The Inside Dope on Sports Testing
With the announcement earlier this month that tennis star Martina Hingis would fight her positive test for cocaine use, sports fans rolled their eyes. We’d heard it before. Isn’t cyclist Floyd Landis still challenging his failed drug test from 2006 and appealing his lost Tour de France title? “I am innocent,” he said through his lawyers in September.
Can you blame us for being skeptical? They failed the tests! Doesn’t that mean they cheated? Maybe, but for all the sports coverage on radio and television and in newspapers, we know little of how drug testing works, or if it does determine who uses prohibited drugs.
Welcome to Drug Testing 101.
While testing crept into the universal sports consciousness in 1968, when the International Olympic Committee introduced it at the Winter and Summer Games, it took a giant step forward in 1999 with the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, formed by the IOC. Those 31 years saw abuses escalate, capped by sprinter Ben Johnson’s steroid bust at the 1988 Olympics and the drug raid on the 1998 Tour de France.
“History tells us that until recently the level of ambition among the people charged with doing something about performance-enhancing drugs in elite sport was very, very low,” says John Hoberman, an expert on sports doping. “Doping was treated as a public-relations matter rather than the urgent matter that now most people understand that it is. The IOC was panicked by the 1998 tour scandal, and WADA was the result.”
WADA’s rules and list of prohibited drugs—including anabolic agents like steroids; hormones like erythropoietin (EPO); stimulants like amphetamines and cocaine—form the backbone of sports drug policy world-wide. Olympic sports are required to follow the rules explicitly, while most professional sports and the National Collegiate Athletic Association tailor them to their own needs.
Today there are 33 WADA-accredited laboratories in 30 countries. Three are in North America: in Quebec, Salt Lake City, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. The agency, based in Montreal, confers with the international sports community—primarily the Olympic national governing bodies of each country and the international federations of the various Olympic sports—to compile a list of banned drugs and establish standards for labs and protocols for collecting samples. It is a continuing process. At its world conference in Madrid, Nov. 15-17, WADA made punishment more flexible—tougher if “aggravated circumstances such as being part of a large doping scheme” are involved, easier if there is no intent to cheat. Changes become effective in January 2009.
The labs are monitored by WADA, their proficiency tested regularly. “Twenty blind samples identified as tests are sent to the labs every year, and they must report what they find within a set time,” said WADA’s science director, Dr. Oliver Rabin, from his office in Montreal. “They are also sent educational samples to make sure labs can test for new drugs.” In addition, the agency mixes in test samples along with regular shipments from sports federations, blind tests so the lab doesn’t know they come from WADA.
If a lab falls below performance standards set by WADA—if it fails to catch drugs in a test or identifies drugs incorrectly—it can lose its accreditation; labs must also test at least 1,500 samples a year “to insure sufficient activity and daily practice,” according to WADA. Poor performance cost the South Korea lab a six-month suspension in 2002; last September the lab in Cambridge, England, was decertified for testing too few samples. Most of these samples are urine; only Olympic sports require blood, when testing for drugs undetectable in urine.
The labs and the work they do are generally respected within the sporting community, and are used by the NCAA, National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and its minor leagues. (The National Basketball Association does not disclose its lab of choice.) When there are problems, they usually involve collecting samples to be tested.
“The whole system of testing grinds to a halt if the samples aren’t perfectly collected,” says Dr. Donald Catlin, who until March ran the UCLA lab for 25 years and now heads the Anti-Doping Research Institute in Los Angeles. “That means the right sample in the right bottle and the proper numbers and the proper name, and the chain of custody. It all starts with the collection.”
Exactly when testing occurs differs among pro, collegiate and Olympic athletes—some are tested during the season only, while others are tested year-round—but all testing is supposed to be random and unannounced. WADA rules also provide for “target testing,” Olympic athletes selected on a nonrandom basis at a nonspecified time because of suspicion, history, or a tip; many athletes, including Olympians, may also be tested at events. (Ms. Hingis was tested after her final match at Wimbledon last June.)
The procedure is strict and more than a little humiliating. The athlete is accompanied to the testing area by a trained collector of the same gender and provides the sample within plain view. Quoting from WADA regulations: “The athlete must remove all clothing between the waist and mid-thigh, in order that the witness has an unobstructed view of sample provision.” The athlete then watches as the sample is split into two bottles—labeled “A” and “B”—sealed in a package to be shipped to the lab. Samples do not bear the athlete’s name—only a code number. Once the sample is analyzed, results are sent back to the agency ordering the test and matched with the athlete’s name.
