Vivid Sport October 2004

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Just say yes to drugs

by Craig Turp
October 2004

On the evening of Tuesday 14th September, Tyler Hamilton was cycling's Olympic road-race champion, leading the Tour of Spain and earning more than a million euros a year riding for the Swiss Phonak team. By Wednesday lunchtime he had been stripped of his Athens gold medal, thrown out of the Tour of Spain and dumped by his team; who said sport wasn't cruel?

Hamilton's offence was not even drug-related; not directly, anyway. Hamilton's crime was the now outlawed practice of blood-doping.

Blood doping - usually carried out at altitude - has been going on since time immemorial. It entails removing large amounts of blood from an athlete, storing it, then re-infusing the blood once the amount removed has been naturally regenerated (a process which happens quickest at altitude). This gives athletes a surplus of red blood cells and greatly increases stamina. Useless for sprinters, it is a technique that has long been employed by long-distance runners and cyclists. The practice was widespread in the former East Germany, usually amongst athletes who refused to take standard performance enhancing drugs, but who saw little wrong in blood doping, which, until recently, was frowned upon but not prohibited outright. Indeed, only recently have techniques been devised to allow sports' authorities to actually test for blood doping.

Yet such advances in technology - and an Olympian if naive wish to keep the playing field level - beg the questions as to what should and shouldn't be outlawed? Blood doping poses little or no risk to athletes who use the technique, does not involve the use of illegal substances - indeed of any substance at all except the athletes own blood - so why is it illegal?

There are bound to be cases of athletes producing abnormal amounts of red blood cells quite naturally, just as some athletes are naturally taller than others. Miguel Indurain, who won five Tours de France in the 1990s, was renowned for his abnormal lungs, which were almost a third larger than average. Should he have been disqualified for such abnormalities?

There is a wider question too: why should anything that enhances performance be outlawed? (I include performance-enhancing drugs in the question.) Athletes have long used lightweight sports shoes which are developed to suit their individual needs, to provide ankle support for some, or more purchase from terrain for others. What is the difference between performance enhancing sports shoes and performance enhancing drugs? If the authorities want to make the playing field level they have one of two options.

The first is to allow only athletes of equal size, equal blood counts, equal resting heart rate and equal lung capacity to compete against each other. The second is to bow to the inevitable and give the green light to the formal use of performance enhancing drugs.

Craig Turp is the Editor of Bucharest In Your Pocket.