Cheaters can't be stopped,It's easy to beat the system

[Mirco]

Interesting article
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The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports
Cheaters can't be stopped. Testing costs a fortune. It's shockingly easy to beat the system. The drug cops are perpetually playing catch-up. Says who? Drug-testing expert Don Catlin, that's who. He's the doping detective who helped break the BALCO scandal wide open—and the man who's about to launch a radical new campaign to finally solve the problem.

By Brian Alexander
I KEEP WAITING FOR DR. DON CATLIN TO SOUND THRILLED, or at least mildly pleased, about the mushrooming furor over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Catlin, after all, helped break the now-infamous BALCO doping scandal from this very office, a small, dark, paper-strewn space inside the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory. The lab is one of the world's top facilities for analyzing biological samples from athletes to detect the use of banned substances like anabolic steroids, the blood-oxygen booster erythropoetin (EPO), and scores of other prohibited drugs that aid performance.

But Catlin—a tall, balding, 67-year-old M.D. with a handsomely craggy face—just frowns when I prod him. He sips from an old coffee mug and says the current media blitz reminds him of every other time doping has hit the news: There's a lot of noise, and yet doping persists. He thinks about this a moment and then issues a bleak verdict on the drug-policing system in which he's toiled for the past 25 years.

"People are following this old model—run 'em down, chase 'em, find 'em, assume they are guilty, drag them into testing," he says. "And athletes still get away with stuff, and I maintain you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you."

Millions of dollars' worth of high-tech gear is whirring all around him. Beyond these walls there's an entire international bureaucracy devoted to catching cheaters. If Catlin is right, and all that won't stop doping, the sports world has an even bigger credibility problem than most of us realize.
And sports definitely has a problem, what with the recent congressional hearings about Major League Baseball's steroid scandal and lingering suspicions that many events—from the Olympics to the Tour de France—are tainted by cheating. In the past two years alone, U.S. anti-doping authorities have uncovered 77 violations. Most recently, homegrown cycling fans suffered a major blow when Tour stalwart Tyler Hamilton was hit with a two-year suspension after allegedly transfusing another person's blood into his body in an effort to boost endurance.
In response, sports and legislative leaders are piling on bigger punishments for doping offenders and demanding ramped-up testing. But Catlin is convinced more of the same won't help, and his voice can't be ignored: He's an insider who knows all about what science can and can't do to stop doping.

More recently, Catlin has played a starring role in the BALCO case, the biggest scandal of them all and a strong indicator that, as Catlin has long argued, there are labs out there secretly working to help cheaters outfox the doping police

