Designer drugs

IT IS ironic that a word as cumbersome as tetrahydrogestrinone should be the name of a drug so easy to digest.

That the drug is so potent, however, that just a couple of drops slipped under the tongue could help make an athlete run faster, jump higher and throw further is a little more difficult to swallow.

THG, as it is known to those of us outside the chemical laboratories, is at the centre of the biggest doping scandal in sport since EPO stuck a spoke in the wheel of the Tour de France in 1998 or Ben Johnson stopped the Seoul Olympics in its tracks 10 years earlier.

And it is the newest and, to date, most powerful threat to the integrity of sporting endeavour.

Reports say more than 20 athletes who took part in the US track and field championships in June and tested negative for banned substances at the time have now tested positive for THG after officials used new methods and re-tested samples which competitors provided four months ago.

Named so far are US shot putt champion Kevin Toth, hammer thrower James McEwan and middle-distance runner Regina Jacobs. Also named has been British sprinter Dwain Chambers, the European 100-metres champion.

THG is an anabolic steroid that is, a synthetic version of the male hormone testosterone designed as much to escape the procedures of the drugs testers as to give cynical athletes a head start against their rivals by increasing muscle bulk and stamina.

It had been performing a vanishing act when urine was subjected to the normal processes that take place during laboratory drug testing.

Indeed we might still be unaware of it had it not been for Dr Don Catlin, who arrived at his laboratory at the University of California in Los Angeles one morning in June and found an unexpected package in his in-tray.

In it Catlin found a syringe containing a barely visible residue of an unrecognisable substance.

Initially confused, the doctor recalled hearing that an official at the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), an independent body which implements America's fight against drugs in sport, had received an anonymous tip-off from someone claiming to be a leading athletics coach.

The informant had talked of a new strain of designer anabolic steroid which was so powerful that athletes only had to inject themselves with a couple of drops under their tongue to boost performance.

What Catlin now unwrapped was the proof of that conspiracy.

American athletics has been dogged by rumours going back two decades of the systematic use of performance-enhancing substances; of cover-ups and official collusion.

That was blown wide apart when former US Olympic Committee anti- doping official Wade Exum revealed that all-American hero Carl Lewis, once the leader of those who condemned drug-taking on the way to winning nine gold medals in four Olympics, had failed tests for three banned substances before the 1988 Games.

Worse was to come at the World Championships in Paris in August. The US topped the medals table but that was forgotten in a wave of bad publicity as double world champion Kelli White tested positive for the stimulant modafinil.

Then it was also revealed by an American newspaper that 400 metre gold medallist Jerome Young had tested positive before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Like Lewis 12 years before him. Young had still been allowed to compete by the USOC in the 4x400 relay in Sydney, helping the US to win gold, adding to the view that the US Track and Field was still not on board.

The news last week that authorities, namely Dr Catlin and his team, had developed a test for THG has concentrated minds across the sporting world and brought USTAF firmly into line.

The IAAF is retroactively testing all samples from the world championships and the results may provide a watershed in drug- testing as important as Ben Johnson's downfall in 1988.

It was Catlin and his team of seven other scientists who developed that test, having tested and re-tested the sample sent anonymously in June until they managed to pinpoint the drug's molecular fingerprint it's code.

Dr Catlin was also aided by the fact he had a readily available batch of samples once his test had been established and scientifically validated so as to detect the drug in urine samples.

He had taken a call from USADA chief executive Terry Madden, who had asked him if he could freeze samples collected from athletes during the US championships held in Stanford a few days earlier in June.

If Catlin was on to a drug that chemists, coaches and athletes thought was undetectable, then Madden figured the odds were that competitors at the meet had been using it.

One of the most successful coaches at those championships had been Remi Korchemny, a former coach to 1972 Olympic 100m and 200m champion Valery Borzov.

Korchemny, now in his 70s, runs the KMA Track Club with Victor Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), a nutrition company based in San Francisco.

Korchemny is coach to Kelli White and Dwain Chambers, who are both members of the KMA Track Club, which was set up by Korchemny and Conte to help market BALCO's most popular product, a zinc and magnesium supplement called ZMA which since 1999 had grossed the company about $100m (85m) worldwide.

By the time Chambers joined Korchemny in Saarbrucken, Germany, at the end of July for a training camp to finalise his preparations for Paris, the sprinter was extremely confident.

And when a team of officials from the International Association of Athletics Federations, appeared on August 1 to carry out a random drugs test on the training group, Chambers thought he had nothing to fear.

He had not counted on Catlin, who had now begun testing the samples frozen by USADA's chief executive Madden.

The Los Angeles doctor was shocked at the scale of his discovery. Up to 20 of the most famous names in athletics showed traces of THG. And when the biggest sporting drugs scandal hit the newspapers this month, Dwain Chambers discovered he too was part of the revelations.

At the centre of the scandal, however, is Conte, the man behind BALCO.

Athletes who have worked with the Californian sports nutritionist have not just broken track records, they have thumped home runs and landed knockout punches.

They've also taken their performances to higher levels and often at ages when most of their rivals are easing down.

Now a cloud hangs over their achievements. The question marks appear. How much of their success was down to a new regime inspired by better exercise, training and nutrition and how much were they assisted by a designer steroid called THG?

With a US federal grand jury investigating Conte's BALCO business records, which have been seized by the Internal Revenue Service, the two cases together have dragged down some big names in sport.

Aside from Regina Jacobs and Dwain Chambers, baseball star Barry Bonds and boxer Sugar Shane Mosley, who won a controversial decision over Oscar De La Hoya in Las Vegas last month, have both been subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury.

It can hardly help the cause of those also associated with Conte.

USADA chief executive Terry Madden has called the emerging drugs scandal "international doping of the worst sort"' and has said he is "fairly certain"' BALCO and Conte are the source of the THG sent in the syringe by the anonymous coach to Dr Catlin four months ago.

Athletes who have tested positive for THG so far have some link to BALCO.

Either they are listed on its website as clients or they went to Conte for nutritional advice, bought supplements from his other company, SNAC System, or got their weight training at the gym around the corner from a trainer associated with Conte.

Conte denies being the source of the THG sample. He says he has provided nutritional advice and products to elite athletes for 20 years and points to magazine articles which have explained how these are combined with intense training.

SPORTS medicine experts like John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor and authority on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, however, say it's not credible that these training methods could be responsible for such dramatic improvements in performance.

Toth, Chambers and Jacobs, through their representatives, have denied knowingly taking THG but under the international rules governing Olympic sports of "strict liability," athletes are responsible for whatever they ingest. That hard line is a reaction to athletes in the past claiming they took supplements "contaminated" with steroids.

"There is no excuse,' World Anti-Doping Agency committee member Dr Gary Wadler said last week. "If it's in your body, we've got a problem. Supplements don't do anything anyway, so why run the risk of having something in there that not only will cost you a medal, but maybe your reputation?'

With The Olympics returning to its birthplace of Athens next year, it is not just individual reputations that are at risk. There is not a sport within the Olympic movement that does not have a cloud hanging over it in terms of the spectre of drug abuse.

And with the general public becoming increasingly cynical about their favourite sports being contested on level playing fields, there is a risk that the 2004 Olympics will be written off as a freak show for designer athletes dosed up to the eyeballs on designer drugs.

Dr Catlin and his colleagues, it seems, will not have too long to celebrate what is a significant breakthrough in the battle against the doping cheats.

Victories like this one will not always come so neatly gift-wrapped.