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1 7 - 0 3 - 2 0 0 5 Pointe Claire lab at centre of battle
JACK TODD
In the bowels of the INRS building on Hymus Blvd. in Pointe Claire, Dr. Christiane Ayotte sits in an office amid the clutter of a lifetime spent researching and testing the junk athletes put in their bodies.
The basement lab is made necessary by the sensitive equipment needed to detect the increasingly sophisticated drugs athletes use to enhance their performances while evading detection. The clutter results from Ayotte's busy life as scientist, detective and expert witness at trials and arbitration hearings around the world.
Each year, Ayotte's Doping Control Laboratory tests thousands of urine and blood specimens from athletes around the world. When and if one of baseball's suspect sluggers has a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs, it will come from this lab; Ayotte has the contract to perform the much-publicized doping tests for Major League Baseball. More important, 40 per cent of the lab's budget goes to research as chemists work to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated substances athletes are willing to put into their bodies.
In more congenial surroundings in downtown Montreal, Dr. Olivier Rabin works in the well-lit, spacious offices of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which occupy the entire 17th floor of the Stock Exchange building. Rabin is WADA's director of science, the chief of detectives for the agency that is co-ordinating the worldwide effort to halt the abuse of a wide variety of substances banned by WADA, the International Olympic Committee and various sports federations.
Between the WADA offices downtown and Ayotte's Pointe Claire lab, Montreal is the international headquarters for the worldwide anti-doping movement. Never has that movement generated more attention or controversy, especially in North America.
Hardly a day goes by without new revelations concerning the abuse of steroids and a long and complex list of other performance-enhancing drugs (see box at left). Today, the U.S. Congress begins high-profile hearings into steroid abuse in major-league baseball, but the baseball controversy is barely the tip of the iceberg. At WADA headquarters and in laboratories like Ayotte's, a high-tech war is being waged not so much against athletes who cheat as against a small army of shadowy and unscrupulous scientists, physicians, coaches, trainers and supplements-industry executives who do not hesitate to administer to athletes a daunting list of banned substances, many of which have never been subjected to animal testing or clinical trials.
"It's not a matter of cheating," argues Canadian author, athlete and activist Laura Robinson, "but of turning athletes into experiments for scientists. I think the power of the science lab trumps the power of the podium every time. Winning at a sporting event is nothing compared to transferring the power that winning body has from the person who inhabits it to the scientist who now controls it."
"The athletes are the slaves," Ben Johnson says.
In December of 2003, an obscure Calgary sprinter named Derek Dueck was caught by Canada Customs trying to import a steroid called desoxy-methyl testosterone, or DMT. When Dueck was caught, he also had in his possession a vial of THG and 70 vials of another banned substance, Human Growth Hormone, or HGH.
An anonymous source eventually brought the drug to the attention of WADA and Ayotte's Doping Control Laboratory, and Ayotte worked with chemists at Customs Canada to analyze DMT. ("You should have seen us," she says. "We were like a couple of nerds - 'Look at this!' 'Smell this!' ")
Dueck, who had been barred from competition for four years after testing positive for androstenedione at the Canada Games in 1997, eventually paid a $3,000 fine. He was released without ever explaining where he obtained the new steroid or for whom it was intended.
In Ayotte's opinion, the two designer steroids, THG (or tetrahydrogestrinone) and DMT, come from the same source, identified in news reports as an Illinois chemist working with Victor Conte's BALCO lab, although their manufacture requires very different levels of sophistication. THG, Rabin says, could almost be manufactured on your kitchen table. DMT requires a serious organic-chemistry laboratory.
Besides being classed as designer steroids, THG and DMT have one other thing in common: Because of the clandestine nature of their development, they have never been subjected to the normal process of clinical trials and animal testing before being made available to athletes.
The French-born Rabin is perhaps uniquely qualified to serve as science director for WADA: He is a former athlete who gave up competitive martial arts because he was performing microsurgery at the time and had to protect his hands; from surgery he moved on to work for the pharmaceuticals industry in England and the U.S. before coming to WADA. He is precise, eloquent and passionate by turns. "When you talk about athletes as guinea pigs," Rabin says, "the first thing that comes to mind is all the issues with THG, DMT, the designer drugs. Here, we refer to it as designer steroids, but we can - more globally speaking - refer to designer drugs, which are drugs that clearly have been developed purely for the purpose of doping. And THG, which we know more about, is clearly a drug that has been synthesized purely for this purpose.
