Whereabouts

The word Whereabouts has become the common descriptive term covering the current debate raging within the sports community over drug testing. The topic came up again during the recent Twin Cities Mile press conference.

TC Mile women's race winner, Shannon Rowbury, detailed the requirements for track athletes to keep their country or region's testing agency aware of their Whereabouts, where they can be found in case the agency wants to test them. The WADA code, which sets the standards for sport drug testing for Olympic sports, requires that athletes provide this information so that no notice, out-of-competition(OOC) testing can be done. The code is updated periodically.

The latest update took effect on January 1 of this year and, for the first time, covered every Olympic sport and the countries that are signatories to the UNESCO treaty on anti-doping. The requirements for Whereabouts resulted in a lawsuit by a group of athletes in Belgium, a report on whether or not the code was deemed to be in violation of European Union(EU) laws, a FIFA(the governing body for soccer) declaration that they could not adhere to the code as written, and howls of protest from some athletes. The unstated fact that was not mentioned in this discussion is that the new WADA code is actually less stringent than rules and regulations in place in many sports and by many testing agencies prior to this year.

Olympic athletes in the US, for example, have always had to adhere to the 24/7, 365 days a year Whereabouts notification. At one time, they could be tested at any time. That was relaxed so that testers would not show up at an athletes door in the middle of the night, as neither the athletes nor the testers particularly wanted to be doing bodily fluid collections at three o'clock in the morning. The rationale behind this seemingly onerous obligation for athletes is that many drugs that enhance performance are "training" drugs. They assist an athlete in recovering from workouts and allow them to do more heavy training.

Since the 1970s, Olympic drug testers have insisted that no notice, OOC testing is a key to deterring drug use among athletes. One of the pioneers in Olympic drug testing, the late Manfred Donike, who ran the Cologne laboratory in Germany that helped develop testing for substances, such as anabolic steroids, campaigned back then for testing out of competition. It was nearly 20 years before any groups implemented any out of competition testing, and the disparity between how much such testing is done the various countries is often cited as a rationale many athletes used to justify doping.

The "Everybody is doing it" mantra is reinforced when athletes from the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries with full-functioning testing agencies observe that athletes from other nations are seldom tested. One of the missions of WADA is to close these "loopholes" in the system, to create a uniform standard that strives to expose all athletes to equal scrutiny from sports drug testers. In most sports many athletes suspect that their opponents are trying to get "an edge" any way they can.

One of the reason's WADA was formed nearly ten years ago was to attempt to change the perception that sports federations and some country's sports governing bodies were actively aiding athletes wanting to get that edge. The revelations of how things operated in the GDR reinforced this mistrust between countries when it was shown that there existed a state run doping program in what was "East Germany." As many former GDR athletes have admitted, they did what they did because they believed the US and other countries were doing it too.

A story that illustrates this happened at an Olympics in the 1970s. An athlete from the US and an athlete from an Eastern Bloc nation were talking before the competition. They openly compared the drug regimen each was taking. They concluded that each was using pretty much the same stuff, and they had no qualms that the other had any unfair advantage. One won the gold, the other the silver medal. A prominent exercise physiologist told of tests done in his lab on Olympic team strength athletes in the 1980s. They all were using steroids, he said.

The athletics company Nike started an track team, Athletics West, in the 1980s with the express purpose of being the US version of the GDR system, which was then touting it's ability to use science to identify and train genetically gifted individuals for sport. One of the coaches for AW openly admits that information on steroids was given to the athletes because they knew the athletes were at least considering taking them and that they wanted the athletes to be able to make an informed decision about the risks and benefits of performance enhancing drug use.

It wasn't until after the Pan American Games of 1983 drug scandal and revelations about how the USOC had done "informational" pre testing of athletes prior to the 1984 Games that anything apart from testing at competitions began to be considered. A smattering of out of competition testing began prior to the Seoul Olympics in 1988, and after Ben Johnson was caught there, the movement toward a more comprehensive, year-round testing process began to gain momentum.

In fear of further doping scandals, many of the international sporting federations resisted such programs or, if they allowed them, tightly controlled them arousing much suspicion that potentially embarrassing positive test results were manipulated and/or "covered up." Positive tests were not punished because the use of a banned substance was deemed to be "inadvertent" or accidental by the governing organization. Appeals panels exonerated athletes on arguments that would defy explanation in hearings held behind closed doors.

Rules for doping were filled with loopholes and ways for athletes to avoid punishment. Dorian Lambelet Coleman, who helped draft a new set of doping regulations for the US track governing body in 1993, commented at the time that the existing rules appeared to be written either by people who were not very smart or who didn't want to catch anybody. Athletes were also very enterprising in attempting to avoid sanctions.

One, at a time when it was possible for athletes to handle their B samples during the confirmation process for a doping violation, pretended to drop the B sample bottle containing his urine. It bounced on the floor, but didn't break. He picked it up and threw it against the wall. It shattered. There was no rule that applied to intentional destruction of a B sample, but there was a rule that a test result could only be declared positive if the A and B sample were positive for drugs.

