids.

Even without worrying about new substances and designer drugs, testing is expensive. According to WADA, a blood test for epo costs $60US and a urine test costs $400US. Sports scholar Barrie Houlihan reported in 2001 that an out-of-competition test can cost between $500 and $1,000US. In 2002, wada carried out more than 4,500 out-of-competition tests in 56 countries. This sounds impressive, but more than 13,000 athletes competed in the 2000 Summer Olympics and 2002 Winter Olympics.

Clearly, far more needs to be done to ensure that athletes are tested regularly. But how can many countries, especially lesser-developed countries, afford to regularly subject their athletes to out-of-competition tests? Moreover, there are growing concerns about the invasiveness of testing; athletes must inform sporting authorities of their whereabouts at all times and regularly subject themselves to supervised urine and blood tests. World-class athletes are treated much like criminals on parole. While many are willing to subject themselves to such restrictions, there are legitimate reasons to be wary of such intensive surveillance.

Over the past several years, WADA, the IOC and several national anti-doping agencies have stepped up the fight against doping. But unless they change the nature of sport itself, they are unlikely to meet with long-term success. Athletes driven to succeed will continue to dope, and advancements in medicine will make it possible for them to do so. Many athletes believe (with some justification) that their fellow competitors are doping, making their own decision to dope seem less egregious. To truly combat doping, we need to change the nature of sport - making it less commercial, less professional and less all-consuming for the athletes. Record times will suffer, but the athletes have much to gain in terms of improved health and more balanced lives.

Catherine Carstairs is an assistant professor of history at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. Her upcoming book discusses the history of illegal drug use in Canada.

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