Cheating athletes know the tricks
In white coats, over bubbling beakers, they would toil in obscure laboratories, creating ever more complex molecules to mimic the muscle-building hormone testosterone.
Some nefarious boy geniuses cooking up the latest designer drug to enhance athletic performances?
Nope.
They were pioneering chemists, working in the first fervour pitch of anabolic steroid science more than four decades ago.
Caught up in the initial thrall of the new steroid field, they created dozens of variations of the artificial male hormone. Unwittingly, they left an extensive menu for modern-day cheaters who are rummaging through their dusty, forgotten papers to find substances to beat an increasingly rigorous drug-testing system.
With accusations cropping up again last week that Tour de France king Lance Armstrong was using a banned blood booster, the ongoing race between cheaters and those trying to catch them has again come into focus. And today, 17 years after sprinter Ben Johnson brought a compendium of anabolic steroid references into the Canadian consciousness, the race is still afoot and the winner far from certain.
"But they are not that clever, " Christiane Ayotte, head of the International Olympic Committee's accredited testing lab in Montreal, says of the modern steroid makers. "It was easy if you think about it."
Ayotte says pharmaceutical researchers working in the 1950s and '60s "just made a race" to synthesize as many testosterone-mimicking molecules as possible.
"What we're observing right now is these (cheating) guys today just looking in that literature," she says, "and they're picking the interesting molecules that were not put on the market by the pharmaceutical industry and having them synthesized somewhere."
Just who these modern chemists are is far from clear. They inhabit a murky underground that largely serves the sweaty gyms and fitness boutiques that have proliferated across the continent. But Ayotte says it's pretty clear the drugs are being sent to China to manufacture in bulk.
While those on the policing side have the same, or better, access to the old steroid literature, Ayotte says they lack the time or funding to construct the drugs themselves and therefore come up with a test for them.
"If I had only that to do, voila," she says, "but there are hearings, testing, arbitrations. There's too many of them and not enough of us."
The modified steroids are often found in so-called nutritional supplements, sold at gyms and health food stores as part of the multibillion-dollar bodybuilding and strength-training businesses. Among the most famous of these goosed supplements is androstenedione, a natural testosterone builder that helped baseball hulk Mark McGwire shatter the single-season home run record in 1998.
Another designer "supplement" known as THG was discovered during last year's infamous Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) investigation. The probe into the California steroid scandal has ensnared several prominent athletes, including baseball superstars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, in its widening net.
While androstenedione and THG are now detectable and banned from most sports, the supplement game is ongoing, says Ayotte, who is now hot on the trail of another "secret" steroid herself.
"They're playing cat-and-mouse games," she says. "They change the structure of a (steroid) molecule and put it on the market in a supplement until the (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration says this is not permitted and then they change the molecule again."
One such supplement on the market is Superdrol, which Ayotte describes as "a potent steroid that should never have been allowed to be distributed for human beings." Until such products are shown to contain steroids, however, they can be legally purchased.
What's more important to elite athletes, however, is that these throwback molecules are undetectable during frequent, mandatory urine tests.
To a large extent, drug tests can only see what they're looking for, and every new steroid Ñ often created simply by twisting inert molecules into different shapes Ñ requires a new test and its own place on a banned substance list. (The IOC's list is the banned substance Bible for most international sports.)
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suggested freezing relevant portions of blood or urine samples until new tests come on line. The threat that athletes will be retroactively disqualified or shamed may act as a deterrent to taking designer drugs now, the agency argues.
Armstrong's purported positive test, reported last week in a French sports journal, suggested the seven-time Tour de France winner had elevated levels of the blood-building agent EPO (erythropoietin) in a urine sample he gave during his 1999 victory. That was before EPO could be properly detected in urine samples. Armstrong's urine Ñ the B sample from that originally negative test Ñ had been frozen until last year, when scientists outside Paris used it for EPO "research."
Dr. Andrew Pipe, former head of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and an acknowledged doping expert, says cycling has been an "incubator" for almost all of the banned substances now used in sports. But the new "designer drugs" are far from the most popular among athletes, no matter what their calibre, most experts say.
