cheesebeast
26-02-2006, 12:33
Blood sport: a fight against drugs
Saturday, 25 February 2006
S HORT cuts to success in sport shun all ethics, and the Winter Olympic Games in Turin have provided yet more proof that doping is still very much alive and well and is symptomatic of a systemic problem.
It was inevitable that while my book, Blood Sports, was published only last week, on the eve of the Turin Games and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, fresh incidents would keep adding to the sorry catalogue of cases.
Before the Turin Games even began, 12 athletes were suspended on "suspicion" of blood doping. Their red blood cell levels had exceeded pre-set thresholds.
The latest incident at the Games involved Austrian skiers. The principal character in the scandal, ski coach Walter Mayer, was found to be "loitering" around the Austrian ski team's hotel.
He had been officially banned from future Winter Games after he was implicated in the doping of Austrian athletes at the Salt Lake Games of 2002.
Sources said Italian police had seized blood analysis equipment during the latest raids, including blood-transfusion equipment, syringes, asthma medication and other substances. One Austrian athlete apparently threw a bag containing needles and medicine out of a window.
Mayer was seen scurrying from the scene in a minivan. Back in Austria, trying to elude police, he slammed into a squad car, wrecking both vehicles.
All this had shades of the Greek tragedy that befell Greek sprinters Kosta Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou just before the 2004 Athens Summer Olympic Games. In attempting to avoid drug tests, the pair were involved in a motorcycle crash.
Two Austrian athletes soon followed Mayer home from the Turin Winter Games, fearing a possible two-year jail term under tough new Italian anti-doping laws.
Mayer admitted he had tried to commit suicide by slamming into the police car and has sought treatment at an Austrian psychiatric hospital.
It sounds like a good old Hollywood "cops and robbers", movie but it is all too real that cheating persists in sport and, like caged criminals, the cheats try desperately to escape their captors when about to be exposed.
But no matter whether they are legal or illegal, drugs are now so widespread at the elite sporting level that one wonders whether sport could be sustained without them.
In a survey taken during the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, almost 80 per cent of the 2758 athletes questioned declared using at least one medication or supplement.
More than 500 admitted taking more than five substances and one, who could only be described as a "junkie", admitted taking 26 different concoctions.
The culture is well and truly entrenched in elite sport, just as it is in society's penchant for quick fixes for headaches, insomnia, hyperactive kids, even our sexual woes. For the sporting elite, under- performance equates to what the average citizen calls feeling under the weather - and it needs to be treated.
At a recent World Anti-Doping Agency meeting, Italian researcher and former athletics coach Sandro Donati made this startling observation: of the global sales of EPO (erythropoietin), estimated at almost $12billion, less than $2billion worth was actually used for what it was meant for, treating medical cases. In other words, only one in six doses of EPO was being used legitimately. The rest? Well, we can all speculate where it's ending up.
And don't just think that the "non- medical" use of EPO is for the two-legged athlete. On the eve of the 2001 Melbourne Cup, a Victoria Racing Club official became aware of a "backyard" trainer who had injected a horse with EPO by mistake. Whether the VRC investigated this incident is not known, but one thing is known: it is ridiculously easy to get EPO. Anyone can register online as a trainer (or a fictitious trainer) and get EPO, even Aranesp and the dog blood booster (oxyglobin), delivered to their doorstep.
So now blood doping is as much a part of the landscape as steroids.
But what exactly is blood doping? How has it come to inflict enormous casualties without even appearing to raise eyebrows?
Ask 100 people whether they have heard of steroids being used in sport and maybe two or three will say no. Ask the same 100 whether they have heard about blood doping in sport and maybe two or three will say yes - the rest look at you as if you have two heads
Yet blood doping has claimed many lives, as many as steroid abuse has done since steroids were first used back in the mid- 1950s. Just how many lives is the question.
Between 1987 and 1990, 18 professional cyclists died suddenly and largely without explanation. The suspected cause of these deaths was the release of a new wonder drug, simply referred to as EPO, which had made its way from the medical field to the sporting field.
The consequences of excessive doping with EPO resulted in blood becoming so thick that it induced either fatal heart attacks or strokes or simply caused the heart to stop pumping.
The logic behind cheats using EPO was that it provided more blood and therefore more oxygen, which was great for endurance sports in which steroids were not of much use, as they did not provide what was needed most, oxygen. The same benefit can be obtained by blood transfusion.
But the race to create tests to expose EPO doping was fraught with problems, not least because of the silence of sporting authorities reluctant to admit to the EPO problem because of bad "PR".