"DMT is a bit different because it has been synthesized since the '60s, but it was not developed as a drug. But it's been revived recently by a chemist somewhere to provide to athletes. It's very worrisome because those drugs have not been properly tested as medicine, so many of the side effects are absolutely unknown.
"What it shows is that you've got athletes who are provided with drugs with unknown risks and accept to take those risks to improve their performance."
(Tim Montgomery, the husband of sprinter Marion Jones who is now barred for his role in the BALCO scandal, reportedly told the U.S. grand jury investigating BALCO that THG had "nasty" side effects and sometimes made athletes sick when they used it.) Drugs from clandestine labs, Rabin said, are only part of the problem when it comes to athletes taking substances that have not been approved for use in humans.
"The other part is the use of drugs which are in development within the pharmaceutical industry, but are still in clinical trials. There is a whole process of development for a drug, but sometimes athletes have access to those drugs and are willing to pay large amounts of money for those drugs because they believe that they are not on the market yet, so they are not detectable.
"And there is also another aspect that is also a bit hidden, which is the fact that the athletes are combining a lot of substances. Some of those substances are developed for patients with diseases and are safe in the doses that are recommended. With the dopers, we see a combination of substances that are not sound in medical practice and in doses that are not sound in medical practice because the athletes tend to go beyond the therapeutic doses. So you've got this combination that is both experimental and very empirical (relying on observation of the result) because some of those athletes are advised by their entourage on how to use those substances, often without any scientific knowledge behind it.
"It shows again that some athletes are willing to take any risk with their health and probably also because in the past, the death of athletes was not as exposed as it ought to have been. With all we know about doping and the risks associated with poor practice, it becomes more visible."
The history of synthetic EPO is instructive in attempting to understand both the use of athletes as guinea pigs and the complexities of the effort to contain doping. EPO, or erythropoietin, was developed to treat anemia in patients suffering from renal failure. Cyclists quickly discovered that EPO promotes the level of red-blood cells and the ability to retain oxygen - and the risk of developing blood clots and, potentially, a fatal thrombosis.
Initially, there was no test at all for EPO. Eventually, UCI (the Union Cycliste Internationale) began a sort of indirect test, checking the level of haematocrite, or red blood cells. If a cyclist's haematocrite level was too high, he or she would not be allowed to start a race. (Quebec cyclist Genevieve Jeanson has twice fallen afoul of the rule.)
The IOC, seeking a reliable test for EPO, turned to physician and cycling coach Francesco Conconi, a highly respected leader in sports science and a member of both the IOC and the Italian Olympic Committee. Conconi worked with the IOC to devise a drug test for EPO.
During the Lillehammer Olympics in 1992, Conconi gave a talk to IOC members to update them on his progress and report on the 23 "amateur" athletes to whom he had administered EPO. According to Italian prosecutors, the athletes in fact were elite cyclists on Conconi's Carrera team, their names concealed under a long list of aliases.
Prosecutors charged that, while funded by the IOC and the Italian Olympic Committee, Conconi used the money to buy EPO and administer it to athletes. The case was finally dropped because the investigation could not be completed in the allotted five years, but Conconi and his cohorts were not acquitted.
There is now a urine test available for EPO, but the substance quickly clears the system. Ayotte believes that even out-of-competition testing is not effective because the cost of pursuing individual athletes around the world is prohibitive.
"When the EPO urine test came and they tried the test in Paris, it was a mess. They were getting all kinds of positive tests, but it was on an experimental basis so they couldn't do anything. The first year, we got many positives. Now, we're getting much less. So what happened? Did they stop using EPO? No. We know perfectly well they continue using EPO. We know what they're doing is they're taking EPO in advance, then they stop and replace this when it comes close to competition with blood transfusions of their own blood.
"We do out-of-competition tests, but 70 per cent of our out-of-competition tests are good for the garbage. We do it for convenience. We go four or five days before a big competition, when we have many athletes gathering for this, but they know they are going to be tested. It's not expensive because you're not sending one individual to chase one athlete. It's not expensive, but it's worth zero.
"If we test only the Tour de France and the Olympics, it's meaningless." WADA officials disagree and say they are close to testing athletes for EPO in a meaningful fashion.
Meanwhile, those who administer EPO and other drugs to athletes do so with impunity, in part because they are protected by the athletes themselves. Conconi's protege is another physician and cycling coach, Michele Ferrari, himself the target of Italian prosecutors. Ferrari in turn has spent more than a decade in close association with American cyclist Lance Armstrong, winner of the Tour de France on six consecutive occasions.
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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
