loading...
Canwest News Service
Last February, when speed skater Claudia Pechstein allowed blood doping officers to collect samples from her for the umpteenth time, no one knew it would set off a fight that could undermine a proposed new regimen for unmasking drug cheats.
For more than two decades, Pechstein had been a force on the speed-skating circuit. Over five Olympic Games, she'd won nine medals, five of them gold. She'd won more than three dozen world championship medals. A six-time world champion, she was Germany's most decorated winter athlete.
In all, she'd given 90 blood samples since 2000. And in all that time she had never once tested positive for drugs.
Now on the downside of long a career, the 37-year-old had one more Olympics in her plan: Vancouver 2010.
But when three blood samples collected at the world championships in Hamar, Norway, came back with abnormally high reticulocyte counts, anti-doping officials raised the alarm. Early-stage red blood cells released from bone marrow, reticulocytes are indicators of a body's response to erythropoietin, a naturally occurring hormone.
The percentage of reticulocytes in Pechstein's blood was way higher than that of every other athlete tested at the event. But more importantly, it was also well out of range when compared with Pechstein's previous blood samples, taken over three years of competition.
The normal range, according to the International Skating Union, is 0.4 to 2.4; Pechstein's samples at Hamar climbed as high as 3.54, before dropping back sharply after the competition.
The ISU concluded Pechstein had done something illegal to boost her blood and suspended her from competition for two years, effectively ending her career. She became the first person in sports history to be banned for doping based on the biological profile of her own blood — without evidence of her ever having taken a banned substance.
A cheaters newest foe
Pechstein's case became a focal point for anti-doping authorities, including the World Anti-Doping Agency, which was in the final stages of a decade-long effort to develop a new weapon to detect drug cheats.
Called the "athlete's passport," the concept is essentially a monitoring program built upon individual athletes' blood and urine profiles. Traditional anti-doping techniques involve looking for the residue of banned substances. With passports, officials would essentially build a profile of the athlete's own samples, making any abnormal variations stick out. That, combined with intelligent or targeted testing, would become a potent combination in foiling what has become a complex cat-and-mouse chase with athletes who use sophisticated drug regimens to elude detection.
"It is a profile that athletes have gathered of blood samples, so that you establish a baseline over time — so that if there are abnormal or sub-normal results you look at them very carefully to see whether they are doping," says David Howman, WADA's director-general. "It is perhaps one of the most powerful tools now available to us, but it isn't the only one."
Pechstein's wasn't directly an "athlete's passport" case. WADA had only accepted the passport concept in principle at the time she was caught. The ISU, however, had already insisted on taking blood samples of athletes.
Pechstein fought back, appealing to the Switzerlandbased Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest governing body for disputes between athletes and their sports federations and the International Olympic Committee.
She argued that the samples must have been tampered with and that her high reticulocyte counts were due to other factors, including possibly a blood disease. She also argued that the science behind blood doping was faulty.
The case was crucial to the anti-doping community. In September, Gian-Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation and a member of WADA's executive committee, gave a startling indication of how important the case was. Kasper, whose own sport is plagued with high-science blood doping, warned a meeting of WADA's executive board that if the court overturned Pechstein's suspension it would put the development of the passport back a decade. In an environment where cheating athletes have often had the scientific edge, such a delay would be catastrophic.
In late November, the court ruled against Pechstein, saying the evidence was clear: she had doped and there was no other reasonable scientific explanation for her high blood counts.
It also noted that the only other time her reticulocyte count was that high was at a competition in Calgary in 2007. It upheld the two-year suspension.
Unsatisfied, Pechstein — still doggedly denying she did anything wrong — took her case to a Swiss court to get an interim injunction so she could continue trying to qualify for Vancouver at a World Cup competition at Salt Lake City in December.
Pechstein, perhaps, solved the legal problem for the ISU and WADA herself; she finished a dismal 13th, far outside the requirements to qualify for Vancouver.
Passport enforcement
The athlete's passport is not widespread in sport, but it will be, within the year. Already, the International Skating Union and the International Cycling Union, the governing body for events like the doping-plagued Tour de France, have begun implementing the collection and examination of widespread blood samples. Last June, just before the Tour, the cycling union placed five riders with suspicious profiles under investigation. In November, WADA approved "operational guidelines" for the passport.
Dr. Don Catlin, the former head of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory at the University of California at Los Angeles and one of the early proponents of the passport, believes it will become an effective tool to coerce athletes to stay clean.
"If you can get control over 95 per cent of people, then you've got them. The ones that will dope will stand out like sore thumbs. They won't join the program," he says.
And yet Catlin believes the science behind the passport is woefully inadequate. "Doping control is based on getting a body fluid, typically urine, nowadays blood, and finding the offending drug in the fluid. Passport programs are based on patterns, and that means they need data and they need good solid science, and I have to say there isn't that much good, solid science in the field," he says.
"Whatever goes into the passport goes in; if it isn't carefully controlled what goes in, it's garbage in, garbage out."
Still, there is hope passports will be able to help identify athletes who are using drugs so new that the anti-doping community hasn't yet developed a test for them.
Take the case of growth hormone, which has been around for years. Although WADA says it has developed a test for the naturally occurring peptide protein, it has yet to produce a single positive result. And that's despite the fact athletes were caught carrying growth hormone to competitions more than a decade ago.
Passports could perhaps detect growth-hormone use by identifying periods and times when an athlete's health patterns are out of whack.
"It will hopefully allow an athlete to show 'I'm clean,' " Howman says. "The other side of it is, it will show whether over time the athlete is doing something peculiar or something peculiar is happening to the athlete."
