With great fanfare, the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday it plans to test at the 2000 Sydney Olympics for the performance-enhancing substance EPO, which caused the Tour de France scandal in 1998.
The approval of a long-awaited test for erythropoietin (EPO), which aids athletes primarily in endurance events by increasing oxygenation of the blood, likely will discourage its use by Olympians.
It will not, however, offer hope that the upcoming Summer Olympics will be even close to drug-free. Some athletes are believed already to have switched from EPO to a wide array of undetectable related substances, and others are taking undetectable performance-enhancing drugs of different types, notably human growth hormone (hGH).
“None of your readers will live to see a doping-free elite sport,” said Penn State epidemiologist Charles Yesalis, author of several books on doping. “By the year 2010, we won’t even be talking about drugs but gene therapy. We already have engineered more muscular mice.”
After hearing reports of a two-year effort by French and Australian researchers to develop a viable EPO test, a 15-member IOC review group voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the scientific validity of a test that uses a combination of urine and blood samples.
If that decision receives the expected approval from the IOC lawyers, the test will be done randomly and without notice on 600 to 700 Olympic athletes from the Sept. 2 opening of the Sydney Olympic Village to the Games’ Oct. 1 closing.
During the Olympics, the IOC also will conduct 2,000 in-competition tests and 400 random, unannounced out-of-competition tests for banned substances other than EPO. The IOC would not divulge details of the EPO testing process.
Suspicion of widespread doping calls into question nearly all spectacular performances, especially in cases where improvement is sudden and unexpected.
Jacques de Ceaurriz of France, who led a team that developed part of the EPO test, has said EPO levels in urine drop dramatically after three or four days. That would allow an athlete now on EPO to stop using it in time to avoid detection at the Olympics.
IOC spokesman Franklin Servan-Schreiber said the new test could detect EPO use “far enough in the past to where EPO [taken before then] would have no useful effect.” It is most effective used immediately before competition and during extended competition, like the three-week-long Tour de France.
Tour de France officials tried to implement an EPO test based on urine samples in time for this year’s race, which began July 1, but thought the test needed further study. The Tour officials decided instead to freeze urine samples for examination after the testing protocol had been refined to withstand legal challenge. That has created the possibility of overall or stage leaders being disqualified in late October.
To one well-informed skeptic, the IOC’s decision was just another futile move in the Sisyphean task of ending drug use in elite sport.
“After 40 years of disingenuous behavior and cover up, cover up, cover up, I don’t think this will have a major impact,” said Yesalis. “I think the Sydney Games will be just as drug-laden as Games in the past.”
Yesalis rejects the new EPO testing as an IOC public relations ploy, much like the sophisticated machinery (high resolution mass spectrometer) that was to be the “miracle of the Atlanta Olympics four years ago.”
The Atlanta Olympic organizing committee paid $1 million to rent the machinery, but the IOC decided to ignore five positive steroid tests it uncovered because of “technical difficulties.” According to Don Catlin, an IOC doping sub-commission member and head of the anti-doping lab at UCLA, there were 10 to 20 cases of athletes found using prohibited substances, all also produced naturally by the body, for which “we don’t have criteria to call something positive.”
“And that doesn’t even begin to address things like hGH, IGF1 [Insulin-like Growth Factor], testosterone gels and creams and designer drugs like perfluorocarbon [synthetic blood], none of which can be tested for,” Yesalis said.
IGF1, not yet approved for human use, is a protein believed to build muscle and reduce fat.
There also is considerable controversy about the efficacy of testing for detectable drugs.
Seven of the nine announced positives at Atlanta were thrown out on appeal. Two were called inadvertent use, and five were dropped because the stimulant involved, bromantan, was not considered a significant performance-enhancer. It is likely that bromantan was being used for its properties as a masking agent, to cover traces of other drugs.
“There were more than just five cases of bromantan use,” Catlin said.
Several suspensions for use of nandrolone, an anabolic steroid involved in dozens of positive results over the past few years, have recently been overturned for a variety of reasons. The most prominent athlete exonerated is Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey, winner of seven Olympic medals, who was banned a year ago but reinstated in June when an appeals panel found basic scientific errors in the testing of her sample.
Among athletes whose performances this season have raised eyebrows are swimmers Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands and Dara Torres of the United States. De Bruijn, 27 this month, has gone from a mid-level elite swimmer to a world record-holder in the past 14 months, and Torres, 33, is swimming career-best times after returning to the sport in 1999 from a seven-year retirement. Neither has ever had a positive drug test.
Wade Exum, the former anti-doping chief of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and two-time Olympic discus thrower Werner Reiterer of Australia both have recently alleged that the national Olympic committees of their countries engaged in systematic encouragement and coverup of doping.
Two weeks ago, the most powerful sports official of the former East Germany, Manfred Ewald, was given a 22-month suspended prison sentence for his role in the country’s state-run doping program. He was found guilty of contributing to the bodily harm of athletes by forcing women to take banned drugs with side effects known to be harmful.
Yesalis says the threat of EPO testing already may have led athletes to return to “traditional” blood doping. That involves taking blood from one’s own body, centrifuging it to increase the concentration of red blood cells, then returning it to the body before competition.
Some U.S. cyclists admitted to blood doping during the 1984 Olympics, when it was not yet banned. The only test for blood doping is by inference from determining hematocrit (percentage of red blood cells in the blood).
