It is hardly a revelation to suggest that sport is losing the war against doping. The abundance of recent doping stories suggests that there is little room for optimism. It has long been acknowledged that the dopers are a step ahead of the testers and it is also generally accepted that clean sport is the ultimate aim. At major sporting events, only 1-2 percent of athletes test positive but recent figures suggest that as many as 39 percent of elite athletes have doped so the current methods of drug testing are clearly not watertight. And this is why the International Olympic Committee is trying to think outside the box.
On Tuesday, the IOC Medical and Scientific Commission chair, Ugur Erdener, and an IOC delegation will visit the University of Brighton to look into their anti-doping research and take part in a seminar on doping and the possible ways of lowering its prevalence in sport. The IOC has chosen the English seaside town because one of the world’s foremost anti-doping scientists is based there. Dr Yannis Pitsiladis is the University’s Professor of Sport ad Exercise Science and he believes that he can develop a method of testing that will revolutionise anti-doping in sport. Rather than attempting to detect traces of illegal drugs in an athlete’s blood or urine, Dr Pitsiladis is developing a test which detects changes in gene expressions in an individual which are the result of taking banned performance-enhancing drugs. He has been working on this project for several years- I interviewed Dr Pitsiladis about this work in 2014 when he was based at the University of Glasgow and he has continued to forge ahead with this research since he moved south of the border.
Dr Pitsiladis holds the traditional view that the best way to catch the dopers is to remain on the current path- continue developing drug testing methods until a test or series of tests is found that do not allow for evasion. The secret with Dr Pitsiladis’ testing method is that, he believes, it cannot be cheated. Even if the substance is out of the athlete’s system, the changes that is has induced cannot be disguised.
There is much merit in this new way of thinking because several downfalls come with the current testing methods which must be eradicated if greater confidence in the system is to be engendered; firstly, current anti-doping testing looks for abnormalities but what is abnormal? Nature dictates that each individual is physiologically different and many elite sportspeople are exceptional biologically which, in turn, helps produce exceptional performances. Secondly, the biological passport has advanced anti-doping testing but it is not infallible; if an athlete micro-doses then it is possible to dope without it being detected and this is why Dr Pitsiladis believes that it is necessary to look for something other than the substance itself in order to produce a greater hit rate.
There will be an alternative view offered next week though, and it will come from Dr Paul Dimeo, a senior lecturer in sport at the University of Stirling and also an anti-doping expert. He believes that the current method has real problems. “The current system isn’t very effective, a lot of athletes are slipping through the net and even though the number of tests conducted has risen in recent years, the percentage of positive tests hasn’t,” he says. “Currently, about £300 or £400 million is spent on anti-doping and I don’t think we’re getting a great return on that money. Also, athletes are not consulted very much at the moment in terms of the process, the sanction does not always fit the offence and there’s no transparency in the governance- there isn’t an auditing body of WADA and there’s no watchdog asking: ‘Is that right, is that consistent, why are you doing this?’. It’s public money and so I think there should be a body that WADA has to report to.”
Dr Dimeo acknowledges that he is likely to be in a minority of one next week- almost every other expert believes that the way forward is to increase testing but Dr Dimeo’s theory deserves some thought because, as he says, the evidence to this point suggests that increased testing does little to improve the percentage of dopers caught. “I don’t think we’ll get close to 100 percent clean sport but I would ask the question: ‘What does clean sport actually mean?’, because everything an athlete does is performance enhancing,” he says. “I think the strongest argument to ban a substance is the health argument- if there’s evidence that a substance damages an individual’s health and that’s why it’s on the banned list then hopefully that will be a more effective deterrent.”
The primary challenge for anti-doping seems to be that no one has a definitive answer as to what is the best way forward to reduce the levels of doping in sport. It is safe to assume that no answers will be settled on next week, but continuing the discussion has to be a positive step towards finding a solution.
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