Protect the Innocent

The real doping scandal: little protection for the clean athlete

Saturday, February 2, 2008, 12:00 am
One of the first major international sports doping scandals happened in 1983 at the Pan American Games. It gave the sporting public a graphic view of what, decades later, has mushroomed into one of the most vexing problems faced by sports administrators and athletes. In 1983 Pat Connolly was coaching Evelyn Ashford, who would win the gold medal in the 100 meters in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Back then Ashford was one of the few female athletes who could win against women athletes from East Germany, who it was later proven were aided by a state-sponsored doping program.  Connolly was enraged that because Evelyn beat these “shemales,” Ashford was suspected of also being on a doping program.  She sought out Dr. Don Catlin, who then was in the process of starting up the Paul Ziffren drug testing laboratory at UCLA to do the testing for the 1984 Games.

Testing for performance-enhancing drugs was in its infancy, just beginning to grapple with the abundance of pharmaceutical products available to athletes. Yet early on Catlin recognized something that was at the core of the drug problem in sports; the clean athletes had to believe that their competitors were clean to have faith in the testing system.  Catching athletes who used drugs was only one small element of a successful anti-doping system. Catching the cheats was not a triumph, it was a failure. “I consider each positive test to be a failure of the system,” Catlin said. “It demonstrates that we failed to deter that athlete from using drugs.”

Testing was only effective as a deterrent, not as some all-powerful tool that would scrub the sport clean. Catlin recognized that some athletes would be deterred by a fear of the shame of testing positive, but others would merely view passing a drug test as another challenge to overcome in the pursuit of Olympic medals.

Steve Plasencia, an Olympian at 10,000 meters in 1988 and 1992, ratified Catlin’s assessment. He pointed to a handout that the athletes received from the USOC. It listed the banned substances and practices that could result in a failed drug test. “It’s not a banned list,” he said. “It’s just a guide for what you can’t take.” Athletes would use it, he said, to determine what substances they could take that would have the same effect as those listed. It wasn’t a deterrent, but rather a manual on how to dope and not get caught.

Where can I get some?

This fact hit home rather dramatically in 1988 when sprinter Ben Johnson was busted for using the steroid stanozolol at the Olympics in Seoul. Shortly after that, Dr. Helen Kelly, a pediatrician in a St. Paul, MN, suburb, got a visit from a mother and her son, who was a high school wrestler. “Can you prescribe some stanozolol for my son?” the mother asked. Dr. Kelly refused, but her experience wasn’t unique. The message from Johnson’s bust was not that if you cheat you will be caught, but rather, “This stuff works! Where can I get some?”

Detecting drugs in an athlete’s body fluids is akin to finding a needle in a haystack at times, Catlin recognized. If you knew the area where the needle was, you’d have a better chance of finding it, but with the hundreds of doping compounds the labs had to test for, the task was complicated and limited at best. As the scientists got better at finding the “needles,” however, athletes would move toward substances that were harder to detect. Endogenous substances, those that mirrored hormones produced by the body such as testosterone or recombinant erythropoietin (rHuEPO), required more sophisticated tests and different machines than the labs used for their other testing.

The mass spectrometers and other equipment necessary for an up-to-date sports doping lab are not cheap; they can easily go for $500,000 or more apiece. And each test they perform on each sample is just a single shot at hitting a bull’s-eye of finding a banned substance. There had to be a better way, Catlin thought. Using his own medical training—he had worked at Walter Reed Medical Center prior to coming to UCLA—he recognized that longitudinal testing, comparing changes in an athlete’s hormone and other physiological variables, gave more than a brief snapshot of what an athlete may or may not be taking.  What if there was a system that could create physiological profiles for each athlete? That would monitor changes and give a clearer picture of what was happening in each athlete’s body than a single beaker of urine or vial of blood? Athletic profiling, Catlin believes, is the answer to the dilemma that plagued Connolly and Ashford, a system with the potential to protect the reputation of clean athletes, while at the same time also detecting those who are abusing drugs for performance enhancement or who may have an undiagnosed disease or condition that presents itself in altered physiological markers. 

Taken to the next level, the information gathered on athletes could also serve as a repository for scientists who wanted to investigate the mysteries of human performance. Do athletes really need nutritional supplements to stay healthy under the physical demands of modern day training? How does the body respond to 130-, 150-, 200-mile weeks? What are the physiological markers of overtraining? The huge data base that would be created by the collection of athlete’s body fluids could be invaluable both to the athletes and scientists interested in unlocking sports secrets.

The carrot and the stick

Catlin characterizes his proposal as sort of a “carrot and stick” scenario. the carrot being what amounted to a form of universalhealthcare for athletes, the stick being that you had better not be using performance enhancing drugs because the chances of your being caught increased exponentially. As with all things in sport and life, however, the roadblock to such a system being implemented begins with a familiar question: How much will it cost? Would it replace the existing testing system or merely be an added cost on top of it? Would the athletes cooperate? Though Catlin has attempted to sell governing bodies, sports federations and testing agencies on the merits of his idea, he has had only limited success.

Athletes, who would be the greatest beneficiaries of such a system, are often notoriously averse to becoming the equivalent of “lab rats” or human guinea pigs. Dave Costill created and ran at Ball State University perhaps the most prominent exercise physiology lab and incubator. Hundreds, if not thousands of athletes were studied at the lab or by the lab’s scientists or those who graduated from there and went on to work and/or develop labs of their own. Many athletes, Costill said, didn’t want to know the physiological “secrets” sports scientists might be able to uncover.

