THE DOPING SAGA

Trawlling The Murky Waters of The Nutritional Supplement Industry

In the fourth part of NutraIngredients’ sports nutrition series, we scan a category as reliant on its elite sports roots as it is at times reviled by them and the rules that can lead to perfectly good products being called foul.

As an earlier article in this series noted, the term sports nutrition is somewhat of an anomaly due to the growing popularity of sports nutrition drinks, supplements, powders and the like among the non-sporty.

Energy and endurance boosting. Recovery. Calorie burning. Such attributes have earned the category a billion dollar-plus health and lifestyle halo that places sports nutrition products into the non-sweaty hands of the non-sporty the world over.

But the fact these products are also consumed to varying degrees by elite athletes lends the category a certain regulatory duality because a group of essentially mainstream products can find themselves subject to the stringent drug testing rules that govern many sports.

So a product that meets Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and other ‘civilian’ product requirements may find itself accused of containing substances such as steroids, hormones and herbal stimulants that appear on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) prohibited list.

It’s at this point things get a little murky as despite the fact most dietary supplements products are utterly ‘clean’, fringe players have engaged in activities such as Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA), which has provoked busts by WADA, and more recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Not that it has stopped athletes using dietary supplements – the European Specialist Sports Nutrition Alliance (ESSNA) estimated some 90 per cent of the 11,000 athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics used dietary supplements. There was not a single supplement contamination case.

Politicised

But product variability – however marginal and marginalised – has led to a situation where professional athletes ultimately found to have doped, have made scapegoats of dietary supplements they may or may not have used, and which may or may not have been contaminated with said substance.

The situation has become highly politicised, in the US at least, where Arizona Senator John McCain this year attempted to introduce legislation aimed at tightening control of the dietary supplements industry and backed by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and several professional sporting bodies like the National Baseball League and National Football League.

Industry said the measures were unnecessary and wondered if the problem did not in fact lie with the sporting associations that fail to implement uniform and rigorous drug testing measures. McCain promptly withdrew the bill.

Despite the immaculate performance of sports supplements at events such as Beijing that has coincided with professional sporting bodies like UK Sport telling elite athletes for the fist time that select dietary supplements from a third-party tested and verified list are ok to use, USADA retains a puzzling stance.

It has said it will name and shame contaminated supplements but will not produce a positive list of tested supplements like the one that exists in the UK and other European countries despite a stated ambition to ‘empower athletes’. Officially, USADA warns elite athletes and sportspeople off supplements.

Divergence

“All of this is just a divergence from the main problem which is that there is rampant drug use in many pro sports and that needs to be addressed,” said Dan Fabricant, PhD, the vice president of scientific and global government affairs at the Natural Products Association (NPA) recently.

Rising to the problem, third party tester NSF International in March became the first US certification body approved by the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) to offer dietary and sports supplement testing for all nutritional products.

The SCC backing came after NSF submitted to a field audit and quality systems audit to evaluate its ability to, “perform specialized testing for banned substances”. NSF’s Certified for Sport programme contains 74 approved products while the Major League Players Association has a ‘Dangerous Contaminated Supplements’ list of 104 products.

(by Shane Starling)

Chinese Officials Pushing For The Jailing of Drug Cheats

China should make it a criminal offence to give banned performance-enhancing substances to athletes and jail those found guilty, a leading sports ministry official has said.

Chinese athletes were at the center of a string of doping scandals in the 1990s and early years of this century but, fearing embarrassment at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the sports ministry cracked down on the use of drugs.

Most positive tests in recent years have been at provincial level or below, including the unearthing of 450 doses of EPO, testosterone and steroids during a raid on a Liaoning athletics school's training camp in 2006.

Jiang Zhixue, director of the science and education department at the sports ministry, said there was insufficient deterrent for coaches and officials who administer drugs to athletes.


"We are confined to punishing them technically, giving them bans or fines but nothing more," Jiang was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

"The (current) regulations have certain connection with the criminal law but the criminal law doesn't have specific terms regarding this area."

However, if it was made a criminal offence one of the punishments could be imprisonment.

Jiang said the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency had conducted 14,042 tests in 2009 -- 13,336 urine tests and 706 blood tests, more than 6,000 of which were random -- and 25 gave positive results.

Three of the positive tests came at last year's National Games in Jinan, including the women's 100 meters champion Wang Jing, and Jiang said more effort would be focused on athletes in the lower echelons of the state sport system.

"This year we will intensify monitoring of the provincial and city level anti-doping work," he added. "We have launched a 'provincial games discipline and anti-doping supervision work group' for the first time."

(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney and Liu Zhen, editing by Tony Jimenez for Reuters)

An Austrian Laboratory Throws Doping Coaches 'Under The Bus'

Vienna laboratory Humanplasma hit back on Tuesday at claims that it stood at the centre of a massive doping network, naming instead several well-known coaches for the first time.

Banned Austrian biathlon and cross-country coach Walter Mayer, Stefan Matschiner, the former manager of disgraced cyclist Bernhard Kohl, and Martin Kessler, a rowing coach, were those at the heart of the doping network that used Humanplasma's facilities between 2003 and 2006, the laboratory said in a statement.

"Between late 2003 and early 2006, these three persons - and only these - arranged for about 30 athletes in total to have blood samples taken," it said.

Mayer, Matschiner and Kessler have long been linked to doping irregularities in Austria - Mayer was also banned from participating in future Olympics after a scandal at the 2006 Turin Games.

But so far, Humanplasma had never named any of the key figures.

The laboratory said it was first approached in 2003 by Mayer and Kessler, who insisted that blood doping was "completely legal and a widespread practice for a long time."

Matschiner then followed in 2005.

The organisation "set and coordinated appointments, escorted athletes to blood transfusions and picked up the concentrates which were later re-injected before races," according to Humanplasma.

Following comments by Austrian Olympic Committee chief Karl Stoss, it denied that any German athlete had been involved in the scheme.

A spokeswoman, Michaela Eisler, also refused to comment on the nationality of other athletes involved. The laboratory only said that the blood doping did not only concern winter sports athletes.

Austrian weekly Sportwoche reported last year that athletes from seven countries and six disciplines - including 10 cyclists and four rowers - had been involved in the doping scheme.

Prosecutors who are investigating Humanplasma over tax evasion say 150 blood samples were taken at the laboratory.

Humanplasma insists it ended its involvement in blood doping after the 2006 Turin Olympics, which ended in scandal and life bans for several Austrian biathlon and cross-country athletes.

But the practices "continued long after 2006," it noted, adding that it was now trying to clear its name.

"We have assumed responsibility for our past. But in the end, all that people remember is the name Humanplasma," said Eisler.

(by AFP)

Balco Founder Attempting an Image Make-Over

WHEN IT COMES to performance-enhancing drugs, a central figure in a scandal-plagued era contends the real villains are sports fans who want to believe in the concept of all-natural heroes, but maybe not so much as to demand rigid testing procedures that would provide more hard evidence as to whether their favorite football or baseball player is dirty.

As the founder and president of Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), Victor Conte is an ex-con widely regarded as the serpent who offered all those world-class athletes a tempting apple enriched with anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, erythropoietin (EPO) and designer drugs that came to be known as "the clear" and "the cream." His clients included disgraced Olympian Marion Jones, champion boxer Shane Mosley and San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, he of the literally swollen head and cartoonishly inflated biceps.

Now, he wants to help remove performance-enhancing drugs from sports, Conte says in an interview with the Daily News. He knows it is not going to happen easily.

"Until those who make the majority of the financial gains from sports develop a genuine interest in reducing the use of PEDs, it will continue," said Conte, who served a 4-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute steroids and money laundering in 2005.

Like many Americans who get their daily episodes of sweaty soap opera on ESPN, Conte watched with interest recently when Mark McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals' new hitting coach who never tested positive for PEDs, yet has been convicted in the court of public opinion, tearfully owned up to his steroid-soaked past. "Looking back," he said in a statement, "I wish I had never played in the steroid era," adding that it's time to "move on from this. Baseball is great now."

A few days after he confessed to what most people already suspected, McGwire was greeted by thunderous applause from a ballroom packed with 2,500 red-clad Cardinals fans whose sense of outrage apparently extends only to ballplayers wearing another team's colors.

Conte, however, sounds a warning that there is still too much money to be made, too much attention to be grabbed and detection too easy to avoid for druggies to turn over a completely new leaf. Whenever someone invents a better mousetrap for testing, smarter rodents are sure to come up with a more foolproof method for snatching the cheese and getting away with it.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game, and the mice usually find a way to stay a step ahead of the cat," Conte said. "Anyone who believes [McGwire] is naive. The use of performance-enhancing drugs is still rampant. Baseball and football have testing programs, but they're inept. Boxing's program is completely worthless."

As proof that the average fan talks a better anti-drug game than he's willing to play, Conte cites a poll of track and field fans in Europe, where sprinters and shotputters are much bigger stars, at least between Olympics, than they are in the United States. Asked whether they would rather see a certifiably clean 100-meter dash guy clocked in 10.2 seconds, or a steroid-fueled one break the world record (the current mark is 9.58 seconds), a majority of respondents gritted their teeth, fessed up and admitted they would rather see the faster guy on PEDs.

With testing programs that cast limited nets and catch an occasional fish but let many whoppers escape, Conte thinks the get-tough posturing in most sports is mostly for show. Cheaters will continue to cheat, but more carefully, Conte says, while those charged with the responsibility of flushing them out go only part of the way to fix the problem.

"I said on ABC's '20/20' that I believed 50 percent of baseball players were on steroids and 80 percent were using stimulants [at a time when aging superstars Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens and others were defying the natural laws of diminishing returns]," Conte said. "Maybe it's a little less now, but a reduction is not the same as elimination."

To buttress that argument, Conte notes that an 2008 agreement between the players union and Major League Baseball allows offseason testing of up to 375 players over a 3-year period, or roughly 31 percent of those on teams' 40-man rosters. Previously, only 60 players were tested in the offseason. All major league players are randomly selected for steroid testing twice during the regular season.

Conte realizes he forever will be a pariah to many, but he insists he's now on the side of good and virtue. He says he's available to pass along his expertise to those truly committed to ridding sports of PEDs.

The response thus far has been, frankly, underwhelming.

Conte, who was sued for defamation by Shane Mosley, was alerted by a New York Daily Newsarticle that reported the World Boxing Council was conducting an investigation into Mosley's use of PEDs. Conte says he contacted WBC attorney Robert Lenhardt, who was involved in the probe.

"I sent him e-mails and documents," Conte said. "All I got back from him was an acknowledgment, 'We're in receipt of this information. Thanks.' It became apparent pretty soon he had no interest in following up."

Lenhardt responed to Conte's claims in an interview with the Daily News. "The WBC believes it is one of the early leaders in all of sports in putting in anti-doping regulations," Lenhardt said.

"Did Mr. Conte send information to the WBC? I can confirm that he did. But the WBC recognizes that these matters [Mosley's defamation suit against Conte] are currently being litigated in the U.S. court system, so there has been no determination [of their validity or usefulness] in advance of the outcome."

Conte also claims to have met with other anti-doping organizations.

"I also met with officials of USADA [United States Anti-Doping Agency] face-to-face. I reached out and wrote an open letter to WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency]. I flew to New York and met with Dick Pound [president of WADA].

"But the new regime at WADA, headed by Australia's John Fahey, don't want to listen to me because I'm a bad guy. Fahey said he'd rather get his information from medical doctors than from a convicted felon."

Typical of what some could say is a "don't-call-us, we'll-call-you" attitude toward Conte by the anti-doping establishment is this response by Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of USADA, who said: "For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would associate with someone like this who's made so many mistakes in the past."

Conte also offered his services to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which sanctioned the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. megafight scheduled for March 13 that fell apart over a drug-testing dispute. He was told thanks, but no thanks.

Keith Kizer, executive director of the NSAC - which requires urine testing, but not blood testing - said he is confident his state's policy is comprehensive enough to get the job done.

"I'm very pleased with it," he said. "We actually had some experts from the U.S. Olympic Committee and USADA come here 8 or 9 months ago to talk about our drug-testing policy. They didn't have a problem with it at all. Certainly nothing about blood testing came up.

"I hope you'll forgive me if I don't put a lot of stock into what Victor Conte has to say. The NSAC is known not just for drug-testing, but for being very proactive in all aspects of regulation. Almost 2 years ago we instituted out-of-competition drug-testing, to be even better at detection. Keep in mind, though, that our ultimate goal is not to catch people; it's to keep them from using in the first place."

Conte said such satisfaction on Kizer's part is indicative of boxing's status as the "wild, wild West" of PEDs, an outlaw hole-in-the-wall enclave where only the dumbest and least discreet violators ever are brought to justice.

