Sports and doping

Doping in sports is a persistent problem, despite a lot of effort to curb it.

 Sports and doping

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• The story: The 2020 games, in Tokyo from July 23rd, shaped up to be among the strangest in the competition’s history. Because of Covid-19, even their name is out of date, for they are taking place a year late. And contagion-prevention means most stadiums will be empty of spectators, so events will take place in silence!
• No Russians around: The 2020 games are unusual in that they are the first summer games since 1984’s — which were boycotted by the Soviet Union — at which Russia will not be present. Some of its athletes will participate as individuals, under the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee, but the national team has been banned in the aftermath of one of the biggest doping scandals in the history of sport.
• Systematic fraud: Between 2011 and 2015, Russia systematically doped hundreds of athletes. It roped in its spy agencies to subvert the anti-doping tests overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), then fabricated data. A controversial court ruling in 2020 reduced Russia’s initial four-year ban to two, which will expire in 2022.

1. The International Olympic Committee now says testing in the run-up to them will be the most extensive yet conducted.
2. Though new technology and increasingly strict rules have indeed made doping trickier than in the past, thousands of the 11,000-odd athletes at the Tokyo games could nonetheless be cheating.
3. Steroids, erythropoietin (EPO) and newer, less familiar performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) will have bulked their muscles, enriched their blood and allowed them to train harder than unenhanced humans would find possible. New drugs, clever tactics and institutional indifference or corruption could meanwhile help them outwit testers.

• Covid-19 and new problems: The pandemic may have made things worse. Since the effects of PEDs last much longer than the drugs stay in an athlete’s body, elite competitors are subject to testing even when they are not competing. Travel bans and lockdowns have disrupted that system.

1. In 2019, Nike closed down its much-publicised Oregon Project, a training camp for elite runners, after Alberto Salazar, the head coach there, was given a four-year ban for doping.
2. Kenya is famous for the dominance of its middle- and long-distance runners. These days that reputation is looking tarnished. The Athletics Integrity Unit, which polices anti-doping in athletics, lists 68 Kenyan runners currently banned from competing, including Wilson Kipsang, a former Olympic medallist and world-record holder.
3. Several other Olympic champions will miss the Tokyo games for drugs violations, including Sun Yang, a Chinese swimmer, and Brianna Rollins-McNeal, an American hurdler.

• Why dope: Athletes dope because drugs offer big advantages, and un-doped rivals have no hope of matching them. WADA, the rules of which bind many sports, maintains a list of hundreds of banned substances. They range from obscure chemicals with names like IGF-1 LR3 and AOD-9604 to insulin (to boost muscle size), amphetamines (for their stimulating effects) and even diuretics (used to mask the presence of other drugs).
• Better gaming through chemistry: The best-known PEDs are anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS), which are close chemical cousins of testosterone, the chief male sex hormone. Athletes take them to increase the size and strength of their muscles, and for their purported ability to enhance recovery after exercise, which allows people to train harder than would otherwise be possible.
• Second best: After anabolic steroids, the best-known doping drug is probably EPO, a natural substance which stimulates production of red blood cells. An artificial version was developed in the late 1980s to treat anaemia. It (and its chemical cousins) quickly became rampant in endurance sports such as running and cycling. Red blood cells transport oxygen around the body, and the supply of oxygen to an athlete's muscles is an important limiting factor in endurance exercise. So boosting red-blood-cell counts can allow superhuman efforts.

 

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