August 08, 2004

Testing Positive

Posted by Kieran

The Irish athlete Cathal Lombard has tested positive for EPO, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In interviews he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.

Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just compare and contrast their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where earlier this year he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.

This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.

Posted on August 8, 2004 07:23 PM UTC
Comments

Question: why isn’t there a separate class of athletics for people who take performance-enhancing drugs?

Posted by Carlos · August 8, 2004 08:52 PM

I agree with Carlos. The distinction between legitimate training and diet and illegitimate performance enhancing drugs is silly and arbitrary. The problem isn’t that athletes are evading these rules. The problem is the rules themselves.

Posted by Xavier · August 8, 2004 09:15 PM

why isn’t there a separate class of athletics for people who take performance-enhancing drugs?

Because most fans romanticize sports, and if they knew all the competitors were loaded up on steroids, speed, and EDO, they would lose interest.

Also, many of those enhancers (especially EDO) are highly dangerous; if sports associations allowed them to be used openly, they’d face suits from the families of athletes who got sick or died from using the drugs.

My opinion of, say, Lance Armstrong isn’t that he’s this big cheater. It’s far worse: most likely you can’t seriously compete for the Tour de France without taking drugs.

Posted by son volt · August 8, 2004 09:20 PM

I remember when Carl Lewis was going on about performance-enhancing drug use in the sport, and everyone dismissed him as a whiner. Now, 20 years later, looks like he was right.

In bodybuilding, there are separate classifications for “natural” bodybuilders. It’s kind of sad, really.

Posted by me2i8 · August 8, 2004 09:28 PM

All sports have “arbitrary” rules. The banning of performance-enhancing drugs is certainly no-less arbitrary than others. Especially considering the enormous advantage such drugs deliver. Legalizing drugs would destroy (the pleasure of watching) many sports, particularly track and field.

Posted by Stander · August 8, 2004 09:30 PM

Me2i8,

Carl Lewis failed a drug test in 1988 (for banned stimulants such as pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and phenylpropanolamine) but was still allowed to compete in the Olympics. Not only was he a whiner, he was a dishonest whiner.

Posted by Stander · August 8, 2004 09:41 PM

I’m puzzled about how performance-enhancing drugs might ultimately play out. Aren’t most physiological changes the result of hormonal “signaling”? As our understanding of that signaling improves, will there be a point at which the signaling due to training will be indistinguishable from what can be done with drugs? That is, at some point the drugs become not merely “hard to spot”, but identical to the natural process, in all ways but the starting point of the signaling.

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.

Of course, this medical magic has a long way to go; otherwise, I’d be about 15% lighter.

Posted by Ken C. · August 8, 2004 10:06 PM

Xavier, while I agree that the rules are arbitrary, I don’t know whether they’re silly. Honest question honestly asked.

There seem to be a bunch of trade-offs going on here: detection versus punishment, abuse versus performance, and abuse versus long-term health. It strikes me as something economists might have studied. Anyone know?

Posted by Carlos · August 9, 2004 12:19 AM

Steve Ovett suggested the same thing: that drug users declare themselves.

There are straightforward physiological constraints on athletic performance. You need a quick reaction time and a fast stride pattern to be a sprinter for instance. Steroids wouldn’t get most men anywhere near 11s for the 100m.

The point is that athletes (or anyone really) who take perfromance enhancing drugs have a far better chance of dropping dead within a few years than those who don’t. It wasn’t the stresses and strains of Olympic level competition which killed Flo-Jo for instance.

We have at present a system where athletes who take drugs can compete in one class and those who don’t can compete in another. The first class just happens not to exist.

However, it’s not fair to talk about “justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work.” The dishonest athletes worked hard too, and they are/were talented.

Le Tour, and cycling generally, is different from Track and Field. The distances and the effort expected in Le Tour are inhuman. Running four 100m races over three days is not.

Ken C’s assumption is wrong. Drug injection does not make you an athlete. Drugs may help you train longer, and allow you to build muscle faster, but that’s it. You still need to put the hours in the weights room in. And it still hurts.

In many Olympic disciplines, athletes are mature in their teens (swimming or gymnastics for example). Even the ardent libertarians might balk at whether a 17 year old swimmer is fit to decide whether to take a steroid recommended by his coach or not.

Posted by Backword Dave · August 9, 2004 12:43 AM

Steve Ovett suggested the same thing: that drug users declare themselves.

There are straightforward physiological constraints on athletic performance. You need a quick reaction time and a fast stride pattern to be a sprinter for instance. Steroids wouldn’t get most men anywhere near 11s for the 100m.

The point is that athletes (or anyone really) who take perfromance enhancing drugs have a far better chance of dropping dead within a few years than those who don’t. It wasn’t the stresses and strains of Olympic level competition which killed Flo-Jo for instance.

