DURING THE FAMOUS training montage in Rocky IV, the villain of the piece — Ivan Drago — is seen being injected with steroids by his trainers while our erstwhile hero chops wood, lifts horse-drawn carts and sprints through waist high snow.
For many sports fans this, coupled with the Ben Johnson era of sprinting, is how dopers are perceived; cartoon character bad guys with He-Man’s physique and Skeletor’s personality.
But like haircuts and sartorial sensibilities, doping has moved on from the garishness of the 80s to something more subtle, a world of so-called ‘marginal gains’ that blur the lines between what is and is not cheating.
Testing — for any number of reasons — has been unable to keep pace yet still, argues investigative journalist and author of ‘The Sports Gene’ David Epstein, the public perception of what drug testing can achieve far exceeds the reality.
“I think part of it is a lack of understanding of how messy science is in general,” Epstein told The42 this week.
“But a lot of it is down to the fact there was this era — when Ben Johnson got caught — when people were getting caught for nandrolone and other drugs where the detection is completely unequivocal, where people could detect directly, right down to the chemicals of the metabolism of that drug.
That led to athletes moving into this era of using drugs which are versions of natural hormones and that really changed things a lot, it has made testing much, much, much more difficult.
“But I think the public perception has not kept up with what is going on behind the scenes. As soon as testing started, drugs like nandrolone just disappeared because the breakdown cycle for a drug like that is months.
“Everyone switched to these synthetic versions of natural horomones that you can’t even test for directly. The kind of testing that’s done to catch people doping in sport is not done anywhere else in the world for any other purpose so there’s no reason for people to know what actually goes on I suppose.
That said, after Lance Armstrong harping on about ‘never testing positive’, and the way that turned out, I would have thought people would have realised there is some gap between those testing positive and those who are doping.”
Epstein's acclaimed book The Sports Gene.
Part of the reason people are looking for an edge is because the talent gap between elite athletes is almost indecipherably small. For instance, on Sunday Usain Bolt beat Justin Gatlin by 0.01 of a second. If you dropped your cup of tea celebrating the instant the Jamaican crossed the line, it would have only moved half a millimetre by the time the American finished second.
Because of that, those elite athletes disposed to cheating are looking for any tiny edge they can find and it’s one of the reasons the phrase ‘marginal gains’ has become so tainted.
“I think that’s unfortunate because there is something to be said for marginal gains when it comes to attention to detail in areas of recovery or diet and things like that,” say Epstein.
“But, for a lot of American track athletes, it’s become a code word, not necessarily just for outright doping but for getting medication they don’t necessarily need and were not on before they were elite level runners.”
Testing is not a simple process. AP / Press Association Images
AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images
But if the testing is so far behind, and the chances of getting caught so small, why is everyone not doping?
“I think some of them aren’t savvy enough but the ones who are have access to resources and to doctors and scientists and I don’t think there’s much to stop them,” he says.
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“They can still fail a test, potentially, but they’d have to be unlucky. And that’s why athletes are tested over and over — the testers hope that, one time, the can just be lucky.
“I don’t think most of the athletes are on top of [doping techniques] themselves but they’re associated with doctors who are.
“Look at someone like Justin Gatlin. He never even came close to going above the threshold for the T/E screening test [a traditional method of testing for levels of testosterone above the 4-1 ratio set down by the World Anti-Doping Agencey (WADA) to allow for natural variations. Most people have a T/E ratio of 1-1.]
“It just so happened he was targeted for Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR) testing [a relatively new test that can distinguish between natural and synthetic testosterone in a way the traditional T/E test cannot] for other reasons so he got really unlucky.
“Normally, the typical athlete showing the T/E profile he did at the time would have slipped straight through the net.”
Justin Gatlin has twice served bans for doping offences. David J. Phillip / AP/Press Association Images
David J. Phillip / AP/Press Association Images / AP/Press Association Images
But if CIR testing is so much more effective, why is it not the standard test undertaken in WADA accredited laboratories?
“The T/E test can be done very quickly, with one person doing large amounts of them in a day, for several hundred dollars.
“The CIR test is several hundred dollars per test and it can take someone several hours just to do one and sometimes it can take even more than a day.
“People probably think that anti-doping is really well funded but it’s not. Researchers are very, very limited but they have a large public footprint. Even though WADA has been pushing the labs they accredit to do more CIR testing, the resources are so limited most can’t.