At first, Catlin was encouraged by the busts, but now he believes BALCO only proved what he already suspected: Doping has gone big-time, and the current anti-doping regime can't hope to stop it. "The system has failed to deal with the problem," he declares. "And it will fail now."
Catlin has no intention of giving up, though. Instead, he's decided to mount a campaign to radically change the way sports go about fighting drugs—an idea that he's revealing publicly for the first time in Outside. Catlin's vision is to replace the current law-enforcement model—in which all athletes are treated as suspects who are monitored and tested to find evidence of specific drug use—with a reward model, one driven by a new voluntary system that, he hopes, would enable officialdom to actually prove that the athletes who take part in it are clean.
As we'll see, there are serious questions about this scheme's practicality, and Catlin knows that, for his idea to gain traction, sports leaders and drug testing's entrenched power structure will have to accept that the current system is fatally flawed. That's a tall order, but whatever the outcome, Catlin's pending crusade is a notable attempt to debate and reform what has become a complex, expensive, and inefficient system for detecting performance boosters. A startling figure shows just how costly the current system really is. Last year, USADA charged 38 athletes with doping violations, including some from the BALCO scandal; based on its 2004 expenses for testing, legal costs, research, education, and administration, each violation it discovered cost USADA $320,404—a huge per-person tab.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sits at the top of this pyramid. It was created in the wake of a famous 1998 scandal that dramatically exposed the warts of the old system, in which various sports federations, as well as the Olympics, ran their own anti-doping operations. During that year's Tour de France, French customs officials stopped a car driven by ***** Voet, a masseur for the Festina team, and found a stockpile of EPO. Festina director Bruno Roussel admitted to doping riders, and he, Voet, and a team doctor were charged with drug-law violations and briefly jailed. Festina star Richard Virenque later confessed and was suspended from competition for nine months.
While the scandal threatened to collapse the Tour, it also frightened officials at the International Olympic Committee (IOC). They had long known doping was rampant, but aside from the occasional high-profile enforcement action, like sprinter Ben Johnson's expulsion from the 1988 Seoul Olympics for steroid use, they'd failed to institute a rigorous protocol for catching cheaters.
The following February, then–IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch convened a meeting at the IOC headquarters, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Two days later, officials emerged with a plan to create WADA as an independent anti-doping agency. WADA's 2005 budget is $23 million, half of which comes from the IOC. The rest comes from governments around the world.
Not all sports fall under WADA's jurisdiction, of course. Major League Baseball and the National Football League set their own drug policies, and these leagues have to negotiate terms with their players' unions. But the dozens of sports federations that have signed on to WADA—the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), for example—must abide by its decisions.
WADA establishes banned methods (such as blood infusion) and the roster of prohibited substances, a list of nearly 200 steroids, stimulants, beta-blockers, diuretics, narcotics, and human hormones that can be dispensed as drugs. All active, elite-level WADA athletes are considered to be part of the "testing pool," and at any time they may be required to provide a urine or blood sample—either during competitions or by surprise while they're traveling, training, or at home.
Based in Montreal, WADA is run by a foundation board and its chairman, Canadian lawyer Richard Pound. It does no testing on its own. Rather, it has accredited a global chain of 33 laboratories like Catlin's to conduct doping tests. National anti-doping agencies, like USADA, are responsible for actually collecting samples, requesting tests from labs, and charging and prosecuting athletes. USADA is financed by American taxpayers, who pay about two-thirds of its $11 million annual budget, and the United States Olympic Committee, which pays about a third.
As it goes about its business, USADA often performs surprise sampling, with names chosen by an automated draw. So, for example, an American cyclist training in this country might hear a knock on his door from a USADA doping-control officer. In a typical procedure for male athletes, the officer follows the cyclist into a bathroom, then asks him to raise his shirt and drop his pants so he can get a close look at the athlete's penis. (Cheaters have used bizarre tricks to fake out control officers, including hiding containers of clean urine up their rectums and releasing it through a hidden tube.) The cyclist then urinates into a bottle and divides that sample between two more bottles, labeled A and B. USADA sends these samples to Catlin. The A sample will be tested, the B used to confirm any positive results.
When the same rider shows up for events like the Tour de France, the UCI takes over. It will choose which riders to test—typically the stage winner, the overall leader, and two chosen at random—and what to test for. It then ships the samples to a WADA-approved lab.
Athletes accused of doping can fight the charges by contesting them before a panel of three arbitrators from the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Supreme Court of sports doping. Should a test turn up positive and be confirmed, punishment can range from a warning or suspension to a lifetime ban, depending on the drug, the circumstances, and the athlete's past record.
Catlin's lab is the business end of this system, and his team is exquisitely good at finding drugs on the WADA list. The facility has handled about 300,000 tests over the past 21 years, and it has never produced a false positive. If Catlin says you've doped, you've doped.
Approaching the lab from the outside, you wouldn't know to be impressed. It's housed in a drab off-campus building that looks like a converted Quonset hut, and it sits next door to an auto-repair shop. Just inside the front door, there's a tiny reception foyer where I wait for Caroline Hatton, a forty-something Ph.D. chemist who helped organize the lab and who will escort me through the complete cycle of a drug test. While I wait, a UPS man arrives with a load of boxes. A Huggies carton sits right on top, so mundane as to be incongruously funny—inside are several of that morning's urine samples.

USADA also wants this sample tested for such things as human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone women generate when pregnant. Dopers sometimes use it to prevent their testicles from shriveling—a side effect of taking steroids.

