Daniel Stone
Published August 8, 2013
Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees star third baseman, is one of 13 major league baseball players charged with taking performance-enhancing drugs and, in some cases, lying about the matter to investigators. Major League Baseball (MLB) announced it would suspend the players for 50 games or more. Rodriguez will miss 211.
The primary evidence implicating the players in doping was testimony from Anthony Bosch, who ran a now-defunct chemical anti-aging company in Florida called Biogenesis. Last year, after being granted immunity by MLB from any legal proceedings, he admitted that he had supplied restricted substances to the athletes in question.
Yet there were no test results that backed up the claim. And that raises the question: Why not?
Professional athletes are tested regularly for performance-enhancing substances, but baseball players have never been tested as intensively as runners, cyclists, and some other athletes. Baseball players must take a simple urine test at the start of every season and then at one random time during play. More extensive blood tests that can detect more complex substances are conducted only with reasonable cause.
MLB officials have said that it's logistically challenging to test players because they are frequently on the road. Even randomly timed tests aren't so random: Players generally know to expect a "surprise" test at their home stadium in the second half of the season-the time when incentives to dope are the greatest.
Annals of Testing
In fact, testing is problematic in many sports. The era of tests for banned substances began in 1960, after 23-year-old Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen fell off his bike and died during a race. He was found to have taken high doses of amphetamines that gave him less need for rest and more time for training.
Photograph from Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Since then, athletes have adopted ever more creative ways of using drugs to gain an edge; testing companies and regulating agencies have usually been at least one step behind.
Testers came prepared to screen for stimulants like ephedrine and amphetamine at the 1972 Munich Olympics, but by then athletes had started taking anabolic steroids, substances that metabolize quickly, help cells grow, and enable muscles to endure more strain.
When testing for steroids arrived at the Olympics four years later, athletes were turning to naturally occurring hormones like testosterone; illicit levels of these hormones can be hard to detect through screening. In the following years, as better tests were developed to detect artificially spiked levels of testosterone, some athletes experimented with blood transfusions and injections of erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone originally designed to treat anemia by stimulating the production of red blood cells.
"In the win-at-all-costs culture of elite-level sports, athletes are often going to innovative measures to gain a performance-enhancing advantage and avoid detection," says Matt Fedoruk, director of science for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).
How Doping Works
All athletes want to run faster, lift more weight, hit more home runs, or out-pedal their opponents. Different doping techniques help achieve those various goals. Substances like EPO increase the blood's capacity for carrying oxygen to help someone run longer. Others, like corticosteroids, are taken in training to help the body repair itself faster, allowing an athlete to train harder.
Athletes have, along the way, figured out how to beat tests. The most high-profile case may be that of Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France. Earlier this year he admitted that throughout much of his competitive career, he doped strategically to avoid testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Rather than inject EPO moments before a race--where he knew that testers would be waiting at the finish line--the cyclist scheduled doping during training rides and between races. Working with a group of physicians, some of whom may still face prosecution by federal investigators, Armstrong was also able to keep track of when certain substances would appear in his system and how quickly they would metabolize.
Professional doping isn't always so sophisticated. Sometimes athletes simply use substances that the testers are no longer looking for. "Some athletes will resurrect a drug that went through a clinical trial in the '50s or '60s," says Daniel Eichner, director of the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in Utah and a former USADA researcher. Regulators are so busy monitoring new and innovative drugs, they simply lack the time and focus to measure the older ones.
A federal investigation revealed that in 2000, athletes like runner Marion Jones and baseball slugger Barry Bonds were going to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) to obtain anabolic steroids that weren't on testers' radar.
In the years that followed, Tyler Hamilton, a former cyclist and teammate of Armstrong's, was on the cutting edge of blood transfusions, a new kind of doping even harder to detect by screening. Hamilton would simply swap his blood with the blood of a donor who had a higher count of red blood cells, which can improve endurance. But in tests, a higher than normal red-blood-cell count would not signal any violations.
Armstrong admitted doing the same thing in his mea culpa interview with Oprah Winfrey in January. He also admitted to sometimes removing some of his own blood, freezing it, then injecting it back into his body. The process of thawing would increase his blood's oxygen-carrying capacity before races.
Testing Not Very Effective
While global regulating authorities spend millions of dollars on testing, very few players actually are implicated by tests. Of the hundreds of thousands of athletes in all U.S. sports, only 116 have been put on the USADA's list of sanctioned athletes since 2010. Some, such as soccer goalie Hope Solo, escaped with just a public warning after a specified diuretic was found in a prescription drug she was taking.
As with Major League Baseball's new scandal, most busts come from testimony rather than physical evidence. A smaller portion come from athletes who don't make themselves available for testing on repeated occasions.
Only about a third of doping cases are reportedly brought to light by positive tests.
That is because the tests themselves aren't effective, says Charles Yesalis, a health and human development researcher who is a professor emeritus at Penn State University. "These baseball players just got caught by a fluke," he says. Sports leagues don't have police departments or police powers. They can do sting operations, but they can't really investigate athletes to uncover doping.
Yesalis says eliminating the incentives for doping would require more severe punishments.
Can It Be Stopped?
Since the late 1990s, regulating agencies like the USADA have taken several steps aimed at cracking down on blood doping and the use of EPO. A big leap came in 1999, after a pair of Swiss researchers had the idea to create what they called a " biological passport," which is a computerized record of an athlete's body, allowing for more nuanced assessments.
Rather than test for banned substances, the passport keeps a running log of an athlete's biomarkers over time. Spiked levels of blood cells or testosterone between tests would imply cheating. Not all athletes could be kept in the system, at least not at first, but regulators hope that the much more advanced way to spot impropriety would provide a powerful disincentive to doping.
The passport has so far been used primarily for endurance athletes-runners, cyclists, and swimmers. Without statistics on how many athletes have changed their behavior as a result of the system, however, it's hard to know how well it has worked.
Testing regimens for athletes became more rigorous around 2004, when USADA and other sport-governing boards introduced off-season testing and started paying unannounced visits to athletes at home or while training, rather than just after races.
Regulators also started collaborating with drug makers to allow them to forecast new substances coming to market. When a Swiss pharmaceutical company made a third-generation EPO in 2007, testers showed up at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing with a test ready. They caught a handful of athletes, including Spanish cyclist Maria Isabel Moreno and Greek race-walker Athanasia Tsoumeleka.
Some of these changes have meant that even athletes without a positive test can be banned from competing. If a professional athlete doesn't make herself available for testing or misses a test three times, for instance, she will face suspension. If a cyclist is caught simply in possession of a restricted substance, he will be added to USADA's list of banned athletes. A weightlifter will effectively end her career if she is caught trafficking banned substances.
Future of Testing
But serious roadblocks to detection remain. USADA's modest staff-earlier this year it had 43 employees and 55 testing contractors around the country-working with governing boards of various sports simply can't keep tabs on all of America's athletes. In poorer countries, the ratio of regulators to athletes is often lower, enraging banned U.S. athletes who see their counterparts in Jamaica or Eastern Europe facing less rigorous oversight.
Athletes who eventually come clean or get outed, including Lance Armstrong, often claim that they had to dope to compete on a level playing field. "It's like saying we have to have air in our tires or we have to have water in our bottles," Armstrong told Winfrey, trying to justify his cheating. "[Doping] was, in my view, part of the job."
Doping tests will continue to become more advanced. The biological passport will be able to store more precise metrics, and illuminate nuanced patterns that signal impropriety. But testing will always have its limits.
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