It’s kind of amazing to think that one of the reasons the best — technologically — growth hormone test was not being done was because no-one was producing enough of the kit for it to be done.”
Resources, Epstein says time and time again, are crucial and admits that if anti-doping labs had enough money to perform CIR tests on every sample, it would be a “major step forward.”
On the recent leak of biological passport data that showed a significant volume of athletes were returning suspect results, Epstein says he wasn’t surprised but that athletics should not be singled out for being the only sport with a doping problem.
“The recent leak of all the biloglical passport data was pretty stunning but it really didn’t change my estimate of how many people are probably doping — 15-20%, that kind of range — and even though that means the majority of athletes are not doping, a very significant minority are.
“But you look at sports like American football where guys have increased in size by 50% in a generation and, simply because they don’t attempt to police it very much, they don’t end up with a scandal.
So you have this ironic situation where, by attempting to make up for having scandal, a sport has more scandal and so on. You have to say that, unfortunately, athletics has earned that reputation.”
New IAAF president Seb Coe has a job on his hands. Andy Wong / AP/Press Association Images
Andy Wong / AP/Press Association Images / AP/Press Association Images
So it’s a catch-22 for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), by trying to catch the cheats, they risk tarnishing the reputation of the very sport they’re attempting to protect.
However, Espstein says, cheats have always and will always exist and hiding from that fact helps nobody.
“It makes me think again about the passport data being leaked. In many ways, some aspects of the IAAF’s response has been reasonable. They said ‘yes, there were a lot of suspicious tests but, because of the way testing works, many of them were false positives and because of the way testing works we just don’t know which ones.’
“That said, their defensiveness has been unbelievable to me. We’re not asking for perfection, just an awareness that this is going on and not attempting to minimise the problem. It boggles my mind when these institutions try to bury their head in the sand about it.
Every enterprise that humans have ever created have some people who are cheating and, in sports, the response of the governing body magnifies the problem.”
Today, Gatlin and Bolt go head-to-head once more in the final of the 200m (at 1.55pm) with many wondering what a win for the American would do for the sport given that Bolt was adjudged to have ‘saved it’ by beating the twice-caught doper in the 100m on Sunday.
“The fact there has been some IAAF response is good, but I don’t care what place Justin Gatlin came [on Sunday], everything is not okay and they should face up to the problem. It doesn’t matter that Bolt finished ahead of him by 0.01 seconds.
If they use that as an excuse to be lax about this then they’re just kicking a grenade down the road and it’s a just a question of when it’s going to go off, not if.
“No governing body can say ‘here we have something cataclysmic if it goes 0.01 seconds the other way but because it didn’t we can just put it off.’ That to me would just be crazy.”
Tyson Gay had his ban reduced for providing information on doping. Mark Schiefelbein
Mark Schiefelbein
Perhaps surprisingly, Epstein thinks that one potential way to reduce doping is to decrease the length of bans and encourage whistle-blowing. He admits there’s no perfect answer, however.
“People are upset with athletes getting reduced suspensions — like Tyson Gay — but the reason that’s happening is because WADA has admitted that testing will never get you all the way there. It’s an important part of the process but it’s limited so they’ve been changing rules to make it more amenable to do investigations.
“They’ve hired their own investigator for the first time ever and some of those rules offer opportunities to banned athletes in return for information on doping. That’s actually been built into the rule so it’s gravitating more towards how governments prosecute organised crime, trading lesser sentances for information.
“The second thing is that you absolutely will have false positives when testing, even with biological passports. So if you’re saying that you’re 99.9% sure that every positive is a true positive and you’re doing 10,000 tests, you’re saying you actually expect a fair number of false positives.
“So I actually think we should consider lowering the threshold a little bit but making the bans shorter. This way, people are more likely to get banned more often — if they’re screwing around — but those who are victims of false positives don’t have to sit out for two/four years.
Despite everything he has seen in his extensive research and the knowledge that there are elite level athletes winning medals this week at the World Championships who are almost certainly doping, Epstein — a collegiate athlete himself — still enjoys watching the events unfolding in Beijing.
“I do enjoy it, and it still feels very different than something like WWE which is intentionally scripted and all that kind of stuff. And even though there are a lot of people cheating, as I said, I think there are a lot of people cheating in every human endeavour in which there are large rewards.