Seeing Catlin's team at work is impressive, but the experience also raises a question. The people here clearly know how to find drugs. A complex international network has been set up to collect samples from athletes. The whole operation looks like a pretty tight net. So why can't it work
I pose that question to Hatton, who laughs at the idea that athletes can't beat these tests. "People always say, 'I have always tested clean,' not 'I do not dope,' " she says. "We hear that and giggle." Her reaction confirms what other experts have told me: Dopers evade detection all the time.
Take the case of Tim Montgomery. According to press reports, Montgomery told the BALCO grand jury he used THG.
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Testing experts seem certain that athletes who cheat often evade detection. "People always say, 'I have always tested clean,' not 'I do not dope,'" says Caroline Hatton. "We hear that and giggle."
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But he has never tested positive, even though he was tested four times in 2001, three in 2002, and five in 2003. Another example is British cyclist David Millar. Though he never failed a drug test in eight years of riding, he admitted in 2004 that he'd used EPO.
THG itself was invisible to testers until Graham mailed the infamous syringe. Making such a designer steroid isn't even difficult. The UCLA lab reverse-engineered its THG sample and determined that its manufacturer had probably taken an existing steroid and bubbled hydrogen gas through it to slightly alter its structure. The ease of such tinkering matters, because Catlin's machines are tuned only to watch for known drugs. Introduce an unknown and the machines can go blind.
Thousands of such combinations are possible, and in a globalized world, these drugs can be made anywhere. In fact, long before BALCO, Catlin argued that clandestine chemists were busily supplying designer steroids to jocks and bodybuilders. Notmany people listened. But all they needed to do was scan the Web, where the underground experts talked about exactly what they were doing. As if to further prove Catlin's argument, another designer steroid, dubbed DMT, was discovered at the U.S.-Canada border in December 2003. Like THG, it was found only because of a tip.
As difficult as finding steroids can be, they're a snap compared with the class of drugs based on natural human proteins. The most famous of these is EPO. Because EPO stimulates the body to make more red blood cells, which carry oxygen, athletes who use it get an endurance boost. This makes it especially popular in cycling, cross-country skiing, and distance running.
Another drug based on a natural human protein, human growth hormone (HGH), joined EPO as a doping agent about ten years ago. As its name implies, HGH helps athletes build muscle and bone, adding strength and power. HGH accomplishes this by stimulating the release of yet another protein, insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1).
These protein drugs are a challenge because they occur naturally in all of us. For more than a decade, testers have been researching ways to tell the difference between natural and artificially introduced proteins. EPO was knocked off first, thanks to a 2000 test developed by scientist Françoise Lasne, of France's National Anti-Doping Laboratory.
The Lasne test is an extremely complex procedure involving a biology lab full of ingredients. It requires nearly three days and dozens of steps, most done by hand. The time factor is one reason why the Tour de France relies more heavily on a simpler hematocrit test, a measure of the volume percentage of red cells in the bloodstream. If a rider's hematocrit exceeds 50, the cyclist will be banned from starting that day.
The Lasne test exploits the difference between natural and exogenous ("out of the body") EPO. When drug companies make EPO, the sugar molecules in it are subtly altered from the natural form. The test measures this difference by using a technique called isoelectric focusing, in which an electric charge sends the EPO scooting through a gelatin slab. Exogenous EPO will stop in a slightly different position than natural EPO. The slab is then blotted, and the blotting material is "developed"—not unlike a photograph. This creates an image of small black blobs aligned in rows. If blobs appear in the range where exogenous EPO is known to stop, that means the athlete doped.
Sounds good, but the test can detect exogenous EPO for only three days after the last time an athlete injected it. Unfortunately for the testers, the performance boost can last several weeks, and new red blood cells can survive for about 120 days. So a cyclist could use EPO, stop four days before a test, and still reap benefits.
This brief window also helps defeat surprise sampling. A doping-control officer has to physically find an athlete to collect a sample. Though athletes are supposed to tell anti-doping authorities where they live and where they'll be, Catlin argues that "any good athlete can wriggle out of that and be somewhere the tester isn't. We are chasing the cheaters around." USADA statistics support Catlin: In 2004, the agency recorded 507 missed tests.
Still, as the case of Tyler Hamilton seems to indicate, some athletes have already decided to shift away from EPO. Hamilton is accused of boosting his red-cell count by transfusing somebody else's blood. Such cheating is detectable because, even if you transfuse blood matched by type—A positive, AB negative, and so on—the blood will have slightly different immune properties from person to person. The test uses a machine called a flow cytometer to sort cells according to these differing properties. But this test has a weakness, too: It can't be used to tell if an athlete has blood-boosted by extracting his own cells during training, storing them, and then injecting them before competitions.
Because there are so many complexities, architects of the anti-doping system may be hurting their cause by trying to keep up with every new technology. For example, in 2003, Kenyan runner Bernard Lagat—later the silver medalist in the 1,500 meters at the 2004 Athens Olympics—was refused entry into the track-and-field world championships after a urine sample from him tested positive for EPO. He denied doping, and his attorney asked German cell biologist Hans Heid to observe his B-sample testing. Lagat's B sample was negative, which didn't surprise Heid. He declared the EPO test "error-prone" and told WADA that "the development of totally new urinary EPO tests should be encouraged and funded."
Heid says WADA authorities told him they knew the test was flawed but were happy to have a test at all. Catlin believes the EPO test was introduced prematurely. WADA clearly saw the need for refinements, too: Last year, four years after the test was first used, WADA issued a refined protocol for performing it.

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