Doping battle makes progress
Experts say there’s more work to do to make sports clean, however
MONTREAL — It’s been an eventful summer on the anti-doping front with big-name athletes landing in trouble.
Three top sprinters from Jamaica and Tyson Gay of the U.S. tested positive for banned substances.
Then Major League Baseball suspended 13 players this month for their connection to an anti-aging clinic in Florida that is accused of distributing performance-enhancing drugs. The list includes Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, the National League’s most valuable player in 2011, and New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who is appealing the decision.
The controversies follow cyclist Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace last year when he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.
They’re encouraging signs for sports fans disillusioned by doping in amateur and professional sports. But the battle to keep sports clean is still fraught with obstacles, which were spelled out in a recent report for the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The number of tests administered annually has jumped from about 150,000 before the creation of WADA in 1999 to about 250,000 tests, the report noted. But if you take out the statistics for marijuana and medications for which therapeutic-use exemptions were likely granted, it said the positive tests amount to less than one per cent.
“There has not been any statistical improvement since about 1985,” said the report from the working group chaired by Dick Pound, a Montreal lawyer and former WADA leader, that examined why testing programs aren’t catching many cheats.
The main reason for the apparent lack of success of testing programs isn’t the science, which is robust and reliable, the report said.
“The real problems are the human and political factors. There is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver doping-free sport.”
“It is discouraging,” acknowledged Christiane Ayotte, director of the WADA-accredited anti-doping lab in Laval, Que., of the low detection rate.
“And we’ve been complaining for years that we have in the labs very sophisticated testing tools, but it cannot detect better than what we receive for testing,” added Ayotte, who was part of the working group.
“We are not testing athletes when
“We are not testing athletes when we should be testing them.”
Christiane Ayotte, WADA lab
we should be testing them.”
She’d like to see more frequent testing, in and out of competition season.
“What we heard, what we read from the cyclists is that they were doping on the eve of Christmas,” Ayotte said. “Christmas Eve they were doping, so we should have been there. It’s written in books, so why is that we’re not there when they dope?
“But that said, the situation has improved dramatically,” she added. “The number of cyclists that are being caught each year is astonishing and continues to be high.”
It was the low numbers of positive tests for EPO, the hormone erythropoietin — which boosts red blood cell production — that led WADA to set up the working group.
“There was a sense of how can this be, when it’s the preferred drug of choice by the cheaters, that more are not being detected,” said David Howman, the agency’s director general.
They used to think anecdotally — and as it turns out, mistakenly — that EPO was only taken by athletes involved in endurance sports, he said. And some sports haven’t tested for it, added Howman, who said the percentage of doping athletes is probably in the double, not single digits.
The report will be considered next month at WADA’s meeting in Argentina. It identified weaknesses in testing, including the fact that “access to athletes can be impeded” and some banned substances may only be detected for a short time in urine and blood — “efficient testing cannot be done on the random basis often adopted.”
Changes to the World Anti-Doping Code that go into effect in 2015 will give WADA, the international regulatory body, the power to approve the agencies’ annual test distribution plans, which Howman believes is a step in the right direction.
In the mandate it gave to the working group, WADA noted: “Testing programs are considered by many as extremely costly and the question of value for money is now raised repeatedly.”
There’s no pressure to scrap drug testing, but to ensure each test counts, said Howman.