Different companies and organizations are charged with collecting samples. For U.S. Olympians, samples are collected by drug control officers under the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), in Colorado Springs, Colo., partly funded by the U.S. Olympic Committee just as WADA is partly funded by the IOC. For individual sports, collection is handled by the federations; in the case of Martina Hingis, the International Tennis Federation.
USADA’s 86 drug control officers submit to a background check and must pass written and practical-skills tests and attend a two-to-three-day workshop. They go through an observation period in the field before their first collection, which comes under staff supervision. They are recertified every two years, according to Kate Mittelstadt, the agency’s director of doping control.
The National Center for Drug Free Sport in Kansas City, Mo., is one of the private companies charged with collecting. It employs about 300 field workers who collect samples for minor-league baseball, the NBA, the NCAA, and high schools in New Jersey and Florida. Their training is similar to USADA’s, and they follow collection protocols set by their clients.
How effective is all this in keeping athletes honest? The new resolve has presumably addressed abuses of the past—athletes taking drugs to mask steroid use or contaminating their sample with salt or vinegar—but there are drugs undetectable by urine tests, like human growth hormone, and new drugs are continually being developed. Catching new cheaters is the goal of Dr. Catlin’s research institute. But testing alone is no longer enough; inexplicably, cheaters escape. The Madrid conference stressed the importance of working in partnership with law-enforcement agencies.
“When we go after drug-trafficking around the world, we work with federal, state, local and international partners,” said Scott Burns, deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, upon his return from Madrid. These resources, he added, follow the money and the product to close cases. “There’s no reason not to go after doping in sports with the same model.”
USADA says it tested track star Marion Jones 24 times from 2000 to 2007. But she was brought down last month in the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (Balco) by federal authorities—including the Internal Revenue Service—working with USADA. (Last month, Ms. Jones accepted a two-year ban and relinquished her five Olympic medals.) Balco also led to slugger Barry Bonds being indicted on federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges earlier this month.
Meanwhile, drug testing remains the front line of defense against cheating, though questions continually surface about its effectiveness.
A recent New York Times article cites players of three unnamed major-league baseball teams getting advanced warning of testing, up to two days ahead. The collecting agency, Comprehensive Drug Testing in Long Beach, Calif., which also collects samples for the NFL and NHL, refused to comment. “We evaluate our procedures at the end of each year to determine if any changes are necessary,” said Pat Courtney, speaking for Major League Baseball.
Warning is a cheater’s weapon.
“The premise behind all successful testing is the element of surprise,” says Dr. Gary Wadler, a member of WADA’s Prohibitive List and Methods Committee. “There are too many ways to subvert the process if you know in advance; even an hour can make a difference. Athletes have put other people’s urine in their bladder; it’s been done.”
If the door is open to cheating, can an honest athlete also be prosecuted? There are precautions. If the “A” sample tests positive, the athlete can opt to have the “B” sample tested. If both tests are positive, there is an appeal process. Ms. Hingis originally announced her retirement on Nov. 1 after both samples tested positive. Then a week later her agent told the BBC she would fight the test.
The two samples and method of appeal are an effort to avoid athletes being falsely punished.
“I’d like to think the odds of that happening are low—it’s a disaster when it does,” says Don Catlin. “How often it does happen I can’t tell you, but nobody’s going to raise the flag and say I had a problem with a test in my lab. I have my ear to the ground and I hear of such things, but it’s hard to document.”
With rumors of drugs rampant in sports, whenever someone performs above his or her normal level it’s only natural to ask if drugs were responsible. And if that athlete fails a drug test but claims innocence, as Ms. Hingis and Mr. Landis have, we are again left to wonder.
“When an athlete gets caught up in a situation where he didn’t cheat but ends up with a positive test, he’s screwed,” says Mr. Hoberman, the expert on sports doping. “The rest of us are left with the spectacle of Floyd Landis on Jay Leno. I was sitting there like a dummy, trying to turn ‘The Tonight Show’ into a polygraph—and I failed. I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or lying.”