“I’m able to enjoy it in the moment and I just expect to have some disappointments in retrospect. Occasionally something happens — like a runner who hasn’t been in the top 20 in the world in five years suddenly wins a World Championship gold medal — and I pretty much kind of write that off.
“But I still enjoy the rest of it, though always knowing there’s going to be some retrospective disappointment. It’s definitely not ideal, but for the most part knowing what I know hasn’t stopped my enjoyment of the moment, just afterwards.”
'I don't care what place Gatlin came, everything is not okay and athletics needs to accept that'
DURING THE FAMOUS training montage in Rocky IV, the villain of the piece — Ivan Drago — is seen being injected with steroids by his trainers while our erstwhile hero chops wood, lifts horse-drawn carts and sprints through waist high snow.
For many sports fans this, coupled with the Ben Johnson era of sprinting, is how dopers are perceived; cartoon character bad guys with He-Man’s physique and Skeletor’s personality.
But like haircuts and sartorial sensibilities, doping has moved on from the garishness of the 80s to something more subtle, a world of so-called ‘marginal gains’ that blur the lines between what is and is not cheating.
Testing — for any number of reasons — has been unable to keep pace yet still, argues investigative journalist and author of ‘The Sports Gene’ David Epstein, the public perception of what drug testing can achieve far exceeds the reality.
“I think part of it is a lack of understanding of how messy science is in general,” Epstein told The42 this week.
“But a lot of it is down to the fact there was this era — when Ben Johnson got caught — when people were getting caught for nandrolone and other drugs where the detection is completely unequivocal, where people could detect directly, right down to the chemicals of the metabolism of that drug.
“But I think the public perception has not kept up with what is going on behind the scenes. As soon as testing started, drugs like nandrolone just disappeared because the breakdown cycle for a drug like that is months.
“Everyone switched to these synthetic versions of natural horomones that you can’t even test for directly. The kind of testing that’s done to catch people doping in sport is not done anywhere else in the world for any other purpose so there’s no reason for people to know what actually goes on I suppose.
Part of the reason people are looking for an edge is because the talent gap between elite athletes is almost indecipherably small. For instance, on Sunday Usain Bolt beat Justin Gatlin by 0.01 of a second. If you dropped your cup of tea celebrating the instant the Jamaican crossed the line, it would have only moved half a millimetre by the time the American finished second.
Because of that, those elite athletes disposed to cheating are looking for any tiny edge they can find and it’s one of the reasons the phrase ‘marginal gains’ has become so tainted.
“I think that’s unfortunate because there is something to be said for marginal gains when it comes to attention to detail in areas of recovery or diet and things like that,” say Epstein.
“But, for a lot of American track athletes, it’s become a code word, not necessarily just for outright doping but for getting medication they don’t necessarily need and were not on before they were elite level runners.”
But if the testing is so far behind, and the chances of getting caught so small, why is everyone not doping?
“I think some of them aren’t savvy enough but the ones who are have access to resources and to doctors and scientists and I don’t think there’s much to stop them,” he says.
“They can still fail a test, potentially, but they’d have to be unlucky. And that’s why athletes are tested over and over — the testers hope that, one time, the can just be lucky.
“I don’t think most of the athletes are on top of [doping techniques] themselves but they’re associated with doctors who are.
“Look at someone like Justin Gatlin. He never even came close to going above the threshold for the T/E screening test [a traditional method of testing for levels of testosterone above the 4-1 ratio set down by the World Anti-Doping Agencey (WADA) to allow for natural variations. Most people have a T/E ratio of 1-1.]
“It just so happened he was targeted for Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR) testing [a relatively new test that can distinguish between natural and synthetic testosterone in a way the traditional T/E test cannot] for other reasons so he got really unlucky.
“Normally, the typical athlete showing the T/E profile he did at the time would have slipped straight through the net.”
But if CIR testing is so much more effective, why is it not the standard test undertaken in WADA accredited laboratories?
“The T/E test can be done very quickly, with one person doing large amounts of them in a day, for several hundred dollars.
“The CIR test is several hundred dollars per test and it can take someone several hours just to do one and sometimes it can take even more than a day.