"I believe there's widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in boxing, and there has been for decades," Conte said.

"If they were really interested in cleaning it up, the first step would be to establish a protocol where inspectors begin to test fighters up to 2 months before a bout. Blood and urine testing would be done randomly."

But what about Pacquiao's aversion to "invasive" testing standards demanded by Mayweather (who also would have submitted himself to them) that have never previously been instituted in boxing?

"For psychological reasons, some athletes are going to complain about having blood drawn," Conte said. "They don't like needles. But to take a very small blood sample would have an extremely minimal to no effect physically.

"I think you could do blood testing up to 5 days prior to a fight with no physical detriment to a participant. Even 10 days would be OK. But as soon as you go to 14 days or longer, that's enough time to use EPO and build up your red blood cell count. At 24 days, there's all sorts of things that can be done with thyroid medication, fast-acting forms of insulin, EPO, testosterone."

Conte said it is "suspicious," the way Pacquiao, 31, has gained lean muscle mass while retaining and even seemingly improving his power and speed while bulking up from 106 pounds to 147. Pacquiao is not known to have ever failed a drug test.

"But it's difficult to make any kind of allegations against him because the drug tests he's had to take are worthless," said Conte, who pointed out that Marion Jones tested negative 160 consecutive times until she admitted to using PEDs, rather than risk more substantial jail time, while under oath and testifying before a grand jury. Jones subsequently was stripped of her five Olympic medals from 2000 by the International Olympic Committee.

But isn't the fact that Jones, McGwire and others were exposed, by whatever means, proof that a legitimate attempt is being made to purify the games people play?

"It's nothing more than propaganda," Conte said. "They want to be able to say, 'Hey, we test. We're trying.' "

(by Bernard Fernandez)

Discussion of The Effects of HGH

While human growth hormone has a remarkable ability to generate controversy, exactly what it does for athletes, both good and bad, is as much of a mystery today as when it first found favor as a performance booster during the 1990s.

“That’s uncharted territory,” said Richard J. Auchus, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. “We just don’t know what happens when people use high doses for long periods of time.”

H.G.H. is among the drugs prescribed by Anthony Galea, a Toronto-based sports medicine physician who was charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last week with, among other things, conspiring to smuggle it into the United States. H.G.H. is legal in Canada but approved in the United States for only a few specific uses that do not include hastening recovery from injuries.

Galea has treated a number of elite athletes, including Tiger Woods, the sprinter Donovan Bailey and the swimmer Dara Torres, and is being investigated by American authorities for supplying performance-enhancing drugs to athletes in the United States. Both Galea and his lawyer have strongly rejected that allegation and dispute the Canadian charges.

Galea told The New York Times before being charged that he had never given an athlete growth hormone. But he acknowledged that he prescribed the drug to some patients at his Toronto clinic who were at least 40 and fatigued. Galea, 50, is such a believer in its restorative powers that he said he had injected the hormone into his body five days a week for the last decade.

But physicians and medical researchers who have studied people with medical conditions that lead to growth hormone overproduction said that available evidence suggested that athletes who cheat by using costly H.G.H. may simply wind up being cheated themselves.

“Ultimately I’d have to say that its main effect is that it makes your wallet a little less heavy,” said Dr. Alan D. Rogol, a professor emeritus of endocrinology at the University of Virginia. Rogol also reviews requests to the United States Anti-Doping Agency from athletes seeking permission to use banned hormones for therapeutic treatments.

Suspicions that athletes may be using growth hormone first surfaced in the 1980s. But at the time, the only source of the hormone was cadavers.

Advances in genetics, however, allowed biotechnology companies to clone and market several hormones, including H.G.H., beginning in the 1990s. Those products swiftly found an illicit following among athletes. H.G.H. is considered a performance-enhancer in sports, and the World Anti-Doping Agency subsequently banned it.

The hormones came with a long list of side effects. For H.G.H., they include cardiovascular problems, an increased risk of diabetes, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, glucose intolerance, colon polyps, skin growths, excessive sweating and serious headaches. Heavy and prolonged growth hormone use can lead to abnormal bone growth in the face, head, hands and feet. It is widely suspected, but not proved, that excessive H.G.H. may promote cancers.

Despite Galea’s practice for older patients, growth hormone injections ultimately leave users fatigued, said Auchus, who acts as the Endocrine Society’s spokesman on hormone abuse. “Rather than being some fountain of youth, the older you are the less you tend to benefit,” Auchus said.

The United States determined that potential harm from H.G.H. is so great that federal law puts it in an unusual category of drugs that doctors cannot prescribe for unapproved, or off-label, uses. (No such ban exists in Canada.) Its approved uses are not conditions common among professional athletes: it can be used in children with severe growth problems, H.I.V. patients may receive it if they have muscle wasting, and it can be prescribed to offset exceptional weight loss in people who have had much of their small intestine surgically removed.

When it came to doping, the new hormones had an attractive feature. Because they are clones of natural hormones, they were invisible to antidoping tests that relied on looking for chemical abnormalities in urine samples. Although a blood test for H.G.H. was subsequently developed, it has not been highly effective. Rogol said that it only worked if the test subject had injected H.G.H. shortly before being asked for a sample.

Some of the cloned hormones unquestionably enhance performance. Erythropoietin, or EPO, boosts red blood cells, offering athletes in endurance sports significant gains in speed and endurance.

The possible gains from H.G.H. use are more varied and far less proven.

Auchus said that it reduces body fat and increases lean muscle mass, which are desirable not just for body building, where growth hormone abuse is believed to be widespread, but in a variety of other sports, including cycling, where leanness boosts results. But, like everything, there is debate about the full extent of that effect.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some athletes use H.G.H. to increase muscle mass. But Auchus and Rogol said that there was considerable research showing that such gains were modest.

One key difficulty in determining what an individual performance-enhancing drug brings to an athlete, Rogol said, is that few people involved in doping use just a single treatment. That opens up the potential for complex interactions, both beneficial and harmful, between various drugs and treatment methods.

There is speculation that growth hormone may be used in conjunction with platelet-rich plasma injections to swiftly heal injured muscles and tendons. While Galea is a leading proponent of platelet therapy, he said during an interview that he never combined the technique with growth hormone.

But there is considerable doubt about whether injecting H.G.H. directly into injured tissue — with or without platelet therapy — actually achieves anything.

Growth hormone does not act directly. Instead it prompts the body to produce insulin-like growth factor 1, or I.G.F.-1, which then triggers growth.

The overwhelming majority of I.G.F.-1 is produced by the liver and delivered through the blood stream. Evidence shows, however, that growth hormone can prompt local I.G.F.-1 production in other cells of the body. Auchus said that it was not clear if such local production was significant enough to accelerate healing.

Even platelet therapy, widely practiced on injured tissue, is an unproven treatment marked by uncertainties; it is however legal and not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

To create platelet-rich plasma, a small amount of the patient’s blood is put in a centrifuge to separate its red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in healing. A small amount of the substance is then injected into the damaged area. The belief is that the high concentration of platelets — 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — prompts the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells.

Scott A. Rodeo, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and a former United States Olympic team physician, said that when it comes to platelet therapy, “the underlying rationale makes sense but there’s very little underlying research.”

Rodeo, who is also a physician for the New York Giants, said that Galea was far from unique in providing the treatment in North America.

“If you want to do P.R.P. today, there are many places to do it, although it may have been different two years ago,” he said. “But sometimes in sports, a name gets out and gets recycled among athletes.”

(by Ian Austen)

U.S. Anti-Doping Agency To Curb Steroids In Supplements

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency will unveil details of a new plan to confront manufacturers who produce supplements that contain steroids and other dangerous drugs.

USADA will introduce the program Wednesday, and says it has support of the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The anti-doping agency has been keying on the supplement industry this year, seeking tougher state and federal laws in an attempt to prevent prohibited substances from being sold over the counter.

In the past five months, Food and Drug Administration investigators have raided a pair of multimillion-dollar supplement companies that are accused of selling steroids under the guise of supplements.
Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press

Analysis of Substance at Center of Jamaican Athletes' Positive Tests

A substance called 4-methyl-2-hexanamine was found in the urine of five athletes tested at the National Championship in June. The athletes were Sheri-Ann Brooks, Yohan Blake, Marvin Anderson, Allodin Fothergill and Lansford Spence.

The substance was described by the IAAF lab as "an adverse analytical finding" and has resulted in three-month bans being handed down to four of the athletes. Brooks was cleared because proper procedure was not followed for the testing of her B sample.

Vitamin supplement

It was later revealed that the main source of the 4-methyl-2-hexanamine was a vitamin supplement called Muscle Speed.

Most people will probably not be aware that 4-methyl-2-hexanamine is NOT on the WADA list of banned substances. Why were the athletes banned then? It is because the IAAF report stated that 4-methyl-2-hexanamine "has a similar chemical structure or has similar biological effect(s)" to tuaminoheptane. Tuaminoheptane is a compound on the WADA list of prohibited stimulants (section S6 b).

The critical word in the report is "similar" which, as defined by the Oxford dictionary, means "like, alike, resembling something but not the same". Similarity is subjective unless there is agreement on the minimum criteria for similarity. As such, the term has limited use in things scientific. More critical is the extent of similarity. What is the minimum criteria which two compounds must meet before they are deemed similar? Is it 1 per cent, 45 per cent, 90 per cent or 99.9 per cent similarity? Which is it? How similar must 4-methyl-2-hexanamine be to tuaminoheptane? The WADA list does not address this issue of the extent of similarity.

Structural similarity

With respect to structural similarity, if you look at the structures of 4-methyl-2-hexanamine and tuaminoheptane under a special microscope, it would show that both compounds are made up of the same type and the same number of atoms (both are made up of 7 carbons, 17 hydrogens and 1 nitrogen). However, the atoms are connected differently in each compound.

Thus, 4-methyl-2-hexanamine is split into two at both ends of the molecule while tuaminoheptane is longer, straighter, and splits only at one end. Are they similar or not? Without an agreement on the minimum criteria for similarity it is impossible to say.

On the matter of similarity in biological effects, are 4-methyl-2-hexanamine and tuaminoheptane similar? Well, it depends on which biological effects. As athletic stimulants? As nasal decongestants? As anti-cancer compounds? Should it be some similarities? All similarities? Only relevant similarities? What is the minimum criteria to be met here? The WADA list does not address this point.

In my examination of over 100 years of science literature, I have found no studies published which establishes that 4-methyl-2-hexanamine is useful as an athletic stimulant. It would be helpful if WADA or the IAAF shows the scientific basis of deeming 4-methyl-2-hexanamine a stimulant. In fact, scientists at a pharmaceutical company, Eli Lily, said over 60 years ago in a 1944 patent that (sic) "4-methyl-2-hexanamine has a negligible effect on the nervous system" (Shoule and Rohrmann, Eli Lily patent 2,350,318). One similar biological effect between 4-methyl-2-hexanamine and tuaminoheptane, however, is that both have been used as nasal decongestants. Is this similarity enough for the athletes to have been banned, or is this an irrelevant similarity?

4-methyl-2-hexanamine itself is a natural compound which comes from the geranium plant.

The leaves and stalk of the plant can be extracted by steam to give geranium oil. This is a clear to light green oil which has a minty-flowery smell. The oil is used mainly in the food and perfume industries.

Geranium oil

4-methyl-2-hexanamine is one of the minor compounds in geranium oil. It makes up less than 1 per cent of the oil extract. Therefore, in a teaspoon of geranium oil extract, 4-methyl-2-hexanamine would comprise only about one drop.

Each tablet of the supplement Muscle Speed contains less than one-half of 1 per cent of 4-methyl-2-hexanamine. Therefore, it would take more than 2,500 tablets (60 bottles) to provide one teaspoon of 4-methyl-2-hexanamine.

In my estimation, structural similarity should not be used as a criterion by WADA. The only important criteria should be biological effects, that is, how the compounds affect the body. This is because there is no predictable relationship between structure and biological effects. Tests always have to be done. Even compounds which are nearly identical can have vastly different biological effects. There are tens of thousands of examples. Just one will serve to highlight: Thalidomide was a drug prescribed a few decades ago to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. It turned out that thalidomide was not one compound, however, but two nearly identical compounds.

Mirror images

The compounds were, indeed mirror images of each other but, like the human mirror image, the right hand side on one molecule was the left hand side of the other. One of the compounds did alleviate morning sickness but the other caused horrible birth defects. These two thalidomide compounds are nearly identical, yet their biological effects are profoundly different. This sad case emphasises that structural similarity does not mean biological similarity.

