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Samples in freezers leave dope cheats in the cold
May 7, 2009
Associated Press
PARIS (AP) -- Justice, it turns out, can be cheap. A shade over $29,000 a year.
That's the running cost for the "Tank," a grand-sounding name for what is really a row of industrial freezers where Australia's anti-doping agency stores drug-test samples it has collected from athletes: thousands of them, ready to be defrosted and subjected to the latest cheat-catching science, should the need arise.
If the idea of keeping frozen blood and urine sounds weird, it makes perfect sense to Mehdi Baala. The French middle-distance runner could now, belatedly, get an Olympic bronze medal thanks to drug testers at the International Olympic Committee who, like the Australians, have the good sense to keep samples they collect on ice.
After Placido Domingo and David Beckham's star turns at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony last August, suspicions arose that some athletes at the games may have been doping with a new endurance-booster, CERA. So, armed with a new test for the banned hormone, the IOC defrosted 847 Olympic blood samples this January and put them through the wringer again.
Bingo. Six Olympians tested positive, the IOC announced last week.
One of them is Rashid Ramzi, a Moroccan-born runner who now competes for wealthy Bahrain. He won the 1,500 meters. Baala crossed the line fourth on that balmy Beijing night, just five agonizing hundredths of a second from the bronze. Exhausted and crushed, Baala collapsed onto his back, his right leg sprawled over a track-side tray of flowers.
This story would have ended there without the IOC's freezers. Now, Ramzi could forfeit his gold if a follow-up test of his thawed-out samples confirms his positive result. Disqualification of Ramzi would lift Baala to third place. The cold metal of a medal can never fully substitute for the warm, lifelong memories -- not to mention the likely sponsorship deals -- that Baala might have enjoyed had he stood on the podium in Beijing.
But it's a start.
"I'll be able to show it to my kids, to my grandkids and wear it around my neck," the French runner says. "Justice has been rendered."
Listening to Baala's joy, tinged with sadness that he may have been robbed, one wonders why the long-term freezing of samples for possible later testing isn't applied universally.
Starting with the 2004 Athens Olympics, the IOC has squirreled away all of its samples -- nearly 4,800 of them from Beijing alone. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the Australians and the IAAF, which governs track and field, do so selectively, too. But others do not. Samples from the Tour de France, for example, are mostly destroyed after 3 months, although France's anti-doping agency says it is now reconsidering that policy.
Costs and the space that frozen samples take up are among reasons cited by the reluctant bodies. Some also doubt whether storing samples for years is cost-effective and, if retested long afterward, whether the results would hold up against litigation.
But if fighting doping is an all-out war, then surely all weapons should be used. The costs seem small when compared against the millions of dollars sloshing around in sport. Jamaican sprint star Usain Bolt can charge appearance fees far greater than it costs to operate the Australian storage facility, which is considered among the best, for a whole year.
Currently, doping agencies and sports organizers decide how long to keep samples. The minimum under World Anti-Doping Agency rules is three months, the maximum eight years.
Given the IOC's latest success, making long-term storage mandatory would make sense. WADA's director general wants discussions on that possibility and plans to raise it when the agency's executive committee meets next weekend.
Had sample-storage been around when Marion Jones was competing crooked then it is likely that she would be have been run out of track and field as early as 2003, instead of four years later, when the now-disgraced sprint star admitted what dope testers were never able to prove: that she cheated.
USADA contacted labs internationally to see if any had kept some of Jones' samples, so they could be tested again in 2003 for the previously undetectable steroid THG, one of the drugs that Jones and others used.
"We didn't find any samples," says USADA's CEO, Travis Tygart.
So Jones was free to continue competing.
USADA subsequently started freezing samples from 2004. Australia's facility was launched in 2007. Sample-storage is "an incredibly cost-effective way of providing a significant deterrent," says Richard Ings, who heads Australia's anti-doping agency.
"The days of relying on one-off tests to catch doping athletes are long gone," he says. "This is the way of the future."
