THE 2006 Winter Olympics begin this Friday, but don鈥檛 be fooled into thinking the athletes are competing on talent alone. Researchers working on ways to detect performance-enhancing drugs announced last week that they believe almost all of today鈥檚 competitors could have taken such pills or potions at some point in their careers (see 鈥淗ormone cheats risk it all for gold鈥�).
The possibility presents a huge challenge to those whose job is to catch the cheats. There are reliable tests for certain performance-enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids and synthetic growth hormone. But there is as yet no way of spotting many others. These include designer steroids, growth hormone obtained from human cadavers, and the growth factor IGF-1, which boosts bone marrow.
It鈥檚 about to get worse. At a recent trial in Germany, evidence emerged of an illegal market in Repoxygen, a form of gene therapy that supposedly increases the flow of oxygen to muscles. Though the technique is unproven, such 鈥済ene doping鈥� opens up a new frontier in the drugs war, potentially offering athletes myriad subtle ways to reshape their physiology. Detecting existing performance-enhancing drugs can be hard enough; spotting gene doping will be a nightmare.
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What should the testers do? They are engaged in a race with the cheats 鈥� and the cheats are winning. That doesn鈥檛 mean the researchers should give up. Blood and urine samples can be kept for years, and if a test is one day developed for an enhancement that is now undetectable, any cheats could be punished retrospectively. A level playing field may seem an idealistic dream, but it is still a dream worth chasing.
