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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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0 3 - 0 1 - 2 0 0 6 5 Doping Scandal Predictions for 2006
Timothy Ferriss Once the politicians tire of criticizing baseball for personal PR, 2006 will present a host of other opportunities to put doping scandals back in the news. From designer drugs in gentleman sports to the comeback of "new" Cold War steroids, 2006 will show just how far athletes have come, and how far they will go, to stay ahead of the competition and beat testing that is obsolete almost as soon as it appears. 1) More Golden Oldies will Resurface Current drug testing protocol is based on identifying specific compounds in an athlete's urine samples. To use proven (but banned) performance enhancers and not be caught, you can either modify the chemical's structure slightly—for example, by adding a chlorine ion and thus creating a so-called "designer" drug—or you can choose a drug that isn't specifically tested for. From 1950 to 1980, hundreds, if not thousands, of effective anabolic steroids were developed but never sold commercially due to cost constraints or other extenuating circumstances. These "lost" compounds (norbolethone would be one excellent example) were never widely used, and thus never tested for. THG, the widely-publicized designer steroid from the BALCO scandal, is a poster child for the value of forgotten research—its roots date back to abandoned research in 1966. 2006 will be a year of "retro" steroid use and modification, and testers will be none the wiser unless they change the testing paradigm from compound to hormonal profiling. 2) Hormonal Profiling or the Death of Testing The current approach to drug testing is so ineffective that any athlete with brains can "drive through the loopholes with a Mack truck", as put by Victor Conte of BALCO fame. Compound testing, or screening athletes for the presence of certain drugs in urine, is not only made obsolete by every advance in designer drugs, it is prohibitively expensive. For example, there are only 6-10 facilities accredited to test for EPO (Erythropoiten), the substance Lance Armstrong is accused of using to increase his red blood cell count. Each urine test for EPO costs a minimum of $400 and is only effective for detecting use within 48 hours of testing. The 2004 Athens Olympic Games hosted 11,099 athletes, and there are hundreds of banned substances, each of which needs to be tested for individually. The math just doesn't work. Even Don Catlin of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory has publicly stated that "the system has failed to deal with the problem, and it will fail now." Under the current format, each violation is estimated to cost the US Anti-Doping Association $320,404 when all research, legal, detection, and miscellaneous costs are included. It is a case of pride overriding practicality—it is time for them to admit that the system is flawed instead of pretending it will improve with positive PR and one or two scapegoats per season. The solution to 80% of the testing problems is hormonal profiling. Instead of searching for individual drugs, you look at the balances of certain tell-tale hormones in each athlete. If certain ratios are abnormal, or if certain levels of signaling hormones such as luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) are low, it can indicate that external drugs have been introduced, causing negative feedback in the body. If you inject or ingest something your body already produces internally, it will stop producing it to maintain a hormonal homeostasis, or balance. This is all reflected in basic hormonal profiling, which can be performed for less than $100 with saliva or blood samples that would indicate use of practically any anabolic that affects internal hormone production. The International Olympic Committee can only make drug testing even remotely effective if they 1) lower the cost and decrease the specificity, and 2) spread the cost of testing and/or increase funding. At minimum, athletes should be required to provide results of previous hormonal testing for baseline comparisons, and ideally, there should be a mandatory per athlete contribution of $200 to subsidize pre-competition testing. 3) Gentleman Sports in the Spotlight Not all athletic drug users are big and strong. In fact, the most rampant users of performance enhancers are often the least suspected. 2006 will be the year of blue-blood doping scandals in the sacrosanct world of so-called "gentleman" sports such as tennis, skiing, swimming, and even golf. No sport is exempt. Dressing like a prep school student or socializing with celebrities instead of meatheads only means you use a different brand of drug. Biathletes and curling athletes will use beta-blockers to reduce anxiety and tremors, tennis players will use mild anabolics such as decadurabolin or oxandrolone, in addition to track favorites such as modafinil and growth hormone (GH). Pseudoephedrine and clenbuterol are also popular as pre-competition endurance boosters. If there is a lot of money involved and the sport has any physical prerequisites that can be improved with drug use, it is safe to assume that at least 20% of the athletes are using some performance enhancer on a regular basis, banned or otherwise. 4) The Wide World of GH and Friends Steroids aren't the only game in town. In fact, performance enhancers include such a broad spectrum of drugs that the intelligent and risk-averse user can avoid steroids altogether and still use some of the most powerful chemicals with little or no fear of detection: Human Growth Hormone (HGH or GH), Human Chorionic Gonadotropic (hCG), and short-acting insulin are just a few examples. Olympic coaches and other qualified sources estimate that up to 80% of power athletes in track and field have used GH. Both GH and insulin (Humulin R) are very small molecules (GH is composed of 191 amino acids, Insulin has only 51) that are injected subcutaneously, or under the skin. They are not stored in fat and clear from the body within 4-8 hours, making them ideal for use around testing times or close to competition after cycling off of anabolic steroids. hCG is a peptide hormone produced during pregnancy, and is thus the molecule that determines a positive or negative in home pregnancy tests. Due to its similarities to luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), hCG is also used by male athletes to jumpstart testosterone production in the testes after a cycle of anabolic steroids. It is only a matter of time before testers or politicians pick hCG as their next big media success, at which point athletes will simply move to anti-aromatases (particularly botanical), which block the natural conversion of testosterone to estrogen, thereby increasing free testosterone levels without introducing any detectable banned substances. 5) Accusations and Seeding as Competitive Strategy From BALCO to Lance Armstrong, drug testing has left the realm of sports ethics and morphed into competitive strategy. THG, the now famous example of previously undetectable steroids, was introduced to Olympic antidoping facilities by a coach whose athletes were losing to THG users. If you can't beat them, it is far easier to take them out of the competition with a well-placed drug scandal than to double the effectiveness of your training program. 2006 will see anonymous accusations and evidence tampering become standard as war by other means in the battle for athletic supremacy. It will no longer be a matter of simply avoiding detection, but keeping use confidential and exploiting the information leaks of other athletes and teams. It's been done in corporate environments for decades, and now that sports are big business, the same rules—or lack thereof—will make disruption tactics an unfortunate norm. If your competition is too busy fending off media and attorneys general to train, they will not win, drugs or no drugs. Timothy Ferriss is a guest lecturer at Princeton University and has assisted athletes to legally set and break more than 70 world records as Director of Research for Adaptagenix Applied Biosciences in San Jose, CA. He predicted the Lance Armstrong scandal and has been featured and interviewed by media worldwide, ranging from the New York Times and LA Times to MTV and MAXIM Magazine. |
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