February 23, 2016
Doping by Amateurs: Sport's next horizon

Fighting for an edge
The cases have come thick and fast. Britain’s junior national time trial champion Gabriel Evans, an 18-year-old from London, was recently caught using the banned blood booster EPO (Erythropoietin). He admitted taking the drug, and claimed it had become “normalised and justified” in his mind because he’d read about others regularly being caught. British Masters road race champion Andrew Hastings was handed a four-year ban after testing positive for two anabolic steroids. He claimed that the failed test came after he borrowed a used syringe to take a vitamin supplement.Testing the limits
The fear must be that this is only the start of something bigger in cycling and other amateur sports. Unsurprisingly perhaps it looks like it may be an emerging crisis in Ironman triathlon competitions – a sport where you must swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles, and then run a marathon. Danish competitor Thomas Lawaetz,was banned for four years after he admitted EPO use. And a survey of 3,000 Ironman triathletes showed that around 20% admitted doping.Force of the law
While the French and Danish governments have laws against doping in lower-level sport, it is not an approach widely supported by other countries. And so responsibility and costs fall on cash-strapped sports agencies who have other funding priorities. A recent study of US cycling highlighted the challenges involved in addressing this problem. The rising popularity of competitive amateurs, especially in endurance sports, means that doping is more than simply challenge to ideas of sporting purity and the ideal of noble Corinthian endeavour. It also poses serious dangers to the health of athletes tempted to dabble. Weekend competitors are unlikely to find expert “doping doctors” like those who helped Armstrong and his team-mates to manage their doping regime. Risks of over-use, sharing needles and contaminated products are significant. EPO has been tentatively linked to several deaths, although without any conclusive proof. It works by releasing more oxygen-carrying red blood cells which “thicken the blood” and force the heart to work harder. Anecdotes from cycling’s darkest days tell of riders setting alarm clocks through the night so they could wake up periodically to train, and to make sure their own congealed blood didn’t kill them while they slept. More and more, amateur competitors are prepared to spend thousands of pounds on equipment, invest 10-15 hours a week training, spend their holidays on training camps, and pay for personal coaches. It’s no great leap to seeing doping as just another opportunity for improvement. They may not be doing it for money – it seems pride and social status, and perhaps even just curiosity – are motivating principles. The paradoxical twist here is that if testing does get ramped up, then the open secret will disappear into the shadows, increasing the health risks as it goes. UK Anti-Doping chief Nicole Sapstead admitted to the Daily Telegraph that she can only guess at the scale of the problem, and has little money available to tackle it. UKAD relies instead on tip-offs and close monitoring of social media to spot potential dopers. It looks like a humble operation amid the scandals of corrupt sports leaders, cover-ups and organised doping in Russia, which symbolise crisis at the highest level of world sport. The attention afforded these situations arguably detracts from a much wider potential public health issue, as yet unacknowledged and without obvious solutions. By defining doping as a part of elite sport, amateur doping falls between the cracks of responsibility, allowing unregulated doping cultures to grow where medical oversight and advice is least able to intervene.Amateur doping shaping up to be sport’s latest test