So, after considering these points, what are your thoughts on the matter? Is 4-methyl-2-hexanamine similar to tuaminoheptane? Should the athletes have been banned for the presence of 4-methyl-2-hexanamine in their test results? It would be interesting to hear what you think.

(by Peter Ruddock, PhD)

1984 Olympics Doping Bombshell

A spokesperson for USA Track and Field said Monday that the current leadership of the federation had no knowledge of an informal testing program leading up to the 1984 Los Angeles Games that allowed athletes who tested positive for doping to avoid punishment. The Orange County Register reported Sunday at least 34 U.S. track and field athletes tested positive or had possible positive tests during six weeks of testing by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1984, according to confidential USOC memos.

"USATF believes that any athlete, in any era, should be banned from competition if they are found to have cheated," USATF spokesperson Jill Geer wrote in an e-mail. "The anti-doping movement was in its relative infancy 25 years ago, in terms of sophistication and comprehensiveness, and USATF and our current leadership have no knowledge of the reported program described."

The USOC no longer handles drug testing of athletes. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency took over testing for Olympic sports after the 2000 Sydney Games.

Pat Connolly, a coach of elite track and field athletes and an anti-steroid advocate, wants more information. "Give us the names," she said. "That's my reaction. If they ever came forward with the names, it would be a who's who of the best medal winners.

"Let them start answering questions. A lot of them have been scott free and holier than thou."

According to the Register story, officials said they did not know or would not confirm whether athletes who tested positive went on to compete in the 1984 Games.

In 1989, Connolly and two of her sprinters, Diane Williams and 1984 Olympic 100-meter champion Evelyn Ashford, appeared before a Senate committee hearing chaired by Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware. Williams told of being steered to steroids for years by coach Chuck Debus, who was later banned from the sport, and that she received a letter from the USOC that she had tested positive and needed to be clean before the '84 Games.

(by Dick Patrick)

Jamaican Athletes Seek Delay in Doping Trial

There was a premature end this morning (Aug 3) to the hearing into the case of five Jamaican athletes who returned positive tests for banned substances at their National Championships in June.

The session did not survive one hour because the athletes through their lawyers, expressed disapproval of some members of the panel assembled to hear the case, TrackAlerts.com was reliable informed.

When our team visited the location, Yohan Blake, Marvin Anderson, Sheri-Ann Brooks, Allodin Fothergill and Lansford Spence were seen leaving the building. A request was made for us to not to reveal the venue for security reasons.

“The athletes’ lawyers asked for a different panel to hear their case and thus it (hearing) ended early,” the source said.

When contacted, the chairman of Jamaica’s Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO) disciplinary panel, Kent Gammon only said: “The disciplinary proceedings for the five athletes started this morning…

“We started hearing submissions (today) and we will continue to hear submissions on Wednesday…”

With today being the deadline date for final entries to the IAAF, it seems to be all over for the five, unless they are placed on the team as reserves.

The Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA) has not yet announced their final list.

Consumers Warned Over Drugs in Supplements

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Tuesday that a line of nutritional supplements containing BALCO-era steroids poses a serious health risk.


The supplements Tren Extreme and Mass Extreme, whose alleged distributors are the targets of a federal criminal probe, could cause liver injury, stroke or kidney failure, said Mike Levy, director of the FDA's division of new drugs and labeling compliance.

The FDA also issued a warning letter to American Cellular Laboratories Inc. of Pacifica, declaring that the company was violating federal law by distributing the products, which are sold online and in sports nutrition stores.

Last week, federal agents raided a Max Muscle outlet in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood and the Pacifica home of Maurice Sandoval, who the government says owns American Cellular.

The agents were seeking evidence of drug dealing, court records show. No arrests were made. Sandoval declined a Chronicle request to be interviewed.

Tren Extreme and Mass Extreme are marketed as legal products, but FDA scientists say they are actually chemical clones of two banned steroids: trenbolone, a steroid created for beef cattle, and DMT, also called Madol, a banned designer steroid.

Both steroids figured in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative drug scandal, the government said in an affidavit. Trenbolone formed the basis of "the Clear," the undetectable drug allegedly used by former Giants star Barry Bonds and other elite athletes who were BALCO clients early in this decade. Madol was synthesized by a chemist associated with BALCO.

(by Lance Williams)

Appeals Court Hears Arguments in Vikings Drug Case

A federal appeals court allowed other major sports to weigh in Wednesday on the NFL's attempts to suspend two Minnesota Vikings for violating the league's anti-doping policy.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals accepted a joint brief from Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL, as well as a similar brief from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which administers drug testing for U.S. Olympic teams.

The teams and independent agency asked the appeals court to rule that the NFL's collective bargaining agreement trumps the state laws that defensive linemen Kevin Williams and Pat Williams are using to fight their four-game suspensions. They wrote it would be impossible otherwise to enforce uniform standards for eliminating performance-enhancing drugs from sports.

The NFL seeks to discipline the two players because they tested positive last summer for the diuretic bumetanide, which is banned from sports because it can mask the presence of steroids. It was an unlisted ingredient in the weight-loss supplement StarCaps, which they acknowledge taking. Court proceedings in the complex web of cases involving StarCaps have established that the NFL knew the supplement contained the banned substance but never shared that information with players.

The Williamses, who are not related, are not accused of using steroids, but the NFL says players are responsible for knowing what they're taking.

The league wants to impose the suspensions at the start of the regular season, and the 8th Circuit on Wednesday scheduled oral arguments for 9 a.m. Aug. 18 in St. Paul to put itself in a position to rule by then.

A federal judge in May dismissed several parts of the Williamses' lawsuit and a related case filed by the NFL Players Association, but sent two issues back to state court because they involve the Williamses' claims their suspensions would violate Minnesota employment laws. The Williamses and the union are appealing other sections of that ruling.

The baseball, basketball and hockey leagues and the anti-doping agency backed the NFL's contention that Judge Paul Magnuson should have dismissed those claims, too.

They argued if the NFL's collective bargaining agreement doesn't take precedence over the two state laws at issue, sports would be subject to a patchwork of different state laws and regulations. And they raised the possibility the Minnesota Twins, Wild, Timberwolves and Vikings might be allowed to use substances that teams in other states could not, giving them an unfair advantage.

"In order for professional sports leagues' drug testing programs to be effective, they must apply equally to all players in the league, regardless of their or their team's home state. Without uniform requirements and procedures, the sports leagues would be unable to properly maintain competitive balance or any semblance of integrity, and instead would be held hostage to the individual rules of each state legislature," the leagues wrote in their friend-of-the-court brief.

A Day in The Life of a Drug-Tester

It’s 6 a.m. on the Charles River. Sun-splashed rowers glide silently past Harvard University.

On this morning, one of them is in for a big surprise when he returns to the docks.

Scott Lowell, a doping control officer for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, sits across the street at Starbucks. He doesn’t need more coffee. He needs 90 milliliters of urine (3.04 oz.) from the Olympic-caliber rower.

Lowell has one of the strangest jobs in sports. He must view athletes peeing in a cup. He says drug testing - sorting out the cheaters - helps level the playing field.

“I believe in what I am doing,’’ he says earnestly. “Growing up as a kid [in Natick], I always played by the rules. I hated the kids that cheated. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t feel passionate about it.’’

As a graduate student at Bentley College five years ago, Lowell began assisting a friend who was a doping control officer.

Then he underwent a week of training at USADA headquarters in Colorado Springs and passed a background check and a written test.

Lowell says he has conducted more than a thousand urine tests over the years to athletes in virtually all Olympic sports, including Boston Marathon runners.

At first he acknowledges that witnessing and collecting urine samples was “awkward.’’

“It was a little weird,’’ he says. “I need to see from mid-torso to mid-thigh. They need to roll their sleeves up to their elbows. I need to see a clear shot of the sample going into the cup.’’

Lowell shrugs.

“If the roles were reversed I would have a tough time, to be honest,’’ he says.

“Now, it doesn’t really faze me.’’


‘Any time, anywhere’
USADA began drug testing athletes Oct. 2, 2000, and is responsible for managing the testing and adjudication process of the athletes in the US Olympic and Paralympic Movement. They test more than 8,000 athletes annually. Last year, more than 5,000 were tested out of competition. The information demanded of these elite athletes is mind-boggling.

“We can test them any time, anywhere,’’ says Lowell, one of 50 doping control officers nationwide.

“They have to provide their whereabouts between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. Where their training location is. Where they live. They have to provide a one-hour window where they guarantee they will be each and every day, otherwise it’s a breach.’’ If the athlete is not where they say they are going to be on three occasions they face a suspension of as many as two years.

Lowell, 33, is happy that he deals with amateurs and not big-name professionals.

“Imagine a professional athlete telling you where they would be at all hours; that would never happen,’’ he says.


At 6:30 a.m., he grabs his leather bag, adjusts his USADA identification badge on his USADA-embossed polo shirt and briskly crosses Memorial Drive. Inside the Riverside Boat Club, he opens the bag. It’s filled with collection cups, glass vials, sealed Styrofoam boxes, and a refractometer. These items can never leave Lowell’s - or a designated chaperone’s - sight.

Rowers stare at him as they come off the river. “Integrity, Health, Sport,’’ reads the printing on the gray lanyard around his neck.

Today Lowell is looking for Alex Rothmeier, a randomly chosen Yale graduate who hopes to compete in the London Olympics. Rothmeier has done nothing wrong. It’s just his day to be tested.

Checking a boathouse computer, Lowell quickly determines Rothmeier is still on the river.

“This could take 15 minutes, an hour,’’ he says. “It could take five hours depending on how dehydrated the athlete is.’’

When a sweaty Rothmeier arrives at the dock, he immediately recognizes Lowell.

“Is it me?’’ he asks.

The two now become inseparable until after nature calls.

“We have to keep an eye on him,’’ says Lowell. “I can’t let him out of my sight.’’

It’s 7:15 a.m. Sooner or later, Rothmeier, 23, a wiry looking rower in the lightweight class, will have to go. But after rowing for nearly two hours, it’s difficult.

He’s almost apologetic.

“The only trouble is we wake up at 5:15 a.m., you’re dehydrated after sleeping,’’ Rothmeier says. “You go and work out for two hours you’re even more dehydrated. You have to chug water to try and pee. Sometimes it takes a while. Last time I chugged a whole bunch of water and had to go six times at work.’’

Occasionally, Lowell is late for work at his regular job as an account manager for ProMedical in Lexington. “They are very understanding,’’ he says.

Still, he doesn’t tell many people about his unusual job. “You get some cracks about it,’’ says the Watertown resident. “But most people think it’s great.’’

All testing is gender appropriate. His wife, who usually serves as a chaperone, does the witnessing honors when women athletes are tested.

He earns $100-$150 per collection. USADA pays her $100.

“It’s worked out great for us,’’ he says.


Aggressive testing policies
Sitting in an office, Rothmeier sips water as Lowell does the paperwork. Rothmeier is asked what medications and/or other substances he has taken in the last three days (including vitamins, minerals, herbs, proteins, amino acids, and other dietary supplements. He has a special therapeutic exemption for asthma medication.

“He is responsible for everything he puts in his body,’’ says Lowell. USADA maintains a hotline for athlete questions about substances that are banned.

Rothmeier gets more water. Lowell goes with him. He changes into a dry T-shirt. Lowell is there.

Rothmeier says he doesn’t mind being tested. Sometimes, USADA arrives with a licensed phlebotomist to draw blood and test for human growth hormone.

“Even though this is my fourth out-of-competition test, I think it’s great,’’ said Rothmeier. “I’m fine with being tested all the time. There’s no anxiety, I know I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not as bad as sitting here and getting stuck with some needles and getting blood drawn. But it’s a good thing this wasn’t in-competition [event] testing. They only give you 60 minutes.’’

The talk turns to athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs.

“They’re cheaters and liars, that’s all there is to say about them,’’ Rothmeier says. “It’s terrible. I can’t see why people would do that to themselves. If you win after you cheated it’s not winning. I don’t know how you can live with yourself.’’

With its aggressive testing policies, USADA believes it is making a difference.

Lowell says his job has given him new respect for athletes’ work ethic.

“I’ve seen guys in January when this river is frozen and they are doing two-a-days, four-hour sessions busting their tails upstairs in the workout room,’’ he says. “When you see that, you want to make sure what they are doing is worth it and they are not going to get beat by some doper.’’

Lowell says the longest wait for him was close to five hours.

“We go to his house and he doesn’t have to pee. He’s got some new video games so I watched him play for hours. I’ve gone out to breakfast with guys, gone to their little kid’s softball games, watched a couple of Red Sox games with athletes. Everything.’’


Sealed and delivered
At 8:15, Rothmeier chooses one of 10 sterile-sealed urine collection containers. He heads for the locker room, Lowell right behind him.