Sports federations, testing agencies, and governing bodies are all strapped for cash and have invested what they have for anti-doping in the current “crime and punishment” model of drug testing. With the seemingly never-ending procession of doping scandals, however, variations on Catlin’s concept are making their way into the testing system. Last fall, the IAAF held an anti-doping symposium in Lausanne. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency had its yearly scientific meeting right before the IAAF symposium and many of the scientists and administrators stayed on to participate.  The consensus at the symposium, which was also attended by current and former athletes, such as Paula Radcliffe, Debbie Ferguson, Mike Conley, and Frankie Fredericks, was that they wanted both tougher sanctions and more comprehensive testing. The scientists and the IAAF said that testing was now moving more toward profiling, gathering physiological data on the athletes and targeting those who exhibited suspicious values for increased testing and scrutiny. This is still a crime and punishment model, but moving toward a more focused approach on doing more effective, directed strategy than the currently employed “shotgun” mode where you “shoot” at a lot of samples and hope to get a hit. 

Cycling, which has been one of the sports most plagued by scandals, has also dramatically altered its approach to the problem. Many of the teams have programs where each cyclist is examined regularly in much the way Catlin proposed. Longitudinal data is gathered and analyzed. Those who are caught with abnormal values are dismissed. Perhaps more importantly, however, the UCI, cycling’s governing body, has called for the teams to put a portion of the riders’ salaries toward a fund to support drug testing research and development. It is one of the missing pieces that, if it catches on, could have a major impact, especially if it spreads to the National Football League (NFL) or Major League Baseball (MLB) where the amount athletes are paid far outstrips what Olympic sports stars can earn.

Golfer Tiger Woods, for example, won more than USADA’s entire yearly budget when he won the PGA year ending tournament championship events in 2007. Baseball promised a grant of nearly half a million dollars to Catlin’s lab to investigate the development of a urine test for Human Growth Hormone. If the entertainment sports kicked in more of their earnings toward the anti-doping effort, much of the financial barrier toward developing a more comprehensive approach to the sports doping problem would be alleviated. And the benefits are there for the entertainment sports as well. The NFL has come under congressional scrutiny for how it treats its former athletes with disability issues or lingering medical conditions. Concussions in some of the sports is a major medical issue.

An organized approach to collect, analyze and work with the findings of medical and physiological studies on these athletes would be welcomed by the players’ unions and could potentially help alleviate some of the medical issues. More comprehensive testing in these sports could also remove the suspicions that surround current home run king, Barry Bonds, and the integrity of the records in baseball. Most sports organizations do not respond to issues, such as performance-enhancing drug use or criminal behavior, until a scandal explodes into the headlines.


Preventative medicine


Like preventive medicine, treating the root of the problem helps prevent the disease or the spread of the disease. And the root of doping in sport is often the belief of the athletes that “everybody is doing it.” That in order to get to the top in sports, and achieve the financial security that often comes with it, you have to find an “edge,” a shortcut, and/or something to aid your performance. This has been the other hidden message delivered by the drug busts, such as that of Ben Johnson, or the admissions of drug use from athletes, such as Marion Jones. The inability of the current testing system to provide athletes with the equivalent of the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” that they are drug free simply fuels suspicion and speculation about any athlete who shows marked improvement or has an outstanding performance.

Kara Goucher, who won a bronze medal at 10,000 meters in Osaka last summer and then beat Paula Radcliffe at the Great North half marathon in September, lamented that people probably suspect her now. She said that she and husband Adam used to constantly talk about the subject of who was using what. Goucher even told family members, “I’ll probably never win a medal because I’m not doing (drugs).” Upon moving to Portland in 2004, new coach Alberto Salazar finally got her to shake that mentality.

“It was just so negative,” she said. “All it did was limit what we thought we were capable of doing.” For others the burden is even harder to bear. During an NPR Talk of the Nation radio call-in program on the subject of drugs in sports in October of 2007, a caller who identified herself as Catherine, a former high jumper and pentathlete who competed for UC-Berkeley 30 years ago, said that she quit the sport rather than do what she was being told she had to do to compete at the elite level. “This is the untold story about the thousands of men and women who just drop out,” she said. “Those drugs work.  They really are amazing.” She said she was engaged to a male athlete who was busted for doing drugs and extradited to Canada, and that he was part of a “huge contingent” of athletes who believed you had to dope.

That was 30 years ago and the pressure on athletes has grown exponentially. Not only have products available for performance enhancement increased and with them the suspicion that “everybody is doing it,” but so too have the spoils of winning. In blogs posted on, U.S. sprinters Lauryn Williams and Sanya Richards expressed their own dismay at the reactions to Marion Jones’ doping revelations. Marion, they said, owed it to the sport to not hide from her past, but to come clean and talk about how she made the decisions she made and what role others, such as her coaches, played in those decisions. In essence, they suggested it was Jones’ responsibility to help others understand how someone as talented as Jones gave in to the temptation to dope; because only by understanding how it happens can those trying to prevent it find ways to intervene, perhaps help others not to make the same mistakes.

Athletes who have been caught doping are demonized. They are branded as cheats or worse, and little effort is expended on rehabilitation. Few athletes who are caught cooperate with the anti-doping groups to help them track down those who supply the drugs, get at the supply chain. Standard practice for those who are caught is to simply continue to deny what they were convicted of doing.

The Scarlet Letter






