Drug abuse very intricate

Abusing dope to enhance performance in sports is becoming more intricate and complicated, experts have said.

The picture becomes even more grim when the experts say categorically that combating the menace is an exercise in futility.

Contrary to popular belief that athletes are the only perpetrators, other parties around the athletes are just as culpable.

There is a deeply-entrenched web of conspirators that include coaches, federation officials, industrialists and, yes, even Governments.

Robert Armstrong, who was the Counsel to the Dubin Commission which was established in Canada following the disqualification of Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics wrote:

“until the Dubin Inquiry...the focus (in doping cases) was always on the athlete. When an athlete tested positive he or she received the assigned penalty and that was the end of the matter, both at the domestic level and with a few exceptions at the international level. No effort was made to ascertain if others were involved. The obvious people - coaches, doctors, trainers - were simply ignored.”

An assistant professor from the University of Paderborn, Germany, Giselher Spitzer, told Play-the-Game World Conference in Copenhagen last month that the former East Germany was decades ahead regarding knowledge and use of doping.

This, he said, left a sad trail of both dead juniors and crippled athletes.

“Today, East Germany is of course part of the united Germany, but despite an effective doping control in the country, part of the old East German system has survived. Some of the 5000 employees in the East German doping system today work with top athletes in other countries, or they hold influential posts within sport,” he said.

The secret doping system in East Germany was huge. All children were screened for talent, and every year 10,000 were selected for special sports schools. The system employed 4700 professional trainers, 1000 doctors, 5000 administrators and 1500 active in doping research.

“GDR athletes were a kind of civil soldiers, they were well paid, extremely controlled and bound to silence,” said Spitzer. From a political point of view there was an explicit wish that East Germany won as many medals as possible, and this was taken literally. Every year approximately 10 kilos or 2 million tablets of anabolic steroids were handed out to top athletes. Around 25 per cent of the medicine was given on an experimental basis.

“Today it is believed that 10,000 athletes have physical damages because of the system. But it also reaches into the next generation with foetal damages,” Spitzer said.

Most adult athletes knew about the doping, but the children probably did not. “It was a system where it was impossible to say no. The sports associations regulated the doses and wrote the manuals, and the politicians expected the foremost results,” Spitzer said.

Italian doping expert Allesandro Donati, who heads Italian Olympic Committee (Coni) research department, identifies the people heavily involved in the trade as: managers and coaches of gymnasiums, athletes, prostitutes, university students, people with criminal records, bouncers at discos, male nurses in hospitals, producers of food supplements, policemen and chemists.

Others involved are fashion designers, industrial managers, dental technicians, electronic engineers and politicians.

A widespread investigation was carried out over the whole Italian national territory on illicit traffic of doping substances in 2000.

So how do coaches and athletes find access to these life threatening substances?

Detective Inspector Gunnar Hermansson of the Swedish National Criminal Intelligence Service, Drugs Unit, said smuggling of anabolic steroids and other related hormone substances is big business but not a big crime in most parts of the world.

“It is possible to buy this kind of pharmaceuticals without prescriptions in most countries in Asia, Africa and in South America.

“Even in Europe, in some Mediterranean countries, it is no problem to find pharmacists selling anabolic steroids and testosterone products in large qualities directly to private persons without questions,” Hermansson said.

This illegal drug trade is extensive and lucrative all over the world but, unlike smuggling of narcotic drugs, very few countries interfere in the illegal doping trade. Hermansson said only the four Nordic countries - Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland - implemented special legislation 10 years ago criminalising dealing with anabolic steroids, testosterone and growth hormones.

Ivan Waddington of the Centre for Research into Sport and Society, University of Leicester, UK , says state-sponsored systematic doping was not confined to the old communist bloc.

“Almost equally infamous is the involvement of Dr John Ziegler, the team physician to the US weightlifting team in the 1950s, who played a central role in the early development of anabolic steroids and in their diffusion among American weight lifters and, subsequently, other athletes,” Waddington