Comments on: Testing Positive

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 19:49:41 +0000

Do the contests honor the achievement – height, time, etc. – or something less clearly measurable? No one answers that, because it’s so murky. Isn’t affluence a performance-enhancer? Doesn’t someone who can devote all their time to the sport, and get subsidized and given access to the latest nutritional/training research, have an advantage over someone who trains in their off-time? What does amateur mean now, “doesn’t make money at it”? What’s that mean? The same b.s. hypocrisy’s in the American campaign against “drugs”. Foaming-at-the-mouth legislators and youth leaders sneer at pot-heads to sugared-up captive audiences of Paxil-, Zoloft-, and Ritalin-saturated kids. – The real thread’s in the natural landscape, that’s why the question can’t be answered from here. We don’t live there anymore.

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 19:47:39 +0000

Tracy, I understand your concern. I’m now struck by two further problems. One is the issue of proving innocence, and the other is complementary to your false +ve concern: if lots of tests are carried out on each sample (tests for amphetamines, tests for steroids, and it seems they test for illegal drugs too) and each test has a risk of a false +ve, then the changes of being accused of taking something you haven’t become quite tangible.

By: ajay

ajay — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:47:11 +0000

Danny Yee: Of the 800+ books I’ve reviewed, the only sport-related one is CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary – and drugs probably aren’t going to give anyone a big advantage in cricket. Provigil might help…

By: Tracy

Tracy — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:15:26 +0000

Backward Dave – testing twice doesn’t fully address my concern. Assume that the drug test has a 5% false positive rate. If you test 2000 drug-free samples, 100 of them on average will show up as a false positive. If you re-test those 100 positives, you can expect 5 will still be a false positive. So, if you carry out 2000 tests on a drug-free population, you can expect 5 people to be wrongfully convicted. How many drug tests are going to/have been be carried out at the Olympics and the run-up? And that’s assuming that the chance of getting a false positive is independent of the sample, and not affected by things like how many poppyseed bagels the athlete ate yesterday or natural variation in people’s blood chemistry. In a large scale testing situation, I think a positive drug test should be considered alongside other information on the likelihood of drug taking (e.g. sudden improvements in scores, physical symptoms consistent with the suspected drug use), I would not put the onus on the athlete to prove reasonable doubt as I already have reasonable doubt from the stats alone. Of course what really worries me is the use of drug tests in criminal convictions, though I can see how an athlete driven enough to make it to the Olympics might regard being banned from competing as worse than being jailed for several years.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 15:07:05 +0000

>Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with. As brian alluded to, this doesn’t necessarily follow. Biological processes all have limiting factors. Imagine a person with 3-sigma type oxygen carrying capacity but short legs. Another one with lousy oxy capacity but long, mechanically ideal legs. They are dead even given normal training. EPO would get the leggy one to the next level, but not the one with short legs.

By: Rod

Rod — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 13:45:12 +0000

I think one of the problems is that the use of performance-enhancing drugs has become, well, normal. In my sport (rugby) everyone, and I mean everyone, takes protein supplements. Although these are legal, what worries me most is that their use is expected as part of normal competition. Usually, they are provided by the coaches – they are waiting for us right after a gym session. Although they’re not mandatory, they are strongly encouraged and so readily available that it is almost impossible to avoid them. I’m not 100% comfortable with this, and I can see that it is a short step from supplements to drug use.

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 11:47:54 +0000

OK, Ken, I’ll accept that I mis-read “I suppose there would always be a safety issue, since over-training would seem to be self-limiting to a degree in a way that drug injection is not” as implying that drug-injection is an alternative to training. On the “false positive” issue, samples provided are divided into ‘A’ and ‘B’ samples and kept separately. If the ‘A’ sample tests postive for some substance, the ‘B’ sample is also tested. It’s very unlikely (but not of course impossible) that two discrete tests would yield the same false positive. As for Shai’s point about Dennis Mitchell, I sort of assumed that top sprinters naturally produced more testosterone than the rest of us: that’s why they’re top sprinters and we’re not. It’s isn’t prima facie evidence of doping.