Pipe says athletes, whether elite or average, still gravitate most to the "tried and true" drugs that have shown results Ñ and are readily available. He says stanozolol, for which baseball star Rafael Palmeiro recently tested positive almost two decades after Johnson did the same, and blood builders such as EPO are still the substances of choice for those in the know. They just try to hide them better, Pipe says, and the methods used to hide these drugs rely both on masking ingenuity and a precision knowledge of testing schedules, experts say.
Created in the kidneys to boost red blood cell production, EPO is found at predictable levels in healthy men and women. But for testing purposes, these normal levels have been jacked up to cover the elevated concentrations that may well occur naturally in some people.
Cyclists may also inject themselves with saline solution in the time between racing and testing to lower EPO concentrations even further, testimony from several Tour riders has revealed.
Meanwhile, Ayotte says testers are growing more sophisticated in their detection methods.
The problem is, athletes and their handlers are becoming commensurately cagey. For example, it's been found that protease enzymes, which can be easily purchased in powder form from laboratory suppliers, can break down EPO rapidly.
"So they have a powder of protease on their hand and put it in the urine sample, then it can start to digest the EPO," she says.
Some sunscreen and hair-growth creams, smeared on the inside of a sample beaker, can also mask certain substances, Ayotte says. As well, while testing today is supposed to be random and unannounced, and while an athlete's whereabouts is supposed to be known year-round, many elite competitors can predict when they'll be asked to give samples, or hide from any testers who may be looking for them. She says athletes can and often train in far-flung locales, where they know their national testers will not follow.
And cyclists often hide in plain sight, Ayotte says, honing their skills, both athletic and pharmaceutical, at smaller, less affluent events where EPO tests at $300 (all figures U.S.) a shot are not performed. (Comprehensive steroid tests go for $130.)
As for that troubled sport itself, both Ayotte and Pipe say cycling officials should implement pre-race blood-screening procedures, looking for elevated levels of hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying component of blood.
So serious is the EPO crisis in cycling and other endurance sports that Pipe says international testing officials should largely forgo the policing of lesser offences, such as cold remedy use, and use their resources to fight the larger problem.
Indeed, Pipe says Olympic officials should consider dropping cycling from the Games until the sport has shown it can clean up its act.
--Toronto Star
Don't have the link, this was courtesy of Patrick Arnold at BB.com
In white coats, over bubbling beakers, they would toil in obscure laboratories, creating ever more complex molecules to mimic the muscle-building hormone testosterone.
Some nefarious boy geniuses cooking up the latest designer drug to enhance athletic performances?
Nope.
They were pioneering chemists, working in the first fervour pitch of anabolic steroid science more than four decades ago.
Caught up in the initial thrall of the new steroid field, they created dozens of variations of the artificial male hormone. Unwittingly, they left an extensive menu for modern-day cheaters who are rummaging through their dusty, forgotten papers to find substances to beat an increasingly rigorous drug-testing system.
With accusations cropping up again last week that Tour de France king Lance Armstrong was using a banned blood booster, the ongoing race between cheaters and those trying to catch them has again come into focus. And today, 17 years after sprinter Ben Johnson brought a compendium of anabolic steroid references into the Canadian consciousness, the race is still afoot and the winner far from certain.
"But they are not that clever, " Christiane Ayotte, head of the International Olympic Committee's accredited testing lab in Montreal, says of the modern steroid makers. "It was easy if you think about it."
Ayotte says pharmaceutical researchers working in the 1950s and '60s "just made a race" to synthesize as many testosterone-mimicking molecules as possible.
"What we're observing right now is these (cheating) guys today just looking in that literature," she says, "and they're picking the interesting molecules that were not put on the market by the pharmaceutical industry and having them synthesized somewhere."
Just who these modern chemists are is far from clear. They inhabit a murky underground that largely serves the sweaty gyms and fitness boutiques that have proliferated across the continent. But Ayotte says it's pretty clear the drugs are being sent to China to manufacture in bulk.
While those on the policing side have the same, or better, access to the old steroid literature, Ayotte says they lack the time or funding to construct the drugs themselves and therefore come up with a test for them.
"If I had only that to do, voila," she says, "but there are hearings, testing, arbitrations. There's too many of them and not enough of us."
The modified steroids are often found in so-called nutritional supplements, sold at gyms and health food stores as part of the multibillion-dollar bodybuilding and strength-training businesses. Among the most famous of these goosed supplements is androstenedione, a natural testosterone builder that helped baseball hulk Mark McGwire shatter the single-season home run record in 1998.
