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Only drugs can stop the sports cheats
19 August 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Le Page

The Finnish cross-country skier Eero Mäntyranta won two gold medals in the 1964 Olympics and accumulated an impressive tally of medals during his career. Later it turned out that he has a mutation in a gene called EPOR that means he produces up to 50 per cent more red blood cells than normal.

The east African runners who dominate distance events have also been shown to have at least one genetic advantage: their lower legs are thinner and weigh on average 400 grams less than those of Danish athletes, which translates into a massive 8 per cent energy saving. Other people have distinct genetic disadvantages. For instance, 1 in 5 Europeans cannot produce the alpha-actinin-3 protein found in fast-twitch muscle fibres. Very few people with this genotype excel at power sports such as sprinting.

So much for fairness in sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency says its aim is "to protect the athletes' fundamental right to participate in doping-free sport and thus promote health, fairness, and equality for athletes worldwide". Such notions are a quaint hangover from the amateur age. Sports are inherently unfair. Genes alone do not make you a winner, of course, but some people's genes give them a massive advantage with which others struggle to compete no matter how young they start or how hard they train.

There is a way to level the playing field: allow athletes to make up for their natural disadvantages by taking performance-enhancing drugs. There is not yet a "foot growth potion" for the rivals of Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, who has size-17 feet, but an estimated 1 million Americans have already taken human growth hormone, which in the US can now be prescribed for children with "idiopathic short stature" - effectively anyone who is very short. No one knows how many average-sized people have used growth hormone to help them make the national basketball team, but would it really be fair to exclude such people as cheats when, for example, players such as Pavel Podkolzin or Sun Ming Ming owe their great height to pituitary tumours that resulted in an excess of growth hormone?

Or take the mutation that boosted Mäntyranta's red blood cell count. All athletes know that there are ways of equalling or surpassing his natural advantage: take the hormone EPO, indulge in blood doping (injecting extra red blood cells), train at high altitude or sleep in a low-oxygen tent. Only the last two are allowed, of course, but the effect is the same. So the consequence of the ban on EPO and blood doping is to give an unfair advantage to athletes who can afford to train at altitude or invest in an altitude chamber - or on cunning doctors who can help them beat drug tests.

If we were really serious about making sport fair, we would try to ensure some sort of equality in the resources athletes have access to. And when genetics becomes advanced enough, we would introduce different divisions or some kind of handicapping system based on people's inherited advantages or disadvantages. After all, people who lack a Y chromosome already compete separately from those who have one. Will it happen? Unlikely.

There is one decent argument against performance-enhancing drugs: safety. Many drugs taken by cheating athletes are dangerous, and allowing their use would force all athletes to take them to have any chance of winning. But the rules as they stand are clearly not designed with the safety of athletes in mind. A good example of this is the lack of any safety limit on the concentration of red blood cells, which beyond a certain level considerably increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Dehydration resulting from exercise makes matters even worse. Yet doping authorities allow athletes to compete no matter how high their blood cell concentration, as long as it is not due to doping. So it is fine for athletes to risk death, just as long as it is a natural death.

If these arguments do not convince you that we need to rethink the ban on drugs in sport, there is a more pragmatic one: the existing regime is not working. Clearly, many top athletes still resort to drugs. And the situation is only going to get worse. In the not too distant future, gene therapy could be used to boost the strength of muscles. The only way to detect such modifications may be to remove and test a piece of muscle. Are we really going to inflict that on athletes?

There is another way: allow the use of drugs, and have sports authorities focus on testing the health of athletes rather than their use of drugs. This is the suggestion of ethicists Julian Savulescu at the University of Oxford and Bennett Foddy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. They argue that any drugs that are safe should be permitted, whatever their effect on performance. Authorities would set a safe level for, say, red blood cell concentration, and anyone exceeding it would not be allowed to compete, whether their result was due to doping, altitude training or genetics.

Savulescu says he would prefer it if there were no drugs in sport. But the drugs are out there and they are not going to go away. So let's adopt the policy that is best for athletes and best for sport. We cannot live in fantasy land. Savulescu thinks doping authorities will have to adopt his idea sooner or later. Sooner would be better.

From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 18-19

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