Rothmeier washes his hands with water only - soap could contaminate the sample - and fills the container above halfway. Barely.

“There’s a little bit of rooting, like, ‘C’mon can you get a little bit more.’ Sometimes I put on the water faucet,’’ Lowell says.

Lowell follows Rothmeier out of the bathroom, keeping his eyes on the prize.

Back at the makeshift doping control station, Rothmeier pours the urine into two vials so there is always a backup to verify testing. The sealed vials are given numbers so testers have no idea whose samples they are handling. Lowell, by design, lets Rothmeier do all the dirty work.

“I can’t touch it,’’ says Lowell. “I just sit at arm’s length directing him.’’

He then uses a refractometer to check density of the sample. It can’t be too clear. This sample looks good, he says. Then Rothmeier packs the samples in a Styrofoam kit and seals it.

Only then, at 11:23, does Lowell receive the sealed package. Next stop: UPS.

“I call it liquid gold,’’ says Lowell. “You guard this like it’s your child."

Performance-Enhancing is No Laughing Matter

STEROIDS AND illegal performance-enhancing drugs are nothing to joke about, and the fact that an athlete like Danica Patrick could try to pass off an ill-conceived comment about drug use as a joke is the whole problem with the athletic/drug culture.

In an interview published in Sports Illustrated on Monday, Dan Patrick asked Danica Patrick if she would take performance-enhancing drugs if she would not get caught and it would lead to her winning the Indianapolis 500.

Danica, who finished third at Indy last month, said, "Well, then it's not cheating, is it? If nobody finds out?

"Yeah," she added. "It would be like finding a gray area. In motorsports, we work in gray areas a lot. You're trying to find where the holes are in the rule book."

After being criticized by U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart, who said Patrick had "undercut what millions of parents try best to teach their kids every day in this country, that winners never cheat and cheaters never win," Danica went into spin control.

She told USA Today that her answer was a "bad joke," mentioned the sensitivity to PED usage in our society and said, "It's a shame kids think they have to do this to get ahead. It's very dangerous."

Yes, it is dangerous, and in some cases we've seen PED use by kids turn out to be deadly.

But the biggest shame in kids thinking that they have to use illegal drugs to get ahead is that they see repeated examples of it working every day in the world of professional athletics.

Major League Baseball suspends Manny Ramirez 50 games for violating league drug policy. But he still has a 2-year contract worth $45 million - less the games he misses because of the suspension.

Alex Rodriguez has already earned $230 million during his time in the majors and still has 9 years remaining on the 10-year, $275 million contract he signed before the 2008 season.

A-Rod has admitted that some of his $500 million performance was fueled by illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

The bank will still cash his checks.

Marion Jones lived a life of luxury, fame, fortune and adulation by cheating her way to the top of track and field and to Olympic glory by using illegal designer drugs.

Yes, she eventually fell, not because she cheated, but only because she lied to government law-enforcement agents when confronted about her drug use.

A complete list of drug-tainted athletes would fill not just my column but also likely the entire sports section, possibly the whole newspaper.

Football, basketball, hockey, soccer, cycling, track and field, swimming, gymnastics - virtually every sport, some more than others, have incidents of athletes reaching the highest level of achievement through the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

So really, tell me how we realistically expect impressionable kids with dreams of becoming famous athletes to shy away from performance-enhancing drugs when they have so many examples of it working for the greats they strive to emulate?

I'm not trying to pick on Danica Patrick because she just happens to be the flavor of the day. But she probably doesn't realize the worst part of her statement.

She apologized for the reference to illegal performance-enhancing drug use, but the motivation for doing it was ignored.

The excuse that it's not cheating if no one finds out goes against the basic core of competition, yet over time it has become the prevalent belief in sports.

The "gray areas" and "holes" in the rule book that Danica Patrick says everyone is trying to find are called "cheating."

Rule books aren't written in gray. The are written in crystal-clear black and white.

Looking for loopholes and gray areas to bend, flex or stretch is called "cheating."

Unfortunately, we've accepted that as how things are.

Instead of cheating, we refer to it as "gamesmanship" or "getting one up."

The use of performance-enhancing drugs is simply the natural extension of our laughing off the spitball to the extent that Gaylord Perry, an admitted cheater, could be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame based on numbers achieved primarily through breaking the rules.

But that's where we are as a society - cheating isn't cheating unless you get caught. Sportsmanship is for losers, not champions.

Cheaters do prosper, and a lot of us are OK with that.

Danica Patrick was right. It was a joke, a joke on anyone who still held the belief that integrity, honor and fair play still have any meaning in sport. *

(by John Smallwood)

Six Confirmed Cheats From Beijing Olympics Revealed

The gold medallist in one of track and field's glamour races and a silver winner in cycling are among six athletes from the Beijing Games nabbed for blood doping in the latest Olympic drug scandal.

National sports bodies in Bahrain and Italy confirmed Wednesday that 1,500-metre champion Rashid Ramzi and road race medallist Davide Rebellin turned up positive for the new blood-boosting drug CERA in retests of their samples. Dominican women's weightlifter Yudelquis Contreras and prominent German cyclist Stephan Schumacher were among the others.

A person with knowledge of the results told The Associated Press that Greek race walker Athanasia Tsoumeleka and Croatian 800-meter runner Vanja Perisic also tested positive.

If their backup B samples also come back positive, the athletes face being disqualified, stripped of medals and banned from the next Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday that a total of seven positive tests involving six athletes came back positive for CERA, which increases endurance by stimulating production of oxygen-rich red blood cells. The IOC has not named the athletes or the sports involved.

The six new cases bring to 15 the total number of athletes caught doping in Beijing, and underscore both the persistence of cheating across sports and nations and the IOC's aggressive policy in catching drug users even outside the period of the Olympics.

The IOC reanalyzed a total of 948 samples from Beijing after new lab tests for CERA and insulin became available following the Olympics. The testing began in January and focused mainly on endurance events in cycling, rowing, swimming and track and field.

Ramzi won Bahrain's first gold medal in track and field and is the first champion from the Beijing Games to be busted for use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The Moroccan-born runner, who won the 800-1,500 double at the 2005 world championships, gave Bahrain its first ever Olympic track and field gold medal with victory in Beijing in three minutes 32.94 seconds.

Ramzi's B sample will be tested in France on June 8 and he will face an IOC hearing the same day, the Bahrain Olympic Committee said.

"The Bahrain Olympic Committee apologizes for receiving such news from the International Olympic Committee since it ensured Ramzi went through all the necessary doping tests before the games and they were all negative,'' the committee said in a statement.

Ramzi became a citizen of Bahrain after moving to the Gulf nation to take up a job in that country's armed forces in 2002, but retains a Moroccan passport and trains with old coach Khalid Boulami.

If he is stripped of the Beijing victory, Asbel Kipruto Kiprop of Kenya stands to be upgraded from silver to gold. Nicolas Willis of New Zealand would go from bronze to silver, and fourth-place finisher Mehdi Baala of France could move up to the bronze medal.

Track and field has been battered by Olympic drug scandals, from 100-metre winner Ben Johnson in 1988 to sprinter Marion Jones in 2000, both of whom were stripped of their golds.

The International Association of Athletics Federations confirmed it had received notification of three cases in track and field, but declined to give any names because they were considered confidential.

However, the person with knowledge of the results identified the two others as Tsoumeleka and Perisic. The person confirmed their identities to the AP on condition anonymity because the names haven't been released by the IOC.

Tsoumeleka finished ninth in the 20-kilometre walk, and Perisic was eliminated in the first-round heats of the 800.

Tsoumeleka announced in January that she had tested positive in Beijing rechecks. She was charged by a Greek prosecutor earlier this month with using banned drugs.

"The IAAF would like to commend the IOC for their efforts in the storage and re-analysis of samples and for their co-ordination with the IAAF in this process,'' the federation said in a statement. ``This step shows that athletes who cheat can never be comfortable that they will avoid detection and sends a strong message of deterrence.''

In Rome, the Italian Olympic Committee suspended Rebellin and anti-doping prosecutor Ettore Torri called him to a hearing on Monday.

The 37-year-old Rebellin finished second behind Spain's Samuel Sanchez in the Olympic road race. If he loses his medal, Switzerland's Fabian Cancellera could move to silver and Russia's Alexander Kolobnev to bronze.

Rebellin's pro cycling team, Diquigiovanni-Androni, temporarily suspended the rider, pending analysis of the B sample.

"I don't see why I should take a path that would ruin me or my image,'' Rebellin told Italy's state TV on Wednesday. "I don't know if I'll still be able to race, but I will always ride because cycling is my life.''

The German cycling federation announced that Schumacher, who finished 13th in the Beijing time trial and dropped out before the finish of the road race, was among the positive cases.

The 27-year-old Schumacher already has been banned for two years by the International Cycling Union after being caught by French authorities in retesting of Tour de France samples for CERA.

Schumacher won two individual time trial stages at the Tour de France last July and wore the yellow jersey for two days as race leader.

"One of the riders (Schumacher) is already under suspension and, for the other one, (Rebellin) we will be writing to him and suspending him provisionally,'' said International Cycling Union president Pat McQuaid.

The Dominican Olympic Committee identified Contreras as another of the athletes snared by the retests. She competed in the 116-pound category as Yudelquis Maridalin and finished fifth.

The IOC previously disqualified nine athletes for doping at the Aug. 8-24 Olympics. In addition, there were six doping cases involving horses in the equestrian competition.

The IOC has already stripped four athletes of Beijing medals _ Ukrainian heptathlete Lyudmila Blonska (silver), Belarusian hammer throwers Vadim Devyatovskiy (silver) and Ivan Tsikhan (bronze) and North Korean shooter Kim Jong Su (silver and bronze).

Morality Struggles to a Loss in "Game" of Doping

For a competitive cyclist, there is nothing more physically crushing and psychologically demoralizing than getting dropped by your competitors on a climb. With searing lungs and burning legs, your body hunches over the handlebars as you struggle to stay with the leader. You know all too well that once you come off the back of the pack the drive to push harder is gone—and with it any hope for victory.

I know the feeling because it happened to me in 1985 on the long climb out of Albuquerque during the 3,000-mile, nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. On the outskirts of town I had caught up with the second-place rider (and eventual winner), Jonathan Boyer, a svelte road racer who was the first American to compete in the Tour de France. About halfway up the leg-breaking climb, that familiar wave of crushing fatigue swept through my legs as I gulped for oxygen in my struggle to hang on.

To no avail. By the top of the climb Boyer was a tiny dot on the shimmering blacktop, and I didn’t see him again until the finish line in Atlantic City. Later that night Jim Lampley, the commentator for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, asked what else I might have done to go faster.

“I should have picked better parents,” I deadpanned. We all have certain genetic limitations, I went on, that normal training cannot overcome. What else could I have done?

Plenty, and I knew it. Cyclists on the 1984 U.S. Olympic cycling team had told me how they had injected themselves with extra blood before races, either their own—drawn earlier in the season—or that of someone else with the same blood type. “Blood doping,” as the practice is called, was not banned at the time, and on a sliding moral scale it seemed only marginally distinguishable from training at high altitude. Either way, you increase the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in your body. Still, I was already 30 years old and had an academic career to fall back on. I was racing bikes mostly to see how far I could push my body before it gave out. Enhancing my performance artificially didn’t mesh well with my reasons for racing.

But suppose I had been 20 and earning my living through cycling, my one true passion, with no prospects for some other career. Imagine that my team had made performance-enhancing drugs part of its “medical program” and that I knew I could be cut if I was not competitive. Finally, assume I believed that most of my competitors were doping and that the ones who were tested almost never got caught.

That scenario, in substance, is what many competitive cyclists say they have been facing since the early 1990s. And although the details differ for other sports such as baseball, the overall doping circumstances are not dissimilar. Many players are convinced that “everyone else” takes drugs and so have come to believe that they cannot remain competitive if they do not participate. On the governance side, the failure of Major League Baseball to make the rules clear, much less to enforce them with extensive drug testing throughout the season, coupled with its historical tendency to look the other way, has created an environment conducive to doping.

Naturally, most of us do not want to believe that any of these stellar athletes are guilty of doping. But the convergence of evidence leads me to conclude that in cycling, as well as in baseball, football, and track and field, most of the top competitors of the past two decades have been using performance-enhancing drugs. The time has come to ask not if but why. The reasons are threefold: first, better drugs, drug cocktails and drug-training regimens; second, an arms race consistently won by drug takers over drug testers; and third, a shift in many professional sports that has tipped the balance of incentives in favor of cheating and away from playing by the rules.