Another designer "supplement" known as THG was discovered during last year's infamous Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) investigation. The probe into the California steroid scandal has ensnared several prominent athletes, including baseball superstars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, in its widening net.
While androstenedione and THG are now detectable and banned from most sports, the supplement game is ongoing, says Ayotte, who is now hot on the trail of another "secret" steroid herself.
"They're playing cat-and-mouse games," she says. "They change the structure of a (steroid) molecule and put it on the market in a supplement until the (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration says this is not permitted and then they change the molecule again."
One such supplement on the market is Superdrol, which Ayotte describes as "a potent steroid that should never have been allowed to be distributed for human beings." Until such products are shown to contain steroids, however, they can be legally purchased.
What's more important to elite athletes, however, is that these throwback molecules are undetectable during frequent, mandatory urine tests.
To a large extent, drug tests can only see what they're looking for, and every new steroid Ñ often created simply by twisting inert molecules into different shapes Ñ requires a new test and its own place on a banned substance list. (The IOC's list is the banned substance Bible for most international sports.)
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suggested freezing relevant portions of blood or urine samples until new tests come on line. The threat that athletes will be retroactively disqualified or shamed may act as a deterrent to taking designer drugs now, the agency argues.
Armstrong's purported positive test, reported last week in a French sports journal, suggested the seven-time Tour de France winner had elevated levels of the blood-building agent EPO (erythropoietin) in a urine sample he gave during his 1999 victory. That was before EPO could be properly detected in urine samples. Armstrong's urine Ñ the B sample from that originally negative test Ñ had been frozen until last year, when scientists outside Paris used it for EPO "research."
Dr. Andrew Pipe, former head of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and an acknowledged doping expert, says cycling has been an "incubator" for almost all of the banned substances now used in sports. But the new "designer drugs" are far from the most popular among athletes, no matter what their calibre, most experts say.
Pipe says athletes, whether elite or average, still gravitate most to the "tried and true" drugs that have shown results Ñ and are readily available. He says stanozolol, for which baseball star Rafael Palmeiro recently tested positive almost two decades after Johnson did the same, and blood builders such as EPO are still the substances of choice for those in the know. They just try to hide them better, Pipe says, and the methods used to hide these drugs rely both on masking ingenuity and a precision knowledge of testing schedules, experts say.
Created in the kidneys to boost red blood cell production, EPO is found at predictable levels in healthy men and women. But for testing purposes, these normal levels have been jacked up to cover the elevated concentrations that may well occur naturally in some people.
Cyclists may also inject themselves with saline solution in the time between racing and testing to lower EPO concentrations even further, testimony from several Tour riders has revealed.
Meanwhile, Ayotte says testers are growing more sophisticated in their detection methods.
The problem is, athletes and their handlers are becoming commensurately cagey. For example, it's been found that protease enzymes, which can be easily purchased in powder form from laboratory suppliers, can break down EPO rapidly.
"So they have a powder of protease on their hand and put it in the urine sample, then it can start to digest the EPO," she says.
Some sunscreen and hair-growth creams, smeared on the inside of a sample beaker, can also mask certain substances, Ayotte says. As well, while testing today is supposed to be random and unannounced, and while an athlete's whereabouts is supposed to be known year-round, many elite competitors can predict when they'll be asked to give samples, or hide from any testers who may be looking for them. She says athletes can and often train in far-flung locales, where they know their national testers will not follow.
And cyclists often hide in plain sight, Ayotte says, honing their skills, both athletic and pharmaceutical, at smaller, less affluent events where EPO tests at $300 (all figures U.S.) a shot are not performed. (Comprehensive steroid tests go for $130.)
As for that troubled sport itself, both Ayotte and Pipe say cycling officials should implement pre-race blood-screening procedures, looking for elevated levels of hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying component of blood.
So serious is the EPO crisis in cycling and other endurance sports that Pipe says international testing officials should largely forgo the policing of lesser offences, such as cold remedy use, and use their resources to fight the larger problem.
Indeed, Pipe says Olympic officials should consider dropping cycling from the Games until the sport has shown it can clean up its act.
--Toronto Star
Don't have the link, this was courtesy of Patrick Arnold at BB.com