LONDON, (Reuters) – During an informative and entertaining address to an anti-doping conference last month, German researcher Mario Thevis referred to “80, 90, 100” new performance-enhancing drugs for which no tests yet exist.
“They act like EPO (erythropietin) but they are structurally different and that means the current EPO tests will not pick them up,” he told delegates to the conference in London convened by worldsportslawreport.
Thevis added that “according to anecdotal evidence and rumours” the drugs, which replicate EPO’s blood-boosting qualities, were already used in elite sports.
EPO stimulates the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. This increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood, allowing muscles to perform for longer.
News that up to 100 new drugs could be available in the runup to this year’s London Olympics will astonish only the naive. “It doesn’t surprise me,” responded World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) director-general David Howman. “We are in the area where we are into third and fourth generations and they continue to climb. Whether they are detectable or not depends on the ability of the individual laboratory.”
One in two competitors will be tested during the London Games, including all medallists, and the estimated 400 daily tests are higher than any previous Olympics.
The problem will not be at the Games themselves, running from July 27-Aug. 12, but the months before in the eternal cat-and-mouse game between the dope cheats and the testers. “In terms of the programme that is in place for the Olympic Games, I think it is very good,” Howman said in a telephone interview with Reuters from WADA’s Montreal headquarters.
“The International Olympic Committee have got probably the most extensive programme they could possibly operate. From the day that athletes come into the opening of the village to the closing ceremony, that’s good.
“What we need is extensive pre-Games testing and we need all the samples that are collected to be tested for the full menu of substances.”
SORE SUBJECT
EPO, the drug at the core of the 1998 Tour de France doping scandals, is a sore subject for WADA.
Earlier this year, Howman said that out of 258,000 doping tests conducted in 2010 only 36 had turned up positives for EPO. “You can understand the frustration that I have been voicing over the past six months,” he said in the interview. “We can do a little bit better than that and one of the reasons we don’t do better is that many of the samples are sent to the lab and the lab is asked not to analyse for EPO. That’s just outrageous.”
Howman said there were a number of reasons why national anti-doping agencies or international federations did not want samples analysed for EPO.
“One, we don’t want to pay the extra cost for EPO, two we don’t think we have a problem in our sport and three, maybe, is we don’t want to know what the results are going to be,” he said.
“What we are getting is many, many samples not being analysed. That’s our suspicion that there were only 36 positive tests in 2010…that defies logic.”
Another current headache for the testers is gene doping, the use of gene therapy to smuggle performance-enhancing drugs into a healthy body. Legitimate gene therapy introduces genes into the body to treat diseases.
Gene doping was included on WADA’s prohibited list in 2003 and in 2006 years former WADA president Dick Pound said: “You would have to be blind not to see that the next generation of doping will be genetic.” However, six years later there is still no test and there will be nothing in place at the London Games.
“DIFFICULT TO DETECT”
Anna Baoutina, a senior research scientist at the National Measurement Institute in Sydney, told Reuters effective methods are being devised but it was up to WADA to decide when they are to be implemented.
“The major feature of gene doping is that it is very difficult to detect compared to drug doping,” she said.
“In effect, gene doping is the ‘illegitimate’ derivation of gene therapy. Gene therapy aims to treat human diseases which are caused by defects in genes. It does this by introducing in the cells of our bodies new genetic material.
“Gene doping is also the introduction of genetic material into the cells but in the absence of defective genes and with the purpose of enhancing performance. For example, if additional copies of genes for human growth hormone (HGH) or EPO are delivered into athletes’ cells, the cells will produce more of these proteins and this may result in performance enhancement.”