Few sporting records are likely to be broken at this summer's athletics World Championships in Berlin. But the event could be the most significant in the history of drug detection in sport.
The competition, which starts on 15th August, is the Olympics' evil twin—or perhaps more accurately its wicked stepsister—a biennial potboiler, intended to keep athletics fans' eyes square during odd-numbered summers. The significance of this year's event is that it will be the first big tournament to trial the new "biological passport," developed at great cost by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada).
Founded ten years ago, Montreal-based Wada's mission is to decide what drugs should be illegal in sport and to fight their use. Its new passport system will make the biggest change to the way cheats are identified since the first patchy out-of-competition tests began in the wake of Ben Johnson's bust at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Since the late 1960s, when the first crude tests for stimulants were implemented, individual spot tests have sought to identify specific drugs or doping techniques and compare them to normal levels in the general population. The problems with this approach are obvious. As well as the practical difficulties of collecting and testing samples, it requires the authorities to guess what drugs might be present and to have a test that will stand up in court. A deeper flaw is the assumption that a normal level exists. This has been successfully challenged by athletes like Belgian triathlete Rutger Beke, who in 2005 proved that his body naturally produced high levels of the blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO). And a British Journal of Sports Medicine article earlier this year described a test for testosterone as "not fit for purpose" because it failed to take ethnic variations into account.
The term "passport" is a reassuringly familiar misnomer for the series of tests managed by a web-based programme named Adams (anti-doping administration and management system). This covers all Olympic and Paralympic sports plus a growing number of professional leagues, tracking athletes' blood and urine parameters over time and looking for suspicious baseline changes that could be attributed to doping. Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, the new system watches the haystack to see if it alters suggestively. If so, a panel of experts sits in judgement.
First trialled at the 2006 Winter Olympics and since rolled out in cycling, the new system is also a response to the increasingly expensive legal battles with athletes accused of doping: £1.62m was spent busting 2006 Tour de France "winner" Floyd Landis and £38m plus went on the US government's pursuit of the Balco athletics doping case between 2003 and 2005. Other concerns include the spread of cheaper sports drugs and a series of scandals that have tarnished sports like road racing and forced it to cancel events through lack of sponsors.
Unprecedented time, money and political and legal effort have gone into the new testing regime. British sport has gone from employing two people in an attic office in Euston back in 1988 to planning a new operation with a staff of 55 and a budget of £7.2m. Provisionally named UK Anti-Doping, it will end the conflict of interest that came from having both drug detection and elite sports management run by UK Sport. In the meantime UCI, the international cycling federation, will carry out over nearly 14,000 blood and urine tests this year, hoovering up more than 50 per cent of its budget, while at Berlin this summer the International Association of Athletics Federations will complete 1,000 tests—up from 700 at the Beijing Olympics. Heroic efforts have been made to get the? funding and support needed.
Needless to say, many professional athletes are far from delighted at the idea being part of a system that enables random testing—by requiring them to specify where they will be for a full hour of every day between 6am and 11pm, up to three months ahead. Football bodies have all protested in favour of holiday exemptions. Rowers, with their early training hours, were particularly unhappy with the "unreliable" computer system. Tennis stars like Rafael Nadal have called the intrusive new regime a "disgrace" and have questioned the security of a system in which athletes themselves will input data—though this is password-protected and can be corrected. Satisfying the entire world of sport, when no global standard exists for data protection or privacy, will be near impossible. The key will be the first test case when it comes to court, because convincing the law to accept the results will be far more important than who collects the first two-year ban.
Of course the new system brings with it new risks and challenges. The Berlin championships may mark the moment when athletes turn to "micro-dosing" to sneak below the radar—although this is probably preferable to the mega-dosing that has hastened the death of many sportspeople in the past. Another possibility is that it will speed up the adoption of genetic doping techniques, which produce no detectable blood or urine products. Bernhard Kohl, third in 2008's Tour de France before he was disqualified, claimed that the new "limits" effectively allowed routine blood-doping: the decades-old practice of boosting aerobic efficiency by injecting extra red blood cells. Kohl's manager was able to top him up with a half-litre bag of stored blood and still stay within the rules. (Fortunately Kohl was caught anyway because he tested positive for Cera, a new, longer-lasting erythropoietin stimulating agent, which many riders had wrongly thought was undetectable.)
The countless legal, medical, scientific, political and financial battles are likely to peak at London in 2012, when more than half the athletes competing are supposed to be tested. In short, there are interesting times ahead—which is more than one can always say before a World Athletics Championships.