We have at present a system where athletes who take drugs can compete in one class and those who don’t can compete in another. The first class just happens not to exist.

However, it’s not fair to talk about “justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work.” The dishonest athletes worked hard too, and they are/were talented.

Le Tour, and cycling generally, is different from Track and Field. The distances and the effort expected in Le Tour are inhuman. Running four 100m races over three days is not.

Ken C’s assumption is wrong. Drug injection does not make you an athlete. Drugs may help you train longer, and allow you to build muscle faster, but that’s it. You still need to put the hours in the weights room in. And it still hurts.

In many Olympic disciplines, athletes are mature in their teens (swimming or gymnastics for example). Even the ardent libertarians might balk at whether a 17 year old swimmer is fit to decide whether to take a steroid recommended by his coach or not.

Posted by Backword Dave · August 9, 2004 12:44 AM

Oh, sorry. And I tested whether the comment had gone through.

Still, another point. Linford Christie grew to international standard in his mid-20s. 30s is a lot to knock off a good 10K time, but it is possible. Sebastian Coe went from talented middle-distance runner to top of the world rankings in the summer of 1979 (he says because that was the year of his finals, and he trained less so he could cram: I see no reason to doubt him).

Posted by Backword Dave · August 9, 2004 12:54 AM

“Ken C’s assumption is wrong. Drug injection does not make you an athlete. Drugs may help you train longer, and allow you to build muscle faster, but that’s it. You still need to put the hours in the weights room in. And it still hurts.”

Of course, I said nothing like “Drug injection can make you an athlete”.

I said, in the future, drugs may be able to mimic the hormonal signaling that occurs in the body during training.

That seems to include, today, the signaling that results in increased red blood cells: the drug EPO, discussed in the cited link, seems to be very close to, and functionally equivalent to, the human hormone secreted naturally by the kidneys in response to low blood oxygen. If the “drug” that was injected was exactly that human hormone, how would that be distinguishable from the result of spending some time at high altitude? In fact, it would be a “poor man’s”, cheaper, way of getting the same effects. In such a situation, why indeed should an athlete whose only advantage is the resources to train at high altitude be seen as “purer” than an athlete with less money?

After spending those hours in the weight room, presumably the exhausted muscles are telling the body, in their hormonal fashion or otherwise, “Make more of me”. Let’s pretend that they generate the hormone Ahnuldine to say that. (The actual general mechanism is probably already known, but not by me.) If you inject Ahnuldine, why is that different in spiritual purity from spending those enlightening hours lifting and lowering heavy objects?

(And again: I know that such a simple injection is not possible today, and mimicry of the muscle’s “make more of me” signal is not currently possible. Moreover, athletes do something with that muscle, and that skill won’t come from a pill. But the question, as posed before and more elaborately above, remains.)

Posted by Ken C. · August 9, 2004 01:43 AM

I think it is a tad unfair to claim
cycling is looking the other way. I suspect David Millar would certainly disagree. The problem is that the list of banned substances is arbitrary. In 2001, for example, Jonathan Vaughters had to quit the tour because of a bee sting in the face - the medically recommended cortisone shot was illegal. Similar problems come up with treatment for exercise induced asthma; is it really asthma if you only have trouble breathing in a pro bike race? As for dangerous, if taking EPO lets a bad climber climb well enough to easily finish inside the time limits without descending unsafely, is it really more dangerous, especially with the hematocrit max limits?

Posted by ian · August 9, 2004 02:18 AM

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.

Posted by Josh · August 9, 2004 02:18 AM

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.

Posted by brian · August 9, 2004 02:30 AM

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.

Posted by Lisa Williams · August 9, 2004 04:01 AM

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.

Posted by John Quiggin · August 9, 2004 08:14 AM

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.

Posted by Tracy · August 9, 2004 09:27 AM

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.)

Posted by Danny Yee · August 9, 2004 09:33 AM

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)

Posted by Shai · August 9, 2004 11:16 AM

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.

Posted by Shai · August 9, 2004 11:30 AM

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.

Posted by Backword Dave · August 9, 2004 11:47 AM

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.

Posted by Rod · August 9, 2004 01:45 PM

>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.

Posted by a different chris · August 9, 2004 03:07 PM

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.

Posted by Tracy · August 9, 2004 04:15 PM

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…

Posted by ajay · August 9, 2004 04:47 PM

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.

Posted by Backword Dave · August 9, 2004 07:47 PM

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.

Posted by Lance Boyle · August 9, 2004 07:49 PM
Followups

→ Performance enhancing drugs.
Excerpt: Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber on performance enhancing drugs: [Blatant use of banned substances in sport] makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch moreRead more at Majikthise

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.