This athlete did not go free, said Ollan Cassell, the head of the US federation at the time. He was sanctioned under another section of the organization's rules governing conduct, a lesser charge than a doping offense. Drug testing has had to evolve to meet many legal and scientific hurdles. Kathy Presnal, who ran the drug testing program back then, noted that she never saw a clear cut doping case that went to appeal. There was always some "technicality" or issue that could leave room for doubt in obtaining a conviction.

This same issue remains with Whereabouts. The EU and WADA are looking at the code to determine if it is in compliance with EU privacy laws, among other things. Dick Pound, the former president of WADA, defended the stringent out of competition testing requirements by declaring that it wasn't a "right" to participate in sport, that athletes had obligations, requirements they must fulfill to be able to compete. Chuck Yesalis, an epidemiologist who has followed sports drug testing issues nearly since their inception, cringes at the code requirements.

He agrees with the EU judgment that they are in violation of privacy rights and others. If a system has to trample basic constitutional rights to be effective, how is that a valid system? he asks. Aren't we giving up more than we are getting? The question not being asked or answered is why can't the science meet the demands of effective OOC testing in a manner that doesn't appear to infringe on individual rights?

Part of the answer to that might be in the way the sports doping lab system has evolved. There was never a plan or a blueprint for how to develop an effective system. Drug testing labs grew out of the need for a testing lab near the site of each Olympics. They weren't selected for their scientific expertise, their research capability, or their role in creating a unified system to meet the various obligations and functions of a global sports drug testing system.

What has grown out of this randomly blossoming network of sports testing labs has been a collection of dedicated scientists attempting to stem the growth of a burgeoning industry that aids in the production and distribution of performance enhancing substances. The BALCO lab was one example of the "industry" the testing labs are fighting, but a bad one. They got caught.

Thee 30+ WADA-certified labs compete for the limited research funds, attempt to grapple with the myriad of challenges of detecting an ever widening array of products, and meet the legal obligations of defending their results before appeals panels.

As has been the case all through the process of the evolving drug testing system in sports, the science, economics, and logistics of a hopefully effective program have held a backseat to the politics surrounding the issue. Control is more important to the various "stakeholders" than the results. The discussions about this topic do not focus so much on solutions as to the vested interests of the combatants.

FIFA complains because it wants control over drug testing of its athletes. Yesalis has an illustration of how far this control goes as he tells the story of another sports body that was faced with news of a drug bust on one of its athletes. The sports body sent a "Swat" team to investigate the issue, not to discover how the athlete cheated or where the drugs came from, but rather to put a "lid" on the publicity surrounding the publicity over the drug bust. There interest was not to investigate the problem, but rather to limit its potential damage to their product.

Rowbury made another familiar plea at the TC press conference. Why, she asked, doesn't USADA or USATF help the athletes with the issue of supplements? While the testing labs have shown in studies that contamination of supplements is not uncommon, there has been little effort to protect the athletes from the threat of consuming a banned substance in a supplement deemed to be "safe." Yes, it's unrealistic for a sports organization to attempt to regulate the supplement industry, but there should be a way for athletes to avoid the fear of being banned for ingesting a seemingly "safe" substance.

Athletes are "stakeholders" too. Much lip service is given to the belief that most athletes want to compete "clean," play fair. Yet, the history of sport is littered with tales of the marginalization of athlete input. Is Rowbury being a bit paranoid in thinking that nothing has been done on the issue of supplements? Yes, but when an athlete is told that they are responsible for whatever they put in their body and that "strict liability" provides the system no ability to differentiate between an athlete attempting to "game" the system and one who simply has made an innocent or tragic mistake on something they ate, then there are trust and communication issues.

The pro sport model of unionization creates the battle of labor(athletes) against management(owners) and certainly doesn't work in the drug testing area. Olympic sport has chosen the representational model where former and/or current athletes are granted a seat at the table, but little influence in decision making.

To be fair, most athletes aren't well equipped for the politics that are the lifeblood of sports governance. Compromise is not the forte of a competitive athlete. Most athletes don't have the time or skills to work with sports administrators on sports governance while they are competing. And, until recently, there have been few really good advocates for athletes' issues in positions to lobby effectively within the sports organizations.

The result is a system that adopts rules that make good talking points in debates about drug use in sports, but that ultimately do more to foster athletes attempting to beat the system, rather than play within it. WADA has done more than the organizations that preceded it in attempting to listen to all the stakeholders in the process, but it can do more. Whereabouts seems like a simple problem to fix, but it's not.

It's trying to mesh the law, politics, science, and human behavior into a workable process that protects clean athletes and punishes those who dope. Just like climbing out the current economic situation, the issues being argued over won't have easy solutions that are quickly adopted. It's going to be a gradual process, and not one that is furthered much by various interest groups trashing each other in the media. Dr. Don Catlin, who ran the drug testing lab at UCLA and now runs the only full-time independent research organization into sports doping issues, characterized it back in the late 1980s, it's like cold war politics.

Both sides distrust one another. Neither sees an advantage in working with one another. Those barriers need to be broken down. Common threads need to be woven, the barriers to trust chipped away. Then, at least, there will be a chance for success in the battle to contain sports doping.