On the eve of the Beijing Games, IOC President Jacques Rogge rallied up the media to speak of many things, one of them being drug testing. "Based on the number of doping tests in Beijing, you can expect 30 to 40 positive cases,” he said.
So far, the number of positive tests is four with one more pending. A North Korean marksman lost a medal when he tested positive for beta blockers. A Vietnamese female gymnast was bounced for taking a PMS drug. A Spanish cyclist was sent packing for a positive test, and a Greek hurdler was also invited to leave and not come back.
Today, another athlete and medalist looks to be on her way out. Lyudmila Blonska of the Ukraine is likely to lose her silver heptathlon medal after a positive drug test.
Five positive tests out of more than 4,000 is nothing. But you have to add to that 39 athletes who never came to Beijing because they tested positive in pre-Olympic tests. Still, the numbers are small, and you can look at that in several ways, depending on whether you’re an optimist, pessimist or realist.
If you’re an optimist, the low number of positive tests mean that the IOC and WADA – the World Anti-Doping Agency – have caught up with the cheaters to the extent that athletes no longer are willing to take the risk of getting caught.
If you’re a pessimist, it means the chemists have invented new chemicals that WADA’s current tests can’t detect, and cheating is just as rampant as ever.
And if you’re a realist – my recommended state of being – it means some of both. There’s no question that WADA has closed the detection gap. The agency is performing blood tests now, and it’s all but impossible to slip through using such drugs as EPO, a notorious substance taken by endurance athletes to boost the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. You can even take the relatively poor showing by the scandal-plagued U.S. Track and Field Team as proof. The team’s athletes have bought into the program, and they’re not dominating the sprints as they did, meaning they’re not doping. On the other hand, the dominant Jamaicans haven’t tested positive – yet.
I’m going to assume that the chemists have been as busy as ever and have developed some drugs that slip past the testing equipment. But I can’t allow myself to wonder whether every athlete who wins in spectacular fashion is doping. If they don’t test positive, I have to assume that at worst, they’re not cheating more than anyone else who doesn’t light up the mass spectrometer. In a way, it’s a level playing field.
We’ll never get rid of drugs. These are the most competitive people on earth, and there will always be some who will do anything to win. But I’m encouraged by the number who were weeded out before the Games began and the small number who’ve been busted in Beijing.
It shows there is a deterrent effect. If there weren’t, we’d have more positive tests.
As for those who are slipping through the dragnet, there’s only one solution. Some athletes have already joined programs that call for more frequent tests and allow WADA to freeze their blood and urine samples so they can be tested in the future when better detection technology is available. The IOC has to move to require samples to be frozen and stored. That way, when a new designer drug is discovered, it can go back and re-test samples taken from medal winners and retroactively strip them of their medals if it turns out they had been cheating.
Do that, and just about all the cheating will have to stop. It’s fear of detection that stops people. Saving the samples elevates fear of detection to certainty of detection, if not now, then five or ten years from now. That’s a risk very few would be willing to take.