By: Shai

Shai — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 11:30:12 +0000

tracy, they do get a hearing. appeal, whatever, where it’s apparently easy to conjure up reasonable doubt where there is any. for example: “[Dennis] Mitchell, an Olympic bronze medallist, claims to have personally experienced the effect having sex had on his testosterone level. He was immediately banned from competition in 1998 after testing positive for having higher than normal levels of testosterone in his body an indication that he was supplementing his natural level by taking additional doses of the hormone in order to enhance his performance. Mitchell’s defense, which prevailed on appeal, was that his positive drug test was the result of having had sex four times (and drinking five bottles of beer) the night before the test was administered” although I hear in his case it probably wasn’t plausible. but as lisa makes clear in her post they just put a cap on the testosterone level so most of the sprinters are doping anyway with better handlers.

By: Shai

Shai — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 11:16:54 +0000

I saw a documentary on TV comparing results in some endurance sports before and after EPO with a fairly strong ceteris paribus controlling for all the new high tech kinesiology. It’s basically improbable that EPO isn’t in wide use. The analysis of the politics involved suggests that if it suddenly became detectable it would be handled “gracefully”. And that natural endowment comparison will be bogus when there is an “arms race” to optimize one performance factor with others not similarly malleable. Basically everyone assumes the effects of performance enhancement while the chance of moving up is a wash. In response to JQ, sure cycling steroids or hgh is relatively safe if you don’t care about the various side effects. The weighting is different for an olympian in comparison to an average person. Semi regular tests do encourage some moderation so it would be ridiculous to suggest that we open the flood gates in a game of who can assume the most risk. This is more obvious for some of the more easily detected ones (e.g. stimulants)

By: Danny Yee

Danny Yee — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 09:33:36 +0000

Personally I think the weird thing is the whole sports obsession… I’ve never got worked up enough about any sport to care about drug scandals. (Of the 800+ books I’ve reviewed, the only sport-related one is CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary – and drugs probably aren’t going to give anyone a big advantage in cricket.)

By: Tracy

Tracy — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 09:27:58 +0000

It always puzzles me that people talk about drug testing, and that so-and-so is guilty of taking drugs, without discussing the false positive rate of the drug test. (And this is not just true of sports, the same applies to to criminal and job-related drug tests.) I was taught in stats that nearly every test has a false positive rate, and a false negative. Given the number of drug tests made in sports, even if the false positive rate is very low, and every positive is tested again, I’d expect some people to be falsely accused of taking drugs based only on drug tests. Unless everyone is taking drugs, in which case we should be making some enquiries about the false positive rate. And also, how are the drug testers tested? Are they regularly being sent secret samples so the sports bodies can keep an eye on their accuracy rates? It seems a bit opposed to natural justice that there’s a system set up that to me looks like it will inevitably convict some people based on pure chance.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 08:14:16 +0000

It might be useful to separate the issues of harm and cheating. There are drug-free training methods that are bad for health and (I assume) relatively safe methods that involve drugs.

By: Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 04:01:19 +0000

A brief note: You can’t actually test for erythropoeitin (EPO). Like insulin, it’s a chemical the body naturally produces. It’s just that users of EPO —cancer patients and people with certain kinds of kidney disease—are getting it via a syringe instead of producing it within their body. When EPO surfaced in cycling, the sport’s regulatory body proposed putting a chemical taggant that would make it possible to do a blood test for EPO. The drug’s manufacturer refused, because the drug had already gone through the FDA approval process in its untagged state, and they didn’t want to introduce anything into the product that wasn’t tested. What cycling’s governing body, the UCI, did instead, was to set an absolute level for a person’s hematocrit (the percentage of their blood made up of red blood cells), setting this level at 50%. A very small number of people have more than that. In any case, what governing bodies have done in lieu of a true drug test is to say to atheletes: dope up to this line and no further.

By: brian

brian — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 02:30:34 +0000

I don’t think giving EPO to someone who was already really talented would have much effect at all. The naturally talented endurance athlete already has a high hematocrit and a huge VO2 max.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 02:18:55 +0000

why isn’t there a separate class of athletics for people who take performance-enhancing drugs? Because the incentive to cheat remains. Say you’re competing in the non-juicing league, doing decently well but not winning. You can start juicing and switch leagues, but there’s no guarantee you’ll win there. Or you can cheat… in which case the arms race just starts up again.