7 September 2017
No more heroes?
Has doping in sport undermined all respect for athletes?
by Frank O’Nomics
Anyone who takes the time to watch the new film by Bryan Fogel, Icarus (now available on Netflix), should prepare themselves for a potential rude awakening regarding their sporting heroes. What starts out as a kind of Super Size Me approach to doping, where Fogel wants to explore how the use of drugs might help him develop as a competitive cyclist, turns into a shocking exposé of the systematic use of drugs by a large proportion of the Russian Olympic team. We should not delude ourselves by thinking such behaviour is limited to the Russians, given news (strangely just released despite being 6 years old) that an anonymous survey of athletes in the 2011 World Championships showed that 30% of them admitted to having used banned substances at some stage. It is a fair assumption that the real number was greater, given that many would have been suspicious of the true anonymity of the process. Should we then give up watching athletics if it is just a test of the best at hiding their doping? Fortunately, there are new developments in testing that offer some hope.
I must at this point confess to my own gullibility. I really did believe Lance Armstrong in It’s Not About The Bike, when he argued that, having pumped his system full of drugs to overcome cancer, he was not going to do that when he got back to competitive cycling. Watching Icarus one is left wondering whether there is anyone in cycling that does not use banned substances. Prompted by the Lance Armstrong’s feat of fooling some 500 dope tests over a 15 year period, Bryan Fogel wanted to understand the implications for every athlete in sport – not just cycling. He initially approached a US expert to help him manage a drugs programme, but the official was concerned about the reputational risks of doing so and recommends a friend who had been running the Russian anti-doping programme. Grigory Rodchenkov helps Fogel manage a course of injections and the smuggling of urine samples for testing. At this point the film starts to fail in its initial intentions, in that (partly due to mechanical issues) Fogel manages little improvement to his competitive performance in the Haute Route, a demanding race for the very best amateur cyclists. However, when news breaks of Russian athletes failing drugs tests, Rodchenkov turns whistleblower, and uses Fogel as his conduit to expose the process by which urine samples were routinely stolen and tampered with. Under pressure to deliver a strong domestic performance at the Sochi Winter Olympics, those who had supposedly been responsible for preventing and identifying doping had seemingly been helping to subvert the system, and the approach had extended to athletics in the run up to the 2016 Olympic games in Rio. The disclosure ultimately led to 115 Russian athletes being banned from the games, many of whom were from track and field, but most of the rowing team and all of their weight-lifters were included.
To suggest that this systematic abuse was restricted to Russia, and only in recent years, would seem naive – especially given the news of the 2011 survey. Justin Gatlin, winner of the 100 metres in this year’s World Championships, has twice been banned for the use of drugs, and the removal of titles from the likes of Marion Jones shows that the US in particular has also had it problems. While the UK has had little to answer for in athletics since the Dwain Chambers ban in 2003, there have been more recent issues in cycling, with Jonathan Tiernan-Locke stripped of his 2012 Tour of Britain title following the detection of anomalies in his biological passport in 2014.
So what hope is there of ever being able to watch drug free competitive sport? A new drugs test, that should be available for the 2020 Olympics, is being hailed a possibly the biggest breakthrough in combating doping in a generation. The process is being developed by the University of Brighton, who have been given an award to do so by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The test can identify gene markers, a kind of DNA fingerprint (known as microRNAs), in blood which are produced when athletes take banned drugs such as EPO. These drugs can be spotted many weeks after the substances have been taken, and hence the process could negate any of the benefits. The research process has included ensuring that no “false positives” are generated, and the next step is to detect the substances in saliva also, which would make the testing process much easier.
There is then some hope, but many of us will remain sceptical. £540,000 invested in a research process to develop tests to stop doping would appear infinitesimal in comparison to the amounts that state agencies can put into finding ways to get around the tests. We should not be under any illusion as to how serious this is – whistleblower Rodchenkov, for example, is still under a witness protection scheme in the US given that he is perceived to be in some danger. It will be interesting to monitor how many drugs cheats the new tests actually identify and, perhaps more telling, the number of athletes who decide not to compete when they realise just how long they have to stay clean to avoid a positive test. Such statistics will give some clue as to the efficacy of the new tests, a gauge of the cleanliness of competition and just possibly the launch of a new breed of heroes.
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