May 7, 2009
Associated Press
PARIS (AP) -- Justice, it turns out, can be cheap. A shade over $29,000 a year.
That's the running cost for the "Tank," a grand-sounding name for what is really a row of industrial freezers where Australia's anti-doping agency stores drug-test samples it has collected from athletes: thousands of them, ready to be defrosted and subjected to the latest cheat-catching science, should the need arise.
If the idea of keeping frozen blood and urine sounds weird, it makes perfect sense to Mehdi Baala. The French middle-distance runner could now, belatedly, get an Olympic bronze medal thanks to drug testers at the International Olympic Committee who, like the Australians, have the good sense to keep samples they collect on ice.
After Placido Domingo and David Beckham's star turns at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony last August, suspicions arose that some athletes at the games may have been doping with a new endurance-booster, CERA. So, armed with a new test for the banned hormone, the IOC defrosted 847 Olympic blood samples this January and put them through the wringer again.
Bingo. Six Olympians tested positive, the IOC announced last week.
One of them is Rashid Ramzi, a Moroccan-born runner who now competes for wealthy Bahrain. He won the 1,500 meters. Baala crossed the line fourth on that balmy Beijing night, just five agonizing hundredths of a second from the bronze. Exhausted and crushed, Baala collapsed onto his back, his right leg sprawled over a track-side tray of flowers.
This story would have ended there without the IOC's freezers. Now, Ramzi could forfeit his gold if a follow-up test of his thawed-out samples confirms his positive result. Disqualification of Ramzi would lift Baala to third place. The cold metal of a medal can never fully substitute for the warm, lifelong memories -- not to mention the likely sponsorship deals -- that Baala might have enjoyed had he stood on the podium in Beijing.
But it's a start.
"I'll be able to show it to my kids, to my grandkids and wear it around my neck," the French runner says. "Justice has been rendered."
Listening to Baala's joy, tinged with sadness that he may have been robbed, one wonders why the long-term freezing of samples for possible later testing isn't applied universally.
Starting with the 2004 Athens Olympics, the IOC has squirreled away all of its samples -- nearly 4,800 of them from Beijing alone. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the Australians and the IAAF, which governs track and field, do so selectively, too. But others do not. Samples from the Tour de France, for example, are mostly destroyed after 3 months, although France's anti-doping agency says it is now reconsidering that policy.
Costs and the space that frozen samples take up are among reasons cited by the reluctant bodies. Some also doubt whether storing samples for years is cost-effective and, if retested long afterward, whether the results would hold up against litigation.
But if fighting doping is an all-out war, then surely all weapons should be used. The costs seem small when compared against the millions of dollars sloshing around in sport. Jamaican sprint star Usain Bolt can charge appearance fees far greater than it costs to operate the Australian storage facility, which is considered among the best, for a whole year.
Currently, doping agencies and sports organizers decide how long to keep samples. The minimum under World Anti-Doping Agency rules is three months, the maximum eight years.
Given the IOC's latest success, making long-term storage mandatory would make sense. WADA's director general wants discussions on that possibility and plans to raise it when the agency's executive committee meets next weekend.
Had sample-storage been around when Marion Jones was competing crooked then it is likely that she would be have been run out of track and field as early as 2003, instead of four years later, when the now-disgraced sprint star admitted what dope testers were never able to prove: that she cheated.
USADA contacted labs internationally to see if any had kept some of Jones' samples, so they could be tested again in 2003 for the previously undetectable steroid THG, one of the drugs that Jones and others used.
"We didn't find any samples," says USADA's CEO, Travis Tygart.
So Jones was free to continue competing.
USADA subsequently started freezing samples from 2004. Australia's facility was launched in 2007. Sample-storage is "an incredibly cost-effective way of providing a significant deterrent," says Richard Ings, who heads Australia's anti-doping agency.
"The days of relying on one-off tests to catch doping athletes are long gone," he says. "This is the way of the future."