For more than a decade nothing was done to weed out this problem, but a test did eventuate at the Sydney Olympics, a combined blood/urine test developed by Australian Institute of Sport scientists and their French counterparts, and it has since nabbed more than 70 blood doping cheats in just five years. By comparison positive doping tests for all drugs at all the Olympics since testing began at the 1968 Mexico Games number about 80 cases.
Unfortunately, as with any new test, the cheats will then look for something new, something that can't be detected. That something came after the Sydney Games and it was the new and more potent version of EPO, called Aranesp, an even more dangerous drug.
The cluster of heart-related deaths of another 10 cyclists between 2003 and 2005 raised suspicions that the cheats had moved from EPO to Aranesp, but few heard about this second wave of deaths, either. Among these was Italian cycling great Marco Pantani.
It is an indictment, perhaps, on society, not just the sporting authorities, that young, fit and healthy athletes are not only prepared to risk being caught for cheating, but many are prepared to die. Are the rewards so great that they are worth dying for?
Even the great Lance Armstrong cannot escape suspicion from blood doping.
There were suggestions that he had doped with EPO in 1999, when urine samples stored from that year were tested for EPO by the national anti-doping laboratory in France for "research" purposes in 2005.
Six of Armstrong's urine samples tested positive for EPO (along with those of six other cyclists), but he said the test was flawed because the samples were too "old". Legally he had nothing to prove, because of the manner of the tests and the way results were exposed in the French press.
And what's around the corner? Unfortunately it looks like more of the same, perhaps only worse, with genetic doping a reality, no longer mere fantasy.
Once doping goes "inside the genes" we may never know who is and who is not doping. The effect may also be permanent and, best of all, mean no need for drugs.
But gene doping may have even more dire consequences, many gene experiments already throwing up unwanted results, like two-headed fish.
Even one head on some athletes is enough, although it would give new meaning to sports like synchronised swimming!
With society drowning in a sea of drugs, the battle to keep them out of sport (two- or four-legged variety) will never stop and may never be won.
Former Australian Institute of Sport scientist Robin Parisotto is the author of Blood Sports. Hardie Grant. 262pp. $24.95.
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=sport&subclass=national&story_id=461714&category=General%20Sport&m=2&y=2006
Saturday, 25 February 2006
S HORT cuts to success in sport shun all ethics, and the Winter Olympic Games in Turin have provided yet more proof that doping is still very much alive and well and is symptomatic of a systemic problem.
It was inevitable that while my book, Blood Sports, was published only last week, on the eve of the Turin Games and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, fresh incidents would keep adding to the sorry catalogue of cases.
Before the Turin Games even began, 12 athletes were suspended on "suspicion" of blood doping. Their red blood cell levels had exceeded pre-set thresholds.
The latest incident at the Games involved Austrian skiers. The principal character in the scandal, ski coach Walter Mayer, was found to be "loitering" around the Austrian ski team's hotel.
He had been officially banned from future Winter Games after he was implicated in the doping of Austrian athletes at the Salt Lake Games of 2002.
Sources said Italian police had seized blood analysis equipment during the latest raids, including blood-transfusion equipment, syringes, asthma medication and other substances. One Austrian athlete apparently threw a bag containing needles and medicine out of a window.
Mayer was seen scurrying from the scene in a minivan. Back in Austria, trying to elude police, he slammed into a squad car, wrecking both vehicles.
All this had shades of the Greek tragedy that befell Greek sprinters Kosta Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou just before the 2004 Athens Summer Olympic Games. In attempting to avoid drug tests, the pair were involved in a motorcycle crash.
Two Austrian athletes soon followed Mayer home from the Turin Winter Games, fearing a possible two-year jail term under tough new Italian anti-doping laws.
Mayer admitted he had tried to commit suicide by slamming into the police car and has sought treatment at an Austrian psychiatric hospital.
It sounds like a good old Hollywood "cops and robbers", movie but it is all too real that cheating persists in sport and, like caged criminals, the cheats try desperately to escape their captors when about to be exposed.
But no matter whether they are legal or illegal, drugs are now so widespread at the elite sporting level that one wonders whether sport could be sustained without them.
In a survey taken during the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, almost 80 per cent of the 2758 athletes questioned declared using at least one medication or supplement.
More than 500 admitted taking more than five substances and one, who could only be described as a "junkie", admitted taking 26 different concoctions.