Gaming Sports
Game theory is the study of how players in a game choose strategies that will maximize their return in anticipation of the strategies chosen by the other players. The “games” for which the theory was invented are not just gambling games such as poker or sporting contests in which tactical decisions play a major role; they also include deadly serious affairs in which people make economic choices, military decisions and even national diplomatic strategies. What all those “games” have in common is that each player’s “moves” are analyzed according to the range of options open to the other players.

The game of prisoner’s dilemma is the classic example: You and your partner are arrested for a crime, and you are held incommunicado in separate prison cells. Of course, neither of you wants to confess or rat on the other, but the D.A. gives each of you the following options:

1. If you confess but the other prisoner does not, you go free and he gets three years in jail.
2. If the other prisoner confesses and you do not, you get three years and he goes free.
3. If you both confess, you each get two years.
4. If you both remain silent, you each get a year.


The table below, called the game matrix, summarizes the four outcomes:

With those outcomes, the logical choice is to defect from the advance agreement and betray your partner. Why? Consider the choices from the first prisoner’s point of view. The only thing the first prisoner cannot control about the outcome is the second prisoner’s choice. Suppose the second prisoner remains silent. Then the first prisoner earns the “temptation” payoff (zero years in jail) by confessing but gets a year in jail (the “high” payoff) by remaining silent. The better outcome in this case for the first prisoner is to confess. But suppose, instead, that the second prisoner confesses. Then, once again, the first prisoner is better off confessing (the “low” payoff, or two years in jail) than remaining silent (the “sucker” payoff, or three years in jail). Because the circumstances from the second prisoner’s point of view are entirely symmetrical to the ones described for the first, each prisoner is better off confessing no matter what the other prisoner decides to do.

Those preferences are not only theoretical. When test subjects play the game just once or for a fixed number of rounds without being allowed to communicate, defection by confessing is the common strategy. But when testers play the game for an unknown number of rounds, the most common strategy is tit-for-tat: each begins cooperating by remaining silent, then mimics whatever the other player does. Even more mutual cooperation can emerge in many-person prisoner’s dilemma, provided the players are allowed to play long enough to establish mutual trust. But the research shows that once defection by confessing builds momentum, it cascades throughout the game.

In cycling, as in baseball and other sports, the contestants compete according to a set of rules. The rules of cycling clearly prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But because the drugs are so effective and many of them are so difficult (if not impossible) to detect, and because the payoffs for success are so great, the incentive to use banned substances is powerful. Once a few elite riders “defect” from the rules (cheat) by doping to gain an advantage, their rule-abiding competitors must defect as well, leading to a cascade of defection through the ranks. Because of the penalties for breaking the rules, however, a code of silence prevents any open communication about how to reverse the trend and return to abiding by the rules.

It was not ever thus. Many riders took stimulants and painkillers from the 1940s through the 1980s. But doping regulations were virtually nonexistent until Tom Simpson, a British rider, died while using amphetamines on the climb up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. Even after Simpson’s death, doping controls in the 1970s and 1980s were spotty at best. With no clear sense of what counted as following the rules, few perceived doping as cheating. In the 1990s, though, something happened to alter the game matrix.

The EPO Elixir
That “something” was genetically engineered recombinant erythropoietin: r-EPO. Ordinary EPO is a hormone that occurs naturally in the body. The kidneys release it into the bloodstream, which carries it to receptors in the bone marrow. When EPO molecules bind to those receptors, the marrow pumps out more red blood cells. Chronic kidney disease and chemotherapy can cause anemia, and so the development of the EPO substitute r-EPO in the late 1980s proved to be a boon to chronically anemic patients—and to chronically competitive athletes.

Taking r-EPO is just as effective as getting a blood transfusion, but instead of hassling with bags of blood and long needles that must be poked into a vein, the athlete can store tiny ampoules of r-EPO on ice in a thermos bottle or hotel minifridge, then simply inject the hormone under the skin. The effect of r-EPO that matters most to the competitor is directly measurable: the hematocrit (HCT) level, or the percentage by volume of red blood cells in the blood. More red blood cells translate to more oxygen carried to the muscles. For men, the normal HCT percentage range is in the mid-40s. Trained endurance athletes can naturally sustain their HCT in the high 40s or low 50s. EPO can push those levels into the high 50s and even the 60s. The winner of the 1996 Tour de France, Bjarne Riis, was nicknamed Mr. 60 Percent; last year he confessed that he owed his extraordinary HCT level to r-EPO.

The drug appears to have made its way into professional cycling in the early 1990s. Greg LeMond thinks it was 1991. Having won the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, LeMond set his sights on breaking what would then have been a record of five Tour de France victories, and in the spring of 1991 he was poised to take his fourth. “I was the fittest I had ever been, my split times in spring training rides were the fastest of my career, and I had assembled a great team around me,” LeMond told me. “But something was different in the 1991 Tour. There were riders from previous years who couldn’t stay on my wheel who were now dropping me on even modest climbs.”

LeMond finished seventh in that Tour, vowing to himself that he could win clean the next year. It was not to be. In 1992, he continued, “our [team’s] performance was abysmal, and I couldn’t even finish the race.” Nondoping cyclists were burning out trying to keep up with their doping competitors. LeMond recounted a story told to him by one of his teammates at the time, Philippe Casado. Casado learned from a rider named Laurent Jalabert, who was racing for the Spanish cycling team ONCE, that Jalabert’s personal doping program was entirely organized by the ONCE team. That program, LeMond said, included r-EPO, which LeMond refused to take, thereby consigning himself to another DNF (“did not finish”) in 1994, his final race.

Some who did go along with the pressure to dope paid an even higher price. Casado, for instance, left LeMond’s team to join one that had a doping program—and died suddenly in 1995 at age 30. Whether his death resulted directly from doping is not known, but when HCT reaches around 60 percent and higher, the blood becomes so thick that clots readily form. The danger is particularly high when the heart rate slows during sleep—and the resting heart rates of endurance athletes are renowned for measuring in the low 30s (in beats per minute). Two champion Dutch riders died of heart attacks after experimenting with r-EPO. Some riders reportedly began sleeping with a heart-rate monitor hooked to an alarm that would sound when their pulse dropped too low.

Trapped in an Arms Race
Just as in evolution there is an arms race between predators and prey, in sports there is an arms race between drug takers and drug testers. In my opinion, the testers are five years away from catching the takers—and always will be. Those who stand to benefit most from cheating will always be more creative than those enforcing the rules, unless the latter have equivalent incentives. In 1997, because there was no test for r-EPO (that would not come until 2001), the Union Cycliste International (UCI), the sport’s governing body, set an HCT limit for men of 50 percent. Shortly afterward, riders figured out that they could go higher than 50, then thin their blood at test time with a technique already allowed and routinely practiced: injections of saline water for rehydration. Presto change-o.

Willy Voet, the soigneur, or all-around caretaker, for the Festina cycling team in the 1990s, explained how he beat the testers in his tell-all book, Breaking the Chain:

Just in case the UCI doctors arrived in the morning to check the riders’ hematocrit levels, I got everything ready to get them through the tests.... I went up to the cyclists’ rooms with sodium drips.... The whole transfusion would take twenty minutes, the saline diluting the blood and so reducing the hematocrit level by three units—just enough.

This contraption took no more than two minutes to set up, which meant we could put it into action while the UCI doctors waited for the riders to come down from their rooms.

How did the new rules of the doping game change the players’ strategies? I put the question directly to Joe Papp, a 32-year-old professional cyclist currently banned after testing positive for synthetic testosterone. Recalling the day he was handed the “secret black bag,” Papp explained how a moral choice becomes an economic decision: “When you join a team with an organized doping program in place, you are simply given the drugs and a choice: take them to keep up or don’t take them and there is a good chance you will not have a career in cycling.”

When Papp came clean, professional cycling slapped him with a two-year ban. But the social consequences were far worse than that. “The sport spit me out,” he lamented to me. “A team becomes a band of brothers,... but with a team of dopers there’s an additional bond—a shared secret—and with that there is a code of silence. If you get busted, you keep your mouth shut. The moment I confessed I was renounced by my friends because in their mind I put them at risk. One guy called and threatened to kill me if I revealed that he doped.”

Papp was never a Tour-caliber cyclist, however, so perhaps the game matrix—with its implications for the rider’s own cycling career—is different at the elite level. Not so, as I learned from another insider. “For years I had no trouble doing my job to help the team leader,” said Frankie Andreu, who was the superdomestique, or lead pacer, supporting Lance Armstrong throughout much of the 1990s. “Then, around 1996, the speeds of the races shifted dramatically upward. Something happened, and it wasn’t just training.” Andreu resisted the temptation as long as he could, but by 1999 he could no longer do his job: “It became apparent to me that enough of the peloton [the main group of riders in a cycling race] was on the juice that I had to do something.” He began injecting himself with r-EPO two to three times a week. “It’s not like Red Bull, which gives you instant energy,” he explained. “But it does allow you to dig a little deeper, to hang on to the group a little longer, to go maybe 31.5 miles per hour instead of 30 mph.”

The Doping Difference
One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”

Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data.) The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.

Italian sports physiologist Michele Ferrari, as knowledgeable on doping as he is controversial (because of his close affiliation with elite athletes who have tested positive for doping or been accused of same), explains it this way: “If the volume of [red blood cells] increases by 10 percent, performance [the rider’s net gain in output of useful kinetic energy] improves by approximately 5 percent. This means a gain of about 1.5 seconds per kilometer for a cyclist pedaling at 50 kilometers per hour in a time trial, or about eight seconds per kilometer for a cyclist climbing at 10 kph on a 10 percent ascent.”

In the Tour de France, those numbers imply that a cyclist who boosts his HCT by 10 percent will cut his own time by 75 seconds in a 50-kilometer (31-mile) time trial, a race typically decided by a few seconds. On any of the numerous 10-kilometer (six-mile) climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees, on grades as steep as 10 percent, that same blood difference would gain the rider a whopping 80 seconds per climb. If any of the top cyclists are on the juice, their erstwhile competitors cannot afford to give away such margins. That is where the game matrix kicks into defection mode.

Nash Equilibrium
In game theory, if no player has anything to gain by unilaterally changing strategies, the game is said to be in a Nash equilibrium. The concept was identified by mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., who was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind. To end doping in sports, the doping game must be restructured so that competing clean is in a Nash equilibrium. That is, the governing bodies of each sport must change the payoff values of the expected outcomes identified in the game matrix. First, when other players are playing by the rules, the payoff for doing likewise must be greater than the payoff for cheating. Second, and perhaps more important, even when other players are cheating, the payoff for playing fair must be greater than the payoff for cheating. Players must not feel like suckers for following the rules.

In the game of prisoner’s dilemma, lowering the temptation to confess and raising the payoff for keeping silent if the other prisoner confesses increases cooperation. Giving players the chance to communicate before they play the game is the most effective way to increase their cooperation. In sports, that means breaking the code of ­silence. Everyone must acknowledge there is a problem to be solved. Then drug testing must be done and the results communicated regularly and transparently to all until the test results are clean. That will show each player that the payoff for playing fair is greater than the payoff for cheating, no matter what the other players do.

Here are my recommendations for how cycling (and other sports) can reach a Nash equilibrium in which no one has any incentive to cheat by doping:

1. Grant immunity to all athletes for past (pre-2008) cheating. Because the entire system is corrupt and most competitors have been doping, it accomplishes nothing to strip the winner of a title after the fact when it is almost certain that the runners-up were also doping. With immunity, retired athletes may help to improve the antidoping system.
2. Increase the number of competitors tested—in competition, out of competition, and especially immediately before or after a race—to thwart countermeasures. Testing should be done by independent drug agencies not affiliated with any sanctioning bodies, riders, sponsors or teams. Teams should also employ independent drug-testing companies to test their own riders, starting with a preseason performance test on each athlete to create a baseline profile. Corporate sponsors should provide additional financial support to make sure the testing is rigorous.
3. Establish a reward, modeled on the X prizes (cash awards offered for a variety of technical achievements), for scientists to develop tests that can detect currently undetectable doping agents. The incentive for drug testers must be equal to or greater than that for drug takers.
4. Increase substantially the penalty for getting caught: one strike and you’re out—forever. To protect the athlete from false positive results or inept drug testers (both exist), the system of arbitration and appeals must be fair and trusted. Once a decision is made, however, it must be substantive and final.
5. Disqualify all team members from an event if any member of the team tests positive for doping. Compel the convicted athlete to return all salary paid and prize monies earned to the team sponsors. The threat of this penalty will bring the substantial social pressures of “band of brothers” psychology to bear on all the team members, giving them a strong incentive to enforce their own antidoping rules.
That may sound utopian. But it can work. Vaughters, who is now director of the U.S. cycling team Slipstream/Chipotle, has already started a program of extensive and regular in-house drug testing. “Remember, most of these guys are athletes, not criminals,” he says. “If they believe the rest are stopping [the doping] and feel it in the speed of the peloton, they will stop, too, with a great sigh of relief.”