Playing with genes
In the whole panoply of drugs and performance-enhancing programs available to athletes, there is one method for which no clear evidence yet exists of use or detection: gene doping.
WADA describes gene doping as "the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene having the capacity to improve athletic performance."
The idea of athletes manipulating their basic genetic codes strikes fear into most anti-doping scientists. That's because apart from being undetectable at this point, it is an incredibly dangerous medical procedure. Normally reserved for the treatment of critically-ill children -where the benefits outweigh the considerable risks -gene therapy is, in a way, messing with the dark side of life.
"If you have a genetic disorder and you are missing genes you can take the genes, take a shot, and get better. That's pretty good," says Catlin. "It can be done, but it's hazardous. But when you start manipulating a person's genes, a lot of things can go wrong. Most commonly, they die because you turn a gene on and you can't turn it off. Or you turn on one gene and a cancer gene develops. It's very hazardous stuff."
But is gene manipulation a reality in sport?
The IOC's medical commission first raised the spectre of gene doping in 2001, even before the creation of WADA's doping code.
In the last decade, however, an entire direct-to-market industry has emerged around the concept of marketing gene testing to consumers. And whether it's someone who wants to know if they are predisposed to a disease -or someone toying with the idea of getting a better physique -consumer demand is pressuring genetic research.
Mark Frankel, a director with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, raised that worry in a presentation to a WADA-organized gene doping symposium in Russia last year.
"National and international sports authorities and governments should reach out to, and where appropriate exercise oversight of, relevant manufacturers and laboratories to plan for the production, quality control, availability, promotion, and possible use of genetic enhancement technologies," he said.
Howman, Dick Pound and Arne Ljungqvist believe gene-doping in sports has yet to be mastered. But it won't be long.
"There are, I am almost certain, labs somewhere in the world working on ways to break gene doping for sport," says Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC's medical commission. "The stakes are very high."
Pound, the senior Canadian IOC member and founding president of WADA, hypothesized before the 2006 Games in Turin that work was under way. But Catlin doesn't believe gene dopers have succeeded yet, for one very sinister reason.
"We as anti-doping specialists have to recognize it is coming into sport if it's not already there," he says. "We can't detect it. Probably the first time we will detect it is when there is a little epidemic of dead athletes somewhere."
Detection, at what cost?
Blood tests. Urine samples. In-competition testing. Out-of-competition testing. Athletes being required to file quarterly reports indicating their whereabouts for at least one hour of every day, 365 days a year.
Already, there are 120,000 athletes' profiles in WADA's "Anti-Doping Administration and Management System". More than 22,600 elite athletes also file those quarterly "whereabouts" reports so they can be found for testing.
The adoption of the passport program will mean thousands more athletes will find themselves closely monitored as they move through their sporting careers.
Just how far is too far in the fight against cheating in sports?
Robert Storey, the Canadabased president of the International Bobsleigh Federation, worries that the "world government" form of anti-doping may prove to be too much.
"This is kind of a philosophical statement, but I don't think you can create something in an ivory tower and then pass a series of regulations that requires other people apply it and end up with a product that is universally sound, fair, equal and good," he says. "I don't think world government works. I think compelling other people to carry out wishes when they are not necessarily convenient is an effective way to do a program. But I don't know the answer for how to do it."
Storey embraces the need to root out doping in sports, and his sport has had its share of athletes being tossed out for using anabolic steroids. But he's raising concerns that the moral and ethical fight for clean sports is getting bound up in legalities as athletes try to protect their reputations.
He says WADA's whereabouts program is a good example. If an athlete misses three tests because anti-doping agents can't locate him or her, the result is a one-year suspension.
"I wonder how far you can take the guilty until proven innocent argument," Storey says. "To my mind, in the long run that means you're inviting courts to become involved. You're inviting all kinds of things to become involved that on their own aren't in essence sport and I think it might become counter-productive."
In that argument Storey finds an ally in Catlin, who for 25 years ran an anti-doping lab and developed tests for more than 100 banned substances. Catlin now runs Anti-Doping Research Inc., a non-profit scientific organization.
"It's another example of WADA getting more and more aggressive. I understand why they have to do it. I just think there are limits to what they can do," he says. "And they are now up against those limits, when you are now asking all athletes worldwide to be available by whatever hours they are. That's pretty aggressive."
In the long run, Paul Melia, the president and CEO of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, believes the answer lies not in enforcement but in education. "The causes of doping and a whole range of unethical behaviour in sport are found in our community sport system," he says. "We see this as needing to take on the long-term prevention work that would take on doping.
"For sport to have that powerful positive effect, it needs to be values-based and values-driven. When kids are exposed to that and come through the system that way, they are not likely to engage in doping and gratuitous acts of violence in sport, hazing, bullying and a range of other anti-social behaviours."
—
DOPING IN SPORTS
A four-part series looking at doping in sports, both amateur and professional.
Saturday, Jan. 16: How scientists uncovered the latest wonder drug used by athletes -and in the process helped a Canadian athlete rightfully get her gold medal.
Monday, Jan. 18: In the nearly 22 years since Ben Johnson was thrown out of the Seoul Olympics, athletes have faced a confusing and increasingly complex and invasive set of rules designed to catch cheats.
Tuesday, Jan. 19: A look inside the 2010 Olympic doping lab.
Today: In the cops-and-robbers world of doping, cheaters are always trying to stay one step ahead of those who are trying to catch them. Enter the world of gene doping and biological passports.
jefflee@vancouversun.com
