BALCO principals give anti-doping advice
PED cheats still rampant 15 years after raid on lab prompted steroids scandal
Can the drug cheats be stopped? Is it worth trying anymore?
The questions are being asked again 15 years after federal agents raided the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) and triggered a steroids scandal that ensnared the likes of Barry Bonds and Marion Jones.
“Doping will always happen,” Thomas Bach, president of the Inter- national Olympic Committee, said last month during an interview with CNNMoney. “This is one of the wars you cannot win.”
Yet Travis Tygart, head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), told CNN, “It’s time to double down” on efforts to ensure fair competition.
With Monday marking the 15th anniversary of the raid on BALCO, Tygart and other central figures in one of the biggest doping scandals in history provide USA TODAY five steps to crack down harder on cheaters.
1. Toughen penalties even more
You can forget about the scaredstraight approach. There is still too much to gain in the form of lucrative contracts and fame and not enough to lose to keep athletes from doping.
Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens remain shut out of baseball’s Hall of Fame because of their links to performance-enhancing drugs. But last month the Giants retired Bonds’ No. 25
jersey, and McGwire has been a coach for various major league teams since
2010.
Simply put, the experts say it’s time to ratchet up the penalties.
“If you put together a program where the risk clearly outweighs the reward, you’re going to have significant impact on compliance,” said Jeff Novitzky, the former federal agent who led the raid on BALCO and now oversees the anti-doping program at UFC. “You’re not going to completely eradicate it, but the impact’s going to be significant.”
One of the culprits is the NFL, Novitzky said, pointing out that first-time violators face only a four-game suspension.
“Clearly in the NFL, risk does not outweigh reward,” he said. “I mean, it sucks to be suspended for four games, but you’re back for three-quarters of he season.”
Novitzky said it’s unclear if risk outweighs reward in Major League Baseball, where first-time violators face an
80-game suspension.
“Being out a half season, does that risk outweigh the reward of using some anabolic steroids in August or September, in the dog days when your body’s just run down and doesn’t have anything left,” Novitzky said, “and you’re at the end of a contract year and you’re looking at tens of millions of dollars in a contract?”
At the UFC, Novitzky said, penalties for first-time offenders can range from a public warning to a four-year suspension. Two fighters have been hit with four-year bans for violating UFC’s antidoping policy and the UFC has issued more than two dozen two-year suspensions since Novitzky implemented the program in July 2015.
Victor Conte, 68, owned BALCO and was the mastermind behind various athletes’ doping. He now works with professional fighters and runs SNAC Nutrition, a business he started after BALCO.
“Until you have consequences or punishment that equals the financial incentive (to cheat), you’re going to continue to have the overwhelming majority of elite athletes cheating.”
2. Close the big loophole
Before the BALCO raid, MLB didn’t impose penalties for players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. But that scandal and others forced baseball and other professional sports to significantly strengthen their anti-doping efforts. Experts say there’s been progress over the past 15 years but that most of the anti-doping programs suffer from the same flaw.
Anything less than the possibility of being tested at any moment creates a serious loophole, said Conte, who says athletes will use “duck and dodge” to avoid being tested.
Conte’s prime example: During the season, MLB players can be tested only at the stadium. That gives them roughly 16 hours to dope elsewhere and has popularized the practice of “micro-doping,” according to Conte and others.
Micro-doping involves using banned drugs in amounts small enough and at the right times to escape detection.
“So at night you’re healing and recovering and there’s tissue repair and you’re getting the anabolic benefits,” Conte said. “By the time you show up at the stadium, you’ll test negative.”
Responding to Conte’s assertions, MLB provided a statement to USA TODAY explaining its medical testing officer has advised that baseball’s antidoping program is equipped to detect micro-dosing.
“While it is accurate that most inseason drug tests are conducted at the ballpark, testing can occur any time pregame, postgame, or both pre- and postgame with no advance notice to players or their Club,” the statement read. “Testing also commonly occurs multiple days in a row with no notice. Given the significant number of tests that are conducted each year as well as the analytical capabilities of the equipment and methods that are currently utilized by our drug testing laboratory, including, but not limited to, the use of longitudinal profiles and mandatory/ random (isotope-ratio mass spectrometry) testing, our medical testing officer Dr. Christiane Ayotte has advised us that doping in any amount will not only be deterred, but also detected.”