“People probably think that anti-doping is really well funded but it’s not. Researchers are very, very limited but they have a large public footprint. Even though WADA has been pushing the labs they accredit to do more CIR testing, the resources are so limited most can’t.
Resources, Epstein says time and time again, are crucial and admits that if anti-doping labs had enough money to perform CIR tests on every sample, it would be a “major step forward.”
On the recent leak of biological passport data that showed a significant volume of athletes were returning suspect results, Epstein says he wasn’t surprised but that athletics should not be singled out for being the only sport with a doping problem.
“The recent leak of all the biloglical passport data was pretty stunning but it really didn’t change my estimate of how many people are probably doping — 15-20%, that kind of range — and even though that means the majority of athletes are not doping, a very significant minority are.
“But you look at sports like American football where guys have increased in size by 50% in a generation and, simply because they don’t attempt to police it very much, they don’t end up with a scandal.
So it’s a catch-22 for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), by trying to catch the cheats, they risk tarnishing the reputation of the very sport they’re attempting to protect.
However, Espstein says, cheats have always and will always exist and hiding from that fact helps nobody.
“It makes me think again about the passport data being leaked. In many ways, some aspects of the IAAF’s response has been reasonable. They said ‘yes, there were a lot of suspicious tests but, because of the way testing works, many of them were false positives and because of the way testing works we just don’t know which ones.’
“That said, their defensiveness has been unbelievable to me. We’re not asking for perfection, just an awareness that this is going on and not attempting to minimise the problem. It boggles my mind when these institutions try to bury their head in the sand about it.
Today, Gatlin and Bolt go head-to-head once more in the final of the 200m (at 1.55pm) with many wondering what a win for the American would do for the sport given that Bolt was adjudged to have ‘saved it’ by beating the twice-caught doper in the 100m on Sunday.
“The fact there has been some IAAF response is good, but I don’t care what place Justin Gatlin came [on Sunday], everything is not okay and they should face up to the problem. It doesn’t matter that Bolt finished ahead of him by 0.01 seconds.
“No governing body can say ‘here we have something cataclysmic if it goes 0.01 seconds the other way but because it didn’t we can just put it off.’ That to me would just be crazy.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Epstein thinks that one potential way to reduce doping is to decrease the length of bans and encourage whistle-blowing. He admits there’s no perfect answer, however.
“People are upset with athletes getting reduced suspensions — like Tyson Gay — but the reason that’s happening is because WADA has admitted that testing will never get you all the way there. It’s an important part of the process but it’s limited so they’ve been changing rules to make it more amenable to do investigations.
“They’ve hired their own investigator for the first time ever and some of those rules offer opportunities to banned athletes in return for information on doping. That’s actually been built into the rule so it’s gravitating more towards how governments prosecute organised crime, trading lesser sentances for information.
“The second thing is that you absolutely will have false positives when testing, even with biological passports. So if you’re saying that you’re 99.9% sure that every positive is a true positive and you’re doing 10,000 tests, you’re saying you actually expect a fair number of false positives.
“So I actually think we should consider lowering the threshold a little bit but making the bans shorter. This way, people are more likely to get banned more often — if they’re screwing around — but those who are victims of false positives don’t have to sit out for two/four years.
Despite everything he has seen in his extensive research and the knowledge that there are elite level athletes winning medals this week at the World Championships who are almost certainly doping, Epstein — a collegiate athlete himself — still enjoys watching the events unfolding in Beijing.
“I do enjoy it, and it still feels very different than something like WWE which is intentionally scripted and all that kind of stuff. And even though there are a lot of people cheating, as I said, I think there are a lot of people cheating in every human endeavour in which there are large rewards.
“I’m able to enjoy it in the moment and I just expect to have some disappointments in retrospect. Occasionally something happens — like a runner who hasn’t been in the top 20 in the world in five years suddenly wins a World Championship gold medal — and I pretty much kind of write that off.
“But I still enjoy the rest of it, though always knowing there’s going to be some retrospective disappointment. It’s definitely not ideal, but for the most part knowing what I know hasn’t stopped my enjoyment of the moment, just afterwards.”
‘Every single performance would have a question mark over it if Bolt ever tests positive’
Good versus evil has no place in a race run in the shadows
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Beijing 2015 Cheating David Epstein Doping Editor's picks Justin Gatlin The Sports Gene Usain Bolt World Athletics Championships World Athletics Championships 2015