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".

Pound also declared that, despite London having first class testing, he "would not expect many cases at the Olympics because if you test positive here you fail not a drugs test but an IQ test".

Without accusing anyone, there may indeed be vast differences between national drug-testing regimes. While Australia leads the way with a very high rate of testing of athletes per population, the Washington Post recently reported that Jamaica's team doctor is a member of track's governing body's anti-doping commission and that Jamaica and other Caribbean islands don't have an independent anti-doping federation like the US Anti-Doping Association.

However, the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission doping control officer Paul Wright refuted claims that the country doesn't police drug use on the basis that JADCO administers tests up to five times a day for 40 weeks during the athletic season and carries out unannounced tests.

At the end of the day, it does not really matter how extensive testing is by international federations if athletes from all countries do not implement an effective random testing program at the national level. It is simply very advantageous for an athlete to stay at home in a nation with a poor random drug-testing regime to benefit from drugs with short half-lives that clear the system in a matter of a few days.

Even WADA (see Table 4) can only have a limited impact, despite its testing having become more targeted by looking more closely at changes in performance and abnormalities in previous tests.

Rich nations and major federations can also lift their game. During July 2012, the IOC medical commission chairman Arne Ljungqvist admitted the organisation had been slow in only deciding only in May to retest around 100 samples from the 2004 Athens Olympic Games given that past samples could only be stored for eight years.

During December 2011, NBA players only agreed for the first time to allow offseason testing for performance-enhancing drugs from the start of the 2012-13 season, but only for a maximum of two tests each during its July-September break.

During July 2012, Australia's Matildas (female national soccer team) rightfully expressed anger at not being at the Olympics. With five North Korean players testing positive to anabolic steroids during the World Cup in July 2011, FIFA provided no drug testing during the Asian qualifying tournament where North Korea finished ahead of Australia.

And given my belief that transparency is necessary to analyse differences between national and international sporting federations, I am amazed that the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) has not published any information on the number of drug tests carried out on specific sports since 2005-06. I had to write to ASADA to ask for information on the number of tests for individual sports, as indicated by general information displayed in Table 5.

ASADA notes that ‘The above figures include the testing of both able bodied and disabled athletes in the sports listed.

In contrast to Table 5 which only provides general information of total tests for each sport, the UK, US and Russia all provide comprehensive details about the number of tests conducted on each sport. In the case of Russia, perhaps the best example of data provided of the three agencies, there is also a breakdown of various urine and blood tests for each sport.

And while ASADA stipulated to myself that user-pay figures are subject to confidentiality provisions and are considered commercial-in-confidence, I was amused to read a May 2011 newspaper article which disclosed that ASADA carried out almost 1000 tests on AFL players between November 2009 and October 2010, including for Human Growth Hormone and blood doping.

Simple logic, at least to myself and the few people I have asked, is that all relevant data should be available to scrutinise in regard to the number and type of tests per sport, country, and federation.

To conclude, drug-testing of sport still has some way to go despite massive improvements in recent years.

While it is reported that major pharmaceutical companies are working with anti-doping agencies by alerting them to experimental drugs that could have performance-enhancing side-effects, thus allowing WADA to develop tests before the drug is even on the market, there are already many HGH-releasing peptides on the black market not yet approved by the FDA. There is also the prospect of gene doping, which could mean genetically manipulating cells to produce more EPO or manipulating the cells that regulate muscle mass.

Despite the ongoing catch-up game, and the immense potential of biological passports to catch cheats, it is essential that every measure possible is adopted to ensure that all participating sporting federations and nations act in a similar way. Perhaps they currently still do not.