Is the current sports drug-testing regime fair?

Many national and international sporting federations today are indeed very determined to eradicate the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Testing now includes biological passports which involve measuring and monitoring an athlete's blood variables over time and establishing an individual longitudinal profile. This approach is much more effective in regard to catching athletes using synthetic versions of testosterone, erythropoietin (EPO) and human growth hormone (HGH), natural hormones of the body.

Just recently, biological passport analysis caught three elite athletes from the 2011 International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) World Championships: Inna Eftimova (Bulgaria) tested positive for synthetic Growth Hormone, while the samples of Nataliya Tobias (Ukraine) and Antonina Yefremova, (Ukraine) both contained traces of synthetic testosterone.

Six other athletes were also caught recently through biological passport analysis with four of them already admitting guilt: Abderrahim Goumri (Morocco), Iríni Kokkinaríou (Greece), Meryem Erdogan (Turkey), Svetlana Klyuka (Russia), Nailiya Yulamanova (Russia) and Yevgenina Zinurova (Russia).

There is also a new test for CERA, or continuous erythropoietin receptor activator, developed to treat anemia caused by kidney disease, which has resulted in a handful of users being caught, including the 2008 Olympic Games 1,500 meter gold medalist Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain.

As table 1, 2 & 3 illustrate (WADA and IAAF data), one can see the enormous effort towards catching drug cheats through many thousands of drug tests, although total numbers fell in 2010.

Table 1: Number of samples analysed by all accredited laboratories around world & adverse findings as percentage of such tests, excluding those tests which may be allowed for therapeutic purposes

But there is still a long way to go given immense differences between nations in terms of testing regimes, despite the potential of biological passports and the UNESCO International Convention against Doping in Sport being adopted by 191 governments at the UNESCO General Conference in October 2005.

According to Dick Pound, the former chief of WADA, only a few drugs cheats were likely to be caught at the 2012 London Olympics with his estimate that around 10 per cent of athletes were still likely to be benefiting from drugs.

Pound also suggested that Jamaican athletes, who have dominated the sprint events at the London Olympics, should expect more visits by drugs testers. When asked by Reuters Television whether he was happy with the way Jamaica tested its athletes events, Pound stated "No, they are one of the groups that are hard to test, it is (hard) to get in and find them and so forth".