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From the page: "Banning performance-enhancing drugs neither ensures fair play nor protects athletes' health


By Peter McKnight, Vancouver SunFebruary 16, 2010



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Juan Antonio Samaranch (right), the former president of the IOC, watches the men's 1,500-metre short track semifinals at Pacific Coliseum on Saturday. Samaranch has proposed rescinding the ban on performance-enhancing drugs while strengthening the emphasis on athletes' health.

Juan Antonio Samaranch (right), the former president of the IOC, watches the men's 1,500-metre short track semifinals at Pacific Coliseum on Saturday. Samaranch has proposed rescinding the ban on performance-enhancing drugs while strengthening the emphasis on athletes' health.
Photograph by: Cameron Spencer, Getty Images, Vancouver Sun

The Olympics have a drug problem. And it doesn't have anything to do with the more than 30 athletes who were prevented from competing in the 2010 Winter Games because of doping violations.

No, the problem is the World Anti-Doping Agency's approach to the use of performance-enhancing (ergogenic) drugs. WADA maintains that a ban on ergogenic substances is necessary to protect athletes' health and to ensure fair play. The trouble, however, is that the ban does neither.

The agency does not, for example, prevent athletes with unusually high levels of ergogenic substances in their bodies from competing, provided those levels are the result of a natural condition. Yet such conditions can give an athlete a distinct advantage, and place his or her health in jeopardy.

For instance, Finnish cross-country skier Eero Mantyranta, a double gold medallist at the 1964 Olympics, "suffered" from a genetic condition that resulted in his body producing excess amounts of erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that stimulates production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.

This, obviously, is a tremendous advantage for a cross-country skier, and calls into question the fairness of allowing genetic "freaks" to compete against the rest of the population. But the advantage comes at a price: If the percentage of red blood cells -- the "packed cell volume," or PCV -- becomes too high, the risk of stroke increases significantly.

Still, given the benefits of erythropoietin, cross-country skiers and some other endurance athletes have tried to increase their own production of the hormone by training at altitude, sleeping in "hypoxic" tents to simulate altitude and injecting recombinant EPO.

Now, from the perspective of performance enhancement and an athlete's health, it makes no difference what method is used to elevate erythropoietin. Yet while banning injectable EPO, the anti-doping agency, after considerable discussion, decided to continue allowing the use of hypoxic chambers even though -- and the agency admitted this -- they are performance-enhancing and can lead to serious health problems.

WADA's concern, then, seems to be with how an athlete achieves an elevated EPO level, rather than with the level itself. This means the agency ban preserves neither health nor fairness.

There is, fortunately, a simple solution to this problem, and that is to rescind the ban on ergogenic drugs, but retain -- in fact, strengthen -- the emphasis on athletes' health. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former president of the International Olympic Committee, first proposed this in 1998.

Samaranch was pilloried for his suggestion, but it was right. Now, several high-profile figures are championing the idea, including physician-philosopher Julian Savulescu, director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. Savulescu argues that athletes should be permitted to take any substance, but only if it is safe to do so. But athletes would be prevented from competing if it would be unhealthy to do so, even if they had not taken any drugs.

Savulescu's program would permit athletes to inject EPO, but would bar from competing any athlete with a dangerously high PCV, whether the result of injecting EPO, of sleeping in a hypoxic tent or of a genetic condition.

The emphasis, then, would be on testing for athletes' health, not for drugs. The program would also lead to greater fairness, since athletes could level the EPO playing field.

Needless to say, WADA is uncomfortable with this idea. Yet while not endorsing the idea in words, it has in action: In 2003, the agency removed caffeine from its banned list because, while recognizing its potentially ergogenic effect, WADA didn't consider the stimulant dangerous.

That's a start. If the agency is truly committed to protecting athletes' health, it will finish what it started.

pmcknight@vancouversun.com
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