Hope springs eternal. But with these changes I believe the psychology of the game can be shifted from defection to cooperation. If so, sports can return to the tradition of rewarding and celebrating excellence in performance, enhanced only by an athlete’s will to win.

(by Michael Shermer)

USADA in Death-Fight Over Sports Doping

The worldwide sports anti-doping program, created to fight performance enhancing drug use in international athletics, imposes severe punishments for accidental or technical infractions, relies at times on disputed scientific evidence and resists outside scrutiny, a Times investigation has found.

Elite athletes have been barred from the Olympics, forced to relinquish medals, titles or prize money and confronted with potentially career-ending suspensions after testing positive for a banned substance at such low concentrations it could have no detectable effect on performance, records show.

They have been sanctioned for steroid abuse after taking legal vitamins or nutritional supplements contaminated with trace amounts of the prohibited compounds. In some cases, the tainted supplements had been provided by trusted coaches or trainers.

The findings emerge from a Times examination of more than 250 anti-doping cases involving runners, cyclists, skiers, tennis players and competitors in dozens of other sports from around the world.

Alain Baxter, 28, became the first Briton to win an Olympic medal in Alpine skiing, placing third in the slalom at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Two days later he tested positive for methamphetamine, a banned stimulant. He was forced to forfeit his bronze medal.

His offense? He had used a Vicks Vapor Inhaler bought in Utah to treat his chronic nasal congestion. Unlike the Vicks inhalers sold at home, the American version contained traces of a chemical structurally related to meth — though lacking its stimulative qualities.

Despite testimony from a Vicks scientist that the compounds differed, an arbitration panel hearing Baxter's case ruled that because anti-doping authorities regarded the chemicals as related, he was guilty.

"It never crossed my mind that it would be different from the British one," Baxter told the BBC upon returning home. "I didn't think I was doing anything wrong."

A 17-year-old Italian swimmer treating a foot infection with an antibiotic cream her mother bought over the counter failed a doping test at a swim meet in 2004. Neither Giorgia Squizzato nor her mother realized that the cream's ingredients included a prohibited steroid — or that applying it between her toes could result in a positive urine test.

Arbitrators in her case acknowledged that "the cream did not enhance the athlete's capacity" and hadn't "favored her performance."

Nevertheless, according to the anti-doping program's zero-tolerance, or "strict liability," policy, which treats an athlete as guilty regardless of how a substance got into his or her body, Squizzato was judged negligent. Her penalty: a one-year suspension.

Stringent anti-doping measures have become a fact of life for the thousands of athletes participating in national and international events since the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, at an international sports conference in 1999. WADA's founding was prompted by a rash of doping scandals threatening the credibility of global sports.

What has evolved to protect competitive purity since then is a closed, quasi-judicial system without American-style checks and balances. Anti-doping authorities act as prosecutors, judge and jury, enforcing rules that they have written, punishing violations based on sometimes questionable scientific tests that they develop and certify themselves, while barring virtually all outside appeals or challenges.

WADA's authority stems from the World Anti-Doping Code, which has been adopted by 186 governments, including the United States, and hundreds of Olympic and international athletic organizations. Under its provisions, athletes competing in sanctioned events are subject to mandatory urine and blood testing at any competition.

Athletes also must submit to unannounced random tests and provide authorities with detailed calendars showing where they can be found at any time, even on vacation.

A test sample is typically divided into two vials, labeled "A" and "B." The "A" sample is the first to be tested. If it comes up positive for a banned substance, the athlete may demand a confirmation test of the "B" sample. If that is also positive, the code allows the agency to declare the athlete in violation of doping rules and impose a penalty ranging from a public warning to a lifetime ban. Generally, the athlete also is disqualified from the event at which the violation allegedly occurred.

An accused athlete's only recourse in the face of a doping charge is arbitration, under rules of evidence dictated by WADA and designed to give the authorities the benefit of all doubt.

In many countries, including the United States, athletes have no right to appeal an adverse arbitration ruling to the courts. In the vast majority of cases, including every case heard in the U.S., the arbitrators have upheld the violation.

Tests for banned substances may be performed only at one of the 34 labs around the world accredited by WADA. Athletes are not permitted to have their samples tested at any lab outside the agency's system. The rules also prohibit WADA labs from doing any tests in defense of an accused athlete.

WADA Chairman Richard W. Pound, 64, a Montreal lawyer, argues that the program must be so stringent and uncompromising to be effective against doping, which he calls "the biggest threat to sports."

"The less discretion there is in the finding of a doping offense, the better it is," he told The Times in an interview.

Pound, a former competitive swimmer who finished just out of medal contention at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, dismissed the notion that a significant number of doping cases are accidental or inadvertent; WADA policy states that every athlete is responsible for everything he or she ingests or applies to the body. In the case of adulterated supplements, he said, "If you didn't know what was in there, it's your own damn fault." In the rare cases that an athlete can be proved truly faultless, he added, the system is flexible enough to temper its penalties.

"If you're captured by a squad of Nazi frogmen and injected with a steroid, you're going to be found positive," he told The Times. "But it wouldn't be a two-year suspension."

The effect of a doping allegation on an athlete's life is immediate and crushing.

"For people who have never had to deal with something like this, it's hard to grasp what it takes away from you," says Rachael Burke, 23, a swimmer at the University of Virginia, whose urine sample turned up in May 2004 with a trace of boldione, an obscure steroid, possibly from a contaminated nutritional drink. Burke had never had a positive result in any other test in more than a decade of competitive swimming.

"You have no idea what happened," she recalled in an interview. "You have no control over the fact that they are going to announce to the entire public that Rachael Burke, this girl that everyone has seen grow up in the spotlight, has tested positive for steroids. The next day, you have to walk on the pool deck and people are saying, 'I wonder if that's why you were so good when you were 8 years old.' You're accused and convicted without a chance to defend yourself."

Concerned that fighting the charge would cost her family tens of thousands of dollars in legal and professional fees and that the arbitration rules were stacked against her, she eventually agreed to a two-year suspension. The sanction knocked her out of international competition, but preserved her right to swim in NCAA events.

Cases like Burke's undermine the program's credibility, says John Ruger, a former Olympic biathlon competitor who serves as athletes' ombudsman of the United States Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs.

He asserted that the anti-doping system sweeps up "two, three, five people every year who are not intentionally cheating."

Ruger added: "If the anti-doping program is to succeed worldwide, athletes have to believe it's a fair process."

Travis T. Tygart, general counsel of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), WADA's largest national affiliate, disagrees with Ruger's figures. He said the agency goes to great lengths to ensure that only the guilty are punished. He said about 20% of all its potential cases are tossed out, leaving only those USADA regards as irrefutable.

"We're not in this to falsely accuse," Tygart said.

He and other anti-doping officials maintain that underground efforts to cheat with new "designer drugs" are a continuing problem, an allegation reinforced by revelations in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, case.

The lab allegedly provided dozens of professional and amateur athletes with undetectable performance-enhancing treatments. Through 2004, USADA said, 13 athletes had been sanctioned under WADA rules based on testimony and evidence in the BALCO case, including some who never tested positive for any steroid.

Yet the international anti-doping program's own statistics cast some doubt on the concerns expressed by Pound and other officials about a sports world awash in drugs. Of USADA's thousands of tests per year, fewer than 0.5% have produced sanctions. Many of those were for prescription medications or substances with little or no performance-enhancing effect.

In 2005, for example, USADA conducted 8,175 tests and imposed sanctions on 20 athletes. Its testing program consumed $5.6 million that year, or 47% of a $12-million budget funded primarily by Congress.

Today the program is facing unprecedented controversy, the result of several high-profile cases.

One involves American sprinter Marion Jones, accused of failing an initial doping test last summer. She immediately rushed home from an international track meet in Switzerland. When her second "B" sample came up negative, the case against her appeared to collapse.

The case remains open, however. Pound has infuriated Jones' supporters by suggesting the negative second test may have been flawed. He told BBC radio he was worried "that someone is misinterpreting things or doing things wrong."

In another simmering controversy, California cyclist Floyd Landis, the 2006 Tour de France champion, is appealing USADA's charge that he doped with testosterone during the July endurance race. He denies taking any performance-enhancing drug and is demanding a public arbitration hearing.

Landis also has posted online (at http://www.floydlandis.com ) the laboratory evidence against him, giving the public a rare inside glimpse of a doping dispute and the science behind it.

The records show, for example, careless bookkeeping errors. Samples attributed to Landis were recorded under several incorrect serial numbers. Also, results from multiple tests on the same samples, all by the same Paris lab, produced markedly inconsistent results.

The Landis camp contends the documents prove he is innocent. "There is no basis for a positive test," says Arnie Baker, a San Diego physician and cycling coach. He is consulting for the Landis defense. "How it got this far in the first place, I have no idea."

'A closed system'

Nestled among industrial shops on a short block in West Los Angeles, just across from a Bed Bath & Beyond, is the world's preeminent sports anti-doping laboratory.

The nondescript three-story UCLA Olympic Laboratory is the domain of Don H. Catlin, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA Medical School who has made the fight against sports doping his life's work.

Holding contracts not only with WADA but with the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. and the National Football League, the UCLA lab performs nearly four times as many blood and urine tests as the global runner-up, in Cologne, Germany. Its work is commonly considered the gold standard of sports doping science.

For all his expertise, however, Catlin is forbidden by WADA rules from testifying in defense of an athlete in a doping case. He and the lab's more than 40 employees are prevented by WADA rules from engaging in "testing or expert testimony that would call into question … the scientific validity of work performed in the anti-doping program."

Despite WADA's claims of "public transparency and accountability," it operates largely as a hermetically sealed scientific community with minimal public oversight.

WADA pays labs, usually one of those in its network, to develop tests for banned substances. It then is the sole arbiter of the test's scientific validity.

WADA determines threshold levels at which traces of a substance are deemed a violation.

And under WADA rules, the same lab that performs a positive test on an "A" sample also must conduct the confirming test on the "B" sample.

"You have a closed system where very few people in the world know what the science is, and the system has a vested interest to make sure its findings are confirmed," says David L. Black, president and chief executive of Nashville-based Aegis Sciences Corp., a large independent doping lab unaffiliated with WADA.

"The lab should just be a fact-gatherer, but the WADA system is designed in a way that the labs are not just objective fact gatherers, but part of the body of prosecution," Black said.

The EPO riddle

No test in WADA's arsenal has drawn as much fire as its assay for synthetic erythropoietin, or EPO — a hormone that increases stamina.

EPO doping has been banned since the 1990s, when the synthetic version began to be used by athletes to improve their stamina. A urine test to identify artificial EPO was introduced in 2000 and has been refined several times since.

It is not a simple test. It can require 36 hours, scores of laboratory steps, sophisticated machinery and a high level of technical skills.

Unlike tests that produce empirical measurements or unmistakable indicators, such as litmus paper, the EPO test involves a significant level of interpretation. Because natural and synthetic EPO produce similar readings in the lab, even experienced technicians viewing the same results can differ in their conclusions.

Results also can be clouded by other natural substances in the sample or by poor lab technique.


"It's a more difficult test than others in that it doesn't give you a fingerprint," Catlin acknowledged in an interview, saying "the EPO test needs more work." However, he also called it "safe and defensible — we would not practice it if it were not."

Yet Catlin's lab produced perhaps the most conspicuous contradictory finding in an EPO test, leading to the apparent collapse of the doping case against sprinter Jones. The UCLA lab's test on her "B" urine sample failed to confirm its own positive finding on her "A" sample.

Catlin says the case represents the first such mismatch in an EPO test by his lab. He declined to discuss it further, because the matter is under investigation by WADA.

But Allen K. Murray, an Irvine biochemist who witnessed the confirmation test on Jones' behalf, says her "A" sample should never have been declared positive in the first place.

"I have very serious questions about the 'A' result," he said, arguing that the quantity of the sample in the "A" test was too low to give a clear reading and that the lab interpreted the relatively faint image too aggressively.

At worst, he said, the initial test should have been declared inconclusive.

Jones's case was not the first flub involving an EPO test.

In 2003, Kenyan distance runner Bernard Lagat was charged with EPO doping after a race in Switzerland. The charge was dropped when his "B" sample proved negative.

Evidence uncovered by Lagat's defense team revealed his sample had been grossly mishandled — transported for hours in a car at temperatures sometimes exceeding 100 degrees, then inadequately cooled at WADA's Cologne lab. His experts testified that those conditions promoted chemical reactions in his urine sample that could have produced a false positive result.

