Doping sleuths help protect track stars
EUGENE, Ore. — They almost got burned.
Though there’s nothing novel in suggesting all 1,900 athletes who will train and compete in the sunny stadium at track world championships in Eugene, Oregon, over the next 10 days should slather up with sunscreen, in the complicated world of antidoping, nothing is quite that simple.
Shortly after last year’s Olympics, the urine samples of more than six dozen athletes who competed in Tokyo came back with traces of a banned stimulant. Career-altering penalties loomed. But they were avoided thanks to some nimble sleuthing by antidoping scientists in the U.S. and Germany. The scientists discovered the stimulant could be found in an ingredient present in an over-the-counter sunscreen.
“I’m lathering sunscreen all over my body. People are laughing at me in the office,” said Dr. Matt Fedoruk, the chief scientist at the U.S. Anti-doping Agency, who identified the issue and also volunteered to be a test subject for his own study. “I’m carrying around urine bottles and sending them to the lab. And within 48 hours, we had the answer to our question.”
It’s an issue that runs more than skin deep throughout sports.
Increasingly sensitive instruments designed to detect banned substances have the ability to pick up increasingly minuscule amounts of those substances in an athlete’s system. In some cases, athletes ingest them intentionally.
But in a growing number of instances, the banned drugs enter their systems in unintentional ways: through the skin via sunscreen or eyeliner, or through contaminated prescription drugs or, in the particularly frustrating case of American distance runner Shelby Houlihan, through what she claims was a pork burrito tainted with traces of a banned performance-enhancing drug.
“Most labs are experiencing really good advancements in technology,” USADA CEO Travis T. Tygart said. “But importantly, the science and the rules also need to advance so that we can be certain we’re not only capturing intentional cheats, but also that we’re not punishing innocent athletes.”