The culture is well and truly entrenched in elite sport, just as it is in society's penchant for quick fixes for headaches, insomnia, hyperactive kids, even our sexual woes. For the sporting elite, under- performance equates to what the average citizen calls feeling under the weather - and it needs to be treated.
At a recent World Anti-Doping Agency meeting, Italian researcher and former athletics coach Sandro Donati made this startling observation: of the global sales of EPO (erythropoietin), estimated at almost $12billion, less than $2billion worth was actually used for what it was meant for, treating medical cases. In other words, only one in six doses of EPO was being used legitimately. The rest? Well, we can all speculate where it's ending up.
And don't just think that the "non- medical" use of EPO is for the two-legged athlete. On the eve of the 2001 Melbourne Cup, a Victoria Racing Club official became aware of a "backyard" trainer who had injected a horse with EPO by mistake. Whether the VRC investigated this incident is not known, but one thing is known: it is ridiculously easy to get EPO. Anyone can register online as a trainer (or a fictitious trainer) and get EPO, even Aranesp and the dog blood booster (oxyglobin), delivered to their doorstep.
So now blood doping is as much a part of the landscape as steroids.
But what exactly is blood doping? How has it come to inflict enormous casualties without even appearing to raise eyebrows?
Ask 100 people whether they have heard of steroids being used in sport and maybe two or three will say no. Ask the same 100 whether they have heard about blood doping in sport and maybe two or three will say yes - the rest look at you as if you have two heads
Yet blood doping has claimed many lives, as many as steroid abuse has done since steroids were first used back in the mid- 1950s. Just how many lives is the question.
Between 1987 and 1990, 18 professional cyclists died suddenly and largely without explanation. The suspected cause of these deaths was the release of a new wonder drug, simply referred to as EPO, which had made its way from the medical field to the sporting field.
The consequences of excessive doping with EPO resulted in blood becoming so thick that it induced either fatal heart attacks or strokes or simply caused the heart to stop pumping.
The logic behind cheats using EPO was that it provided more blood and therefore more oxygen, which was great for endurance sports in which steroids were not of much use, as they did not provide what was needed most, oxygen. The same benefit can be obtained by blood transfusion.
But the race to create tests to expose EPO doping was fraught with problems, not least because of the silence of sporting authorities reluctant to admit to the EPO problem because of bad "PR".
For more than a decade nothing was done to weed out this problem, but a test did eventuate at the Sydney Olympics, a combined blood/urine test developed by Australian Institute of Sport scientists and their French counterparts, and it has since nabbed more than 70 blood doping cheats in just five years. By comparison positive doping tests for all drugs at all the Olympics since testing began at the 1968 Mexico Games number about 80 cases.
Unfortunately, as with any new test, the cheats will then look for something new, something that can't be detected. That something came after the Sydney Games and it was the new and more potent version of EPO, called Aranesp, an even more dangerous drug.
The cluster of heart-related deaths of another 10 cyclists between 2003 and 2005 raised suspicions that the cheats had moved from EPO to Aranesp, but few heard about this second wave of deaths, either. Among these was Italian cycling great Marco Pantani.
It is an indictment, perhaps, on society, not just the sporting authorities, that young, fit and healthy athletes are not only prepared to risk being caught for cheating, but many are prepared to die. Are the rewards so great that they are worth dying for?
Even the great Lance Armstrong cannot escape suspicion from blood doping.
There were suggestions that he had doped with EPO in 1999, when urine samples stored from that year were tested for EPO by the national anti-doping laboratory in France for "research" purposes in 2005.
Six of Armstrong's urine samples tested positive for EPO (along with those of six other cyclists), but he said the test was flawed because the samples were too "old". Legally he had nothing to prove, because of the manner of the tests and the way results were exposed in the French press.
And what's around the corner? Unfortunately it looks like more of the same, perhaps only worse, with genetic doping a reality, no longer mere fantasy.
Once doping goes "inside the genes" we may never know who is and who is not doping. The effect may also be permanent and, best of all, mean no need for drugs.
But gene doping may have even more dire consequences, many gene experiments already throwing up unwanted results, like two-headed fish.
Even one head on some athletes is enough, although it would give new meaning to sports like synchronised swimming!
With society drowning in a sea of drugs, the battle to keep them out of sport (two- or four-legged variety) will never stop and may never be won.
Former Australian Institute of Sport scientist Robin Parisotto is the author of Blood Sports. Hardie Grant. 262pp. $24.95.
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=sport&subclass=national&story_id=461714&category=General%20Sport&m=2&y=2006