UFC’s program is the only one in America professional sports that allows for round-the-clock, unannounced drug testing 365 days a year, according to Novitzky.
“You’re going to be susceptible to micro-dosing when you have a level of predictability in your testing,” he said. “And with our program, athletes don’t. They never know when the tester’s coming. They could come early, they could come late, they could conceivably come in the middle of the night if they had some cause. Because of that, even if you’re micro-dosing, the odds are eventually the tester’s going to catch you around the period of time that you micro-dose and they’re going to be able to detect it or see a spike in that biological passport (that scientists use to track athletes’ biological markers).
“Now if you have predictability in your testing like some of the other professional leagues do — and that could be as little as knowing you’re only going to be tested when you’re at the facility — that’s when you’re vulnerable, in my experience, to micro-dosing.”
Rafael Palmeiro and Alex Rodriguez are among more than four dozen bigleaguers suspended for violating the MLB’s steroids policy. Dozens of NFL players have been suspended, too.
“Has all of the sudden everybody found God and decided they’re going to be clean athletes and respect the fact that everybody deserves to compete on a level playing field? I don’t think so,” Conte said. “But since BALCO the testing has improved.
“You don’t see multiple people hitting 60 home runs (in a season). That’s because they’re having to duck and dodge. ... They’re still gaining a competitive edge, and that may be 25%, maybe 50% of what it was without testing where you could use all you like.”
Tygart cited a 2017 USADA survey when asked what percentage of athletes likely are cheating. Less than 10% of more than 800 athletes polled said they would feel tempted to use PEDs even if their financial well being was threatened, and only 5% said they would feel tempted to use PEDs if most of their teammates and competitors were using them, according to USADA.
3. Demand more from WADA
Don Catlin, whose scientific work helped break open the BALCO case, said more is needed from the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA), created in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee to oversee the fight against drugs in sports. He said the organization needs to be pushed “to improve on their performance.”
“They’ve done a great job in some way, and in others ways they’ve failed to make the grade,” said Catlin, 80, who retired about five years ago.
But progress will require more funding, according to Catlin, who said WADA would benefit from the input of outside researchers and scientists. This year WADA’s budget is $32 million.
4. Address the Eastern European problems
As big as BALCO was, it has been dwarfed by Russia’s state-sponsored doping program, which benefited more than 1,000 Russian athletes, according to the independent McLaren report released in 2016.
When Conte was distributing steroids, it was primarily about “the cream and the clear,” then-undetectable synthetic steroids. As the Russia scandal illustrated, there are now a variety of substances and doping cocktails being used by athletes around the world.
“We’ve had to continue to progress to get more and more sensitivity and be able to expand the scope and scale of what we can find,” said Oliver Catlin, the son of Don Catlin and president of Banned Substances Controlled Group. “It’s enabled us to use a whole new set of equipment to continue to build and grow.”
But technology can only test what you’re looking for, and Oliver Catlin said it’s time to expand the search for potential performance-enhancing drugs. He noted that WADA’s list of banned substances includes only two medications developed in Eastern Europe compared with more than 300 drugs developed in the West.
“Drug testing is a Western-focused business and industry, Western medicine,” said Oliver Catlin, whose company certifies dietary supplements that, if contaminated with a banned substance, can lead to a positive drug test. “I believe there’s Eastern European medicine options that would be good doping choices that are not being considered to be added to the prohibited list, simply because they’re Eastern European medicines.”
5. Change current sports culture
“I could be making so much money getting people around the system if I wanted to,” Oliver Catlin said.
Conte would tell you the same thing. And it speaks to the culture of sports, with athletes looking for an edge because fame and a disproportionate financial reward go to the winner. That must change, said Tygart, the head of USADA.
“Sport is about victory. No doubt about it,” Tygart said. “But we have created an environment now where winning is everything and we lionize the winner at the expense of the secondplace person. That creates an environment where people are going to do anything possible to get ahead, even if it means breaking the rules.”
Tygart said the disparity in financial reward for the winners and the alsorans has widened. “Those kinds of differences are what influence people to try to break the rules,” he said. “So if we’re serious about stopping it, there has to be a conversation around that and some decisions that might equalize or takes some of those pressures off, where athletes are OK if they’re ultimately not standing on the podium.”
While Bach represents pessimism about the anti-doping effort, Tygart said he can imagine a day when doping and the use of performance-enhancing drugs have been eradicated from sports.
“Man, I can,” he told USA TODAY last week.