Drugs in sport: Beyond the limits

In October of last year, American sprinter Marion Jones became the latest elite athlete to have her reputation ruined by revelations of past steroid abuse. She was stripped of the multiple medals she had won at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, banned from competition and ultimately decided to retire altogether.

Jones joined several other high profile track and field competitors, including sprinters Justin Gatlin, Kelli White and Ben Johnson in the doping ‘hall of shame’. Elsewhere, competitive cycling continues to struggle for credibility as each year’s running of the once-legendary Tour De France brings new allegations and revelations of performance-enhancing drug use. While these are the most prominent examples, it seems no sport is completely immune to the scourge of banned substances these days, and the response of governing bodies has been necessarily robust.
Dr. Una May is the manager of the Irish Sports Council’s anti-doping committee and as such is at the forefront of ensuring that Irish sport stays ‘clean’. May says the primary challenge for sporting administrators is keeping up to date with the enormous and ever-expanding range of steroids, stimulants and other substances available to athletes who choose to take the dishonest route. “We’re governed by the world anti-doping agency and they produce a comprehensive, scientific list every year of what’s banned,” she explains. “Obviously, some competitors will always try to evade the testers but I think right now we’re probably a lot closer than we ever were to being on top of what they’re taking. New substances have cropped up over the years but there hasn’t really been anything too significant coming up lately.”
One recent development has been the emergence of ‘designer steroids’, where very slight variations of basic steroids like testosterone are engineered that will potentially get the same results in terms of performance enhancement, but without being detected by routine tests. However, May says testers are well aware of this phenomenon and a constant game of cat-and-mouse is played out as they try to keep up with the latest variants.
Currently, the main area of progress in anti-doping lies in the development of new testing methods to more reliably detect common steroids. “They’re looking at substances that have been around for some time,” says May. “There will always have to be some urine testing but the detection rate of some substances can be improved if blood testing is used and there are tests being developed that only look at the blood.”
The Irish Sports Council’s approach to combating doping involves categorising the various sports as high- and low-risk. The approach is revised each year based on the level of participation and the quality of athletes in the respective disciplines. “We plan our testing according to where we think the risks are and target it accordingly,” describes May. “We carry out random out-of-competition testing where the athletes have to provide us with their whereabouts on a day-to-day basis so we can test them unexpectedly.”
Acceptance of such testing is one of the main requirements for athletes in receipt of personal funding from the government or the Sports Council to support their careers. “We have a lot more competitors in athletics that are funded than any other sports, but we do pay attention to the team sports as well – we do a lot of testing in rugby for example.”
Dr. Conal Hooper is a former director of the centre for sports studies at University College Dublin and currently chairs the FAI’s medical committee, as well as serving as team doctor to the international U21 squad. As a medical doctor, he is all too aware of the long-term physiological damage that steroid abuse can inflict on the body.
“Steroids reduce the potency of the body’s natural defences,” he says. “There is also anecdotal evidence of an increased risk of tumours and life-threatening infections. Where people are using the erythropoietin (EPO) hormone there’s also a risk of clots. The whole purpose of EPO is to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood, and you do that by producing more blood cells. If you have more of them, then there’s a greater risk of clots, which can lead to a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism when the clot breaks off and gets into the lungs.”
Dr. Hooper says he has not come across any cases of steroid abuse during his involvement with Irish soccer, citing a single positive test for a recreational drug as the one incident he recalls. He is of the opinion that “recreational drugs are a societal problem, not a sports problem, but the other argument is that if sportspeople are to be role models, surely they should be clean and not countenance recreational drugs.”
When asked what sports he believes to be worst affected by doping, Dr. Hooper doesn’t hesitate. “Athletics is riddled,” he says, “I’ve no confidence in it and I probably won’t even look at the Olympics – I don’t think Beijing is going to be any different to what’s gone before.”