They cited numerous other shortcomings in the EPO test that they say rendered it prone to false positives.

Lagat, who had been suspended by Kenyan sports authorities and barred from the world track championships after the initial finding, was reinstated in time for the 2004 Olympics, where he won the silver medal in the 1,500-meters event.

But with his lawyers contending that Lagat's "reputation will be tarnished by the doping suspicion for the rest of his life," he sued WADA and international track authorities in a German court. He demanded about $650,000, the value of potential prize money and sponsorship contracts he said he lost during his suspension.

The German court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction in the case.

Meanwhile, after Belgian triathlete Rutger Beke was charged with EPO doping during a 2004 race, scientists from a Belgian university tested the hypothesis that under certain conditions, intense exercise by some athletes could produce a positive EPO test in the absence of doping.

The test was instrumental in persuading a Belgian court to nullify Beke's doping charge, one of the rare cases in which WADA's science was tested in court — not its own arbitration regime.

It remains the rarest of WADA cases: overturned.

Nandrolone cases surge

Beginning in the late 1990s, anti-doping authorities saw a surge in positive tests for substances related to the powerful steroid nandrolone, a phenomenon that would pose a special challenge for WADA's program.

The reason was that WADA's own scientists knew that many cases were unintentional. Athletes, like the general public, were unaware that nutritional supplement makers were selling products contaminated with traces of nandrolone and other banned substances.

A statistical surge in nandrolone cases "allowed the testing program to puff out its chest and say, 'Look at how much we're doing,' " said Charles Yesalis, professor emeritus of health policy and administration at Penn State University and a leading expert on drug abuse in sports.

Studies performed by UCLA's Catlin and by researchers at the Cologne lab, then under the International Olympic Committee, showed in 2000 and 2002 that a wide range of nutritional supplements commonly taken by elite athletes were contaminated with nandrolone and other steroids.

Catlin's research, furthermore, made clear that it was not difficult for tests to distinguish a contamination victim from a cheater. His paper noted that an athlete taking nandrolone in a determined effort to cheat would show levels higher than 100,000 nanograms per milliliter, or parts per billion, of urine.

WADA's threshold for a doping violation, however, had been set in single digits: 2 parts per billion for men and 5 for women. It remains at that level today.

And anti-doping officials have continued to bring cases against athletes for positive tests almost certainly derived from contamination or for steroid levels that could not possibly have any performance-enhancing effect.

Irvine swimmer Kicker Vencill, for example, proved through lab tests in 2003 that the supplements he had taken were contaminated, causing his violation. He later sued the supplement maker in state court and won a $578,635 judgment.

Vencill appealed his suspension from international competition, but arbitrators concluded that the unwitting contamination of his multivitamins by the manufacturer did not relieve him of liability for consuming any banned substances.

"The evidence shows that the presence of a prohibited substance in the athlete's urine was caused by his ingestion of a prohibited substance — whether in a vitamin, a supplement or otherwise — for which the athlete bears complete responsibility."

The arbitrators upheld his two-year suspension, agreeing with USADA that he should receive the maximum penalty, "just as in any case of … 'intentional doping.' "

"In their opening and closing statements, USADA said they were going to prove me a cheater," said Vencill, recalling his arbitration hearings. "It's a war in there, and you're fighting for your character and your integrity."

Anti-doping officials are unapologetic about the nandrolone cases and officially skeptical of explanations of innocence.

"You've got to hear these things over and over again to understand what a mantra it is," Pound scoffed in an interview. "You've got to say, 'Come on. Get over it. You're filled with nandrolone.' "

But there also are hints of internal disagreement. One of the program's arbitrators agreed with an accused athlete that she had ingested trace amounts of nandrolone unintentionally in adulterated vitamins.

American cyclist Amber Neben had tested positive for a concentration of 6.9 parts per billion of the steroid after a Montreal race, 1.9 over the limit for women — but vastly short of any potential performance-enhancing effect.

Arbitrator Christopher L. Campbell favored imposing no penalty, arguing that the fight against doping should not harm "innocent victims of a poorly regulated vitamin supplement industry."

Campbell was outvoted. By a 2-1 margin, the arbitration panel suspended Neben for six months.

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Who's in, who's not

Signatories to the World Anti-Doping Code include the Olympic movement and 78 international sports governing bodies. Here is a partial list of athletic organizations and events subject to the code's regulations, along with some notable exceptions.

Covered by WADA rules

All Olympic events

All Paralympic events

Commonwealth Games

World Cup*

Tennis Grand Slam events:

Wimbledon, French Open,

Australian Open, U.S. Open

Davis Cup

Tour de France

U.S. Tennis Assn.*

International Assn. of Athletics Federations (track & field)

International Basketball

Federation

International Gymnastics

Federation

International Hockey

Federation

International Triathlon Union

International Swimming Federation

International Table Tennis

Federation

World Taekwondo Federation

World Bridge Federation

International Chess Federation

* Subject to their own anti-doping rules

Not covered

Major League Baseball*

National Football League*

National Basketball Assn.*

National Hockey League*

Major League Soccer*

National Collegiate

Athletic Assn.*

Professional Golfers Assn.

Ladies Professional Golf Assn.**

U.S. Golf Assn. (U.S. Open)

British Open (golf)

* Maintain separate anti-doping programs

** Will begin drug testing program in 2008

---

(INFOBOX BELOW)

What's banned?

Substances banned by WADA include:

Anabolic steroids

Effects: builds strength,

facilitates training

Examples: stanozolol,

testosterone

Hormones

Effects: improves red blood

cell count, stamina, training

effectiveness

Examples: erythropoietin (EPO), human growth hormone

Stimulants

Effects: combats fatigue,

improves reaction time

Examples: adrenaline,

methamphetamine

Masking agents

Effect: conceals presence of steroids in urine

Examples: diuretics, epitestosterone

Source: World Anti-Doping Agency
A panel of international sports arbitrators hearing a doping case against Olympic sprinter Torri Edwards went out of their way to sing her praises.

They described Edwards, then a 27-year-old USC graduate, as "a diligent and hardworking athlete" who had "conducted herself with honesty, integrity and character."

They acknowledged that her purported breach of doping regulations was entirely unintentional, caused by the obscure additive nikethamide in a couple of otherwise innocent glucose tablets she took at an exhibition race in Martinique.

"She has not sought to gain any improper advantage or to 'cheat' in any way," they wrote in August 2004.

But the arbitrators, while expressing "unease" about the rules and acknowledging their "harshness," still found Edwards guilty of doping. Her sanction: a two-year suspension from international competition.

The punishment was indistinguishable from what could have been imposed on an athlete caught deliberately injecting steroids. It wiped out Edwards' eligibility for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Edwards' case and others like it illuminate the flaws in the appeals process for elite athletes accused of doping violations. A Times examination of the appeal system found that:

• Athletes are presumed guilty and denied routine access to lab data potentially relevant to their defense.

• Trivial and accidental violations draw penalties similar to those for intentional use of illicit performance-enhancing substances.

• Anti-doping authorities or sports federations have leaked details of cases against athletes or made public assertions of their guilt before tests were confirmed or appeals resolved.

• Arbitrators, theoretically neutral judges, are bound by rules drafted and enforced by the World Anti-Doping Agency and its affiliates, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. They have almost no discretion to adjust penalties to fit individual circumstances.

The WADA rules govern the admissibility of evidence, the burden of proof and the selection of the arbitrators themselves. In each category they tend to favor the accusers. Athletes wishing to compete in national, international and Olympic events subject to WADA jurisdiction have no option but to agree to this system.

Anti-doping authorities argue that these rules — indeed, the very requirement that appeals be heard by arbitrators, rather than in court — are crucial to ensuring a fast and efficient process.

The question is whether they go so far that they deprive athletes of due process and fair hearings.

On the surface, anti-doping arbitrations resemble other commercial arbitrations. Generally, the athlete and the prosecuting agency each select one arbitrator, and those nominees jointly select a third. But the limits under which the panels operate differ from those in other commercial arbitrations.

"The rules are designed to make it as easy as possible to convict an athlete," Howard Jacobs, a prominent Agoura Hills-based athletes' attorney, told an American Bar Assn. conference this fall.

The arbitration provisions, he said, require that "their tests are presumed to be scientifically valid. It's assumed that their labs did everything perfectly. And they have no obligation to provide you with documentation to rebut these presumptions."

This also differs from the standards in a U.S. court of law, where defendants or litigants are routinely granted access to a wide range of documents and the right to cross-examine expert witnesses and challenge technical evidence in great detail.

A costly undertaking

Accused athletes find that challenging a system stacked against them can be extraordinarily costly, prompting some to abandon any effort at defense.

"It wiped out my life savings and my college savings," Zach Lund, 27, a world-class skeleton sled racer from Salt Lake City, said of his effort to clear himself of doping charges.

In 2005, a drug test found traces of finasteride, an ingredient in anti-baldness medication, in his urine. The substance had been banned only that year over concerns that it might mask the presence of steroids in urine samples. That concern, however, was based on a single study by a WADA lab that had not been peer-reviewed by a medical journal. And Lund had been taking the hair restoration prescription for five years.

"I lost all my sponsorships and my funding" from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Lund said in an interview. "I even had to get money from my family and friends. The system is broken. Right now, it's catching people who make mistakes."

An arbitration panel acknowledged that the finasteride came from Lund's medication. In upholding a one-year suspension that deprived him of a chance to compete in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which opened on the very day of the ruling, arbitrators called him "an honest athlete" and acknowledged that the substance had no performance-enhancing effect.

They conceded that they had reached their decision "with a heavy heart": Although Lund had faithfully disclosed his medication on anti-doping forms at every event, no official had ever alerted him to the change in finasteride's status.

"The panel finds this failure both surprising and disturbing, and is left with the uneasy feeling that Mr. Lund was badly served by the anti-doping organizations," they wrote. Still, under the rules, the best they could do was impose the minimum one-year sanction.

A perfect record

USADA has never lost an arbitration case in its history, a record that spans six years and more than 40 proceedings. Authorities call that record a testament to their skill at bringing only bulletproof cases.

"If you're a clean athlete, you have nothing to worry about," says Travis T. Tygart, the agency's general counsel. "We don't proceed if it's not a doping case."

USADA Chief Executive Terrence P. Madden dismisses criticism of the arbitration process as sour grapes from athletes' lawyers.

"These are the same old tired arguments that we've heard for six years, and it's the same defense counsel who bring them up," Madden said.

Madden and Tygart contend that the agency's advantages in the arbitration system only compensate for its lack of governmental powers, such as subpoena authority. Athletes "want a set of rights that far exceeds the powers we have," Tygart says. "They say you have to give them constitutional due process. If that's so, then give us search-and-seizure powers to balance out that right."

But criticism of the process is more widespread than they acknowledge. Even some arbitrators are uncomfortable with the system.

"It's not serving the purpose it was meant to — to give the athlete a real opportunity to be heard," says one long-term doping arbitrator who did not want to be named so as to avoid internal controversy.

Pushing back

Arbitrators staged a rare revolt against anti-doping rules last summer in the case of Mariano Puerta, an Argentine tennis player who had accidentally ingested a tiny amount of a banned stimulant just before playing in the French Open. Puerta faced an eight-year suspension, which the panel considered tantamount to a lifetime ban for the 26-year-old athlete — "a result that is neither just nor appropriate," the panel wrote.

They agreed that Puerta's positive test resulted from his unwittingly sharing the same water glass that his wife had used for her medication.

Arguing that an appropriate penalty did not seem to be contained within WADA's rules, they fashioned their own solution by imposing a two-year ban. "The panel is not persuaded … that it is necessary for there to be undeserving victims in the war against doping," they explained.

But Puerta's case is unique. Only three times has an arbitrator in a U.S. case even filed a dissent. All three were by the same arbitrator: San Francisco lawyer Christopher L. Campbell, a former Olympic wrestler often selected as an arbitrator by athletes.

One of Campbell's dissents came in the case of Kyoko Ina, a U.S. figure skater accused of refusing a drug test late one night. Evidence showed that a USADA official had led her to believe the test could be rescheduled for the next day. Because of the misunderstanding, she was threatened with a four-year suspension, despite never having failed a test or been suspected of doping.

"When any organization, including [USADA] turns this fight against doping on innocent athletes, that behavior is unacceptable," Campbell wrote.

Ina negotiated a two-year suspension and subsequently joined a professional ice show.

The current arbitration system took form after the creation of WADA in 1999, when sports organizations concluded that a unified anti-doping regime was preferable to the patchwork of national and sports-specific policies then in effect.

The tilt toward the prosecution in arbitration cases begins with the selection of arbitrators themselves. The rules require all arbitrators to be accredited by the Swiss-based international Court of Arbitration for Sport. In the U.S., the initial appeal by an athlete is heard by members of the court's North American branch. Any subsequent appeal is heard by panelists selected from the court's international membership.

Many arbitrators have current or prior professional relationships with USADA, WADA or other sports organizations that frequently serve as the prosecution in anti-doping cases.

Of the 45 members of the North American branch, at least 24 have such affiliations. They include Richard Young, an outside counsel to USADA, and WADA Chairman Richard W. Pound. Although neither has arbitrated a doping case, athletes' attorneys say their mere membership in the sports arbitration pool fosters an impression that the system is slanted against them.

In 2001, USADA staged an expense-paid visit for all accredited arbitrators and their spouses to the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the leading WADA lab in the world. The session, attended by 22 of the 38 arbitrators then in the North American pool, featured presentations by USADA officials and Don H. Catlin, the lab director, capped by a night out at a Santa Monica restaurant.

"The arbs are jurors," says Edward G. Williams, an athletes lawyer who contends the session was tantamount to "a bribe."

"I've said anyone who went through that session should be disqualified," Williams said. "I always lose that argument."

The most powerful element tilting the process toward the prosecution is the presumption that the agencies' scientific tests are valid and that the work of WADA's accredited laboratories, which perform all the blood and urine tests, always meet international standards. The presumption is written into the WADA Code.

The presumption shifts the burden to the athlete to prove that the lab's work fell short of scientific standards and that its failures affected the outcome. The effect is to render the athlete guilty unless proved innocent. That's a reversal of the situation in a U.S. court of law, where prosecutors carry the burden of proof from start to finish.

"The athlete is being held accountable, but the lab can have a series of small errors and is not held to a strict liability," says David L. Black, president of Aegis Sciences Corp., a Nashville-based independent doping lab. "No deficiency in the lab performance ever seems to rise to the level of impeaching their finding."

Adding to the perception of bias are frequent leaks disclosing the names of athletes under investigation and public statements by anti-doping and sports officials asserting the athletes' guilt, even before appeals have run their course.

Earlier this year, for example, Pound suggested that former Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong had been guilty of doping in 1999. He based his comments on disputed and supposedly confidential research data compiled by WADA's Paris lab.

"It's a case that has to be answered," the WADA chairman said about what he called "documentary" data linked to Armstrong. His statements, along with other comments from sports authorities, drew rebukes from inside and outside the agency.

"Pound shoots at everything that moves," complained Hein Verbruggen, president of the International Cycling Union.

Losing trust

Scott Burns, an American member of WADA's executive committee, also objected. According to minutes of the September 2005 committee meeting, he complained that it was "the antithesis of what was done at WADA … to speak out or speculate precipitously, especially in public." As a result, Burns said, WADA risked having "lost the trust of athletes."

Another problem facing athletes is the limited availability of independent experts such as Black. A WADA rule prohibits members of its 34 accredited laboratories from testifying in defense of an athlete in a doping case.

The rule exists to shield the WADA labs from political pressure that might be exerted on behalf of a high-profile athlete from their own country, said Olivier Rabin, the agency's medical director.

Still, it reserves the expertise of most of the top doping scientists in the world for use exclusively by the prosecuting agency.

"It's difficult to establish the credibility of our experts when they go up against people who do this every day for a living," said Michael Straubel, a law professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana who has defended numerous athletes.

Athletes' attorneys also face obstacles obtaining technical documents from the agencies. Under USADA rules, the agency is required to produce only records concerning the specific test performed on the athlete's own sample.

Not included are documents that might shed light on a WADA lab's general proficiency or its treatment of other similar cases, arguably pertinent to defense questions about lab consistency or reliability.

Tygart calls the document package routinely shipped to accused athletes "fair and overly generous." The U.S. agency generally rejects requests for further data unless the athlete "can articulate a need that's not a fishing expedition," he says.

USADA's position will probably be tested by Tour de France champion Floyd Landis, who has been charged with testosterone doping in the 2006 race.

Jacobs, Landis' attorney, submitted a 10-page request in October for documents related to the Paris WADA lab's general experience with the testosterone screening. Landis hopes to challenge whether the French scientists "have sufficient expertise at running this test" and whether they can justify their criteria for declaring the cyclist's sample positive.

Tygart rebuffed Jacobs. "Every request you make appears to seek documents or information not called for by the rules," he wrote. The defense lawyer is expected to ask arbitrators to force the release of more documents.

Even when an athlete is able to present a detailed case, the WADA Code ties arbitrators' hands in several ways. For example, arbitrators are prevented from considering an athlete's intent when judging a doping charge.

Under the prevailing principle of "strict liability," the mere presence of a prohibited substance in a blood or urine sample is sufficient to establish the violation, even if it is proved that the breach was accidental.

"We are fact-finders, and we apply the law within the narrow strictures that we are given," says Maidie Oliveau, an experienced anti-doping arbitrator based in Los Angeles.

Arbitrators may overturn a proposed suspension only if an athlete can prove he or she bears "no fault or negligence." They may reduce a suspension, albeit by no more than half, if they find "no significant fault or negligence." The standards for such relief are ambiguous and "virtually impossible to meet" in practice, says Jessica K. Foschi, who studies legal issues in doping at Duke University Law School.

A suspension waived

In the seven years since WADA's founding, only one athlete out of hundreds who have been sanctioned is known to have met the "no fault" standard: Australian tennis player Todd Perry. He proved last year that a tournament doctor had refilled his legal asthma inhaler with a banned drug without notifying him.

Arbitrators waived Perry's two-year suspension. Though they also absolved him of fault, they let stand his formal reprimand. Under the agency's strict liability doctrine, Perry remained a violator for having an illicit substance in his system.

The strict liability standard applies even when a doping charge hinges on subjective interpretations of laboratory readouts. These include WADA's test for erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone that promotes red blood cell formation.

Chances of a misreading are high, according to the technical literature and experts interviewed by The Times. Several recent EPO charges have been dropped because retests failed to confirm initial lab findings or encountered other testing flaws.

"Testing is far behind where it needs to be, but the rules don't reflect that," Foschi says.

Foschi, who was accused and cleared of doping charges as a 14-year-old swimmer in 1995, criticized no-fault rules that require an athlete to prove how a substance entered his or her body to obtain a reduced penalty.

"The person who is most in trouble is someone who is genuinely innocent and has no idea how something got in his or her system," she said.

In her own case, she says, her sample was taken at an event in Pasadena, but she was not informed of the results until a week later, when she was competing across the country and the Pasadena venue had been dismantled. "By then it was impossible to go back and investigate."

Frustration with a harsh and rigid system may ultimately increase pressure for outside judicial review.

"There are cases where everyone doubts that justice has been done," says Bradley J. Andreozzi, a Chicago lawyer who has prosecuted and defended doping cases. He said the program is in danger of becoming "just a trap for the unwary."

But reforming the system could be costly. "The price of relaxing strict liability would be a period of less-stringent controls," said John Hoberman, an expert in doping policy at the University of Texas.

The cost of prosecuting authentic doping violations would go up, he predicted. "The payoff might be much better tests and not trampling on the rights of athletes who have all been thrown into one category labeled 'guilty,' " Hoberman said.

Many professionals within the system believe that the appeals process must become more flexible.

"We should have more discretion within certain parameters, such as in cases where there's no performance enhancement and no intent," said the longtime arbitrator, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid internal controversy.

USADA officials say they have proposed revisions to the WADA Code allowing arbitrators more latitude to reduce penalties in inadvertent cases — or to impose enhanced penalties in egregious cases.

But WADA's leaders are leaning in the opposite direction. Pound, for one, says the rules are already flexible enough to accommodate all situations that arise in individual cases.

"The system, as a system, is a pretty good one," he said. "It can be tweaked here or there, but we're not sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and redesigning the entire world anti-doping system."

michael.hitzlik@latimes.com

"Clean" Athletes Seek Help In Progressing Past The Cheaters

Detailed Diary Reveals Marion Jones' Drug Ritual

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) - Marion Jones used several different performance-enhancing drugs over a substantial period of time, according to a detailed doping calendar that was part of several pages of court documents released Friday.

Jones' alleged doping regimen was part of a Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative ledger that featured the names of athletes along with the performance-enhancing drugs they were taking and results of urine tests. The other names on the list are redacted.

After long denying she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted in October that she'd taken the designer steroid "the clear" from September 2000 to July 2001. "The clear" has been linked to BALCO, the lab at the center of the steroids scandal in professional sports.

The International Olympic Committee formally stripped her of five Olympic medals on Dec. 12, and banned the disgraced American athlete from attending next year's Beijing Olympics in any capacity.

Jones took EPO, human growth hormone and THG using drops and injections, according to the court documents that show use in 2000 and 2001.

Jones' October doping admission came as part of her guilty plea to lying to federal investigators in the BALCO case about using steroids. She will be sentenced on Jan. 11, and prosecutors had suggested to Jones the prison term would be a maximum of six months.

"The context of the defendant's use of performance-enhancing substances, as detailed in the documents seized from BALCO, shows a concentrated, organized, long-term effort to use these substances for her personal gain," the government's sentencing memo reads, "a scenario wholly inconsistent with anything other than her denials being calculated lies to agents who were investigating that same conduct."

In the court documents, former BALCO vice president Jack Valente acknowledges creating the doping calendar and identifies the "Marion J" entries as referring to Jones.

NHL Welcomed To The Doping-Wars

It has been more than a year since Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, stood before a panel of U.S. lawmakers and announced, with as straight
a face as he could muster, that hockey doesn't have a steroid problem.

And for all we know today, maybe it never did and still doesn't. Never mind the alleged jailhouse braggadocio of an accused Florida steroids dealer who told police the other day that he sold his anabolic wares to pro athletes of all kinds, including members of the Washington Capitals.

Maybe those claims were the outsized talk of a wannabe big-timer. Maybe the case of Richard (Andy) Thomas is not the beginning of hockey's BALCO. Maybe it is.

Whatever it is, the folks who run the NHL and its players' association will, if they're smart, treat the arrest of Thomas, the bodybuilding
enthusiast who allegedly partnered with his wife as a supplier of performance-enhancing drugs to pro sports teams, as a crisis.

They will make sure it spurs prompt change to the league's laughably lax drug-testing policy. They'll go on the offensive – and dispense with
the futile questioning of the Thomases' alleged customers in D.C., who said to a man that they know nothing about nothing – instead of
employing the wait-and-see defense of baseball commissioner Bud Selig.

Wilder accusations have been tossed around regarding steroids and the national winter game: Dick Pound, the former world anti-doping czar,
once guesstimated that a third of the NHL's 700-some players were doping. But there is, to be fair, scant evidence of a drug problem.

Bryan Berard, the ex-Leafs defenceman, was found to have used an anabolic steroid in 2006 in a test administered by the U.S. anti-doping
authorities before the Turin Olympics.

Dave Morissette, the ex-goon, wrote a 2005 memoir in which he claimed the use of steroids and
stimulants was commonplace in the league. So there's a positive test, plenty of hearsay and no smoking gun.

That doesn't mean Bettman's past posture on the issue hasn't amounted to a joke.

"(The) alleged benefits of steroid use ... are not consistent with playing hockey at the highest level of the sport," Bettman said last
year.

Coming from the man who told us satellite radio is the future and all is well in Phoenix, those words couldn't be less credible coming out of
the mouth of Roger Clemens. Surely Bettman can't be of the belief that the same family of drugs that made Ben Johnson the fastest man in the
world wouldn't benefit NHL players, none of whom could possibly be interested in becoming quicker and stronger and better able to recover from injuries.

Please. When the common denominators of huge money and lax testing co-exist, it's hard to imagine virtue repeatedly prevailing over
temptation.

When NHL players under pressure to keep
multi-million-dollar jobs are tested a maximum of three times a year (and as little as once) and aren't tested in the post-season or the
off-season – a set-up Pound has called a "sham" –it's hard to imagine the good guys ever catching up with the theoretical cheaters.

That's not to say there aren't hockey executives well aware of this reality.

As my colleague Damien Cox reported a few months back, Lou Lamoriello, the New Jersey Devils GM and a former member of the board of the steroid-scarred New York Yankees, has challenged the players' association to accept the terms of a more stringent testing protocol.

And Paul Kelly, the executive director of the players' association, was on record as saying, long before the Thomases were accused of dealing
steroids to the Capitals, that it was prepared for "serious" discussions on beefing up testing.

Anyone who loves the game can only hope that they mean what they say and that Bettman, for once, removes his head from the desert sand and acts.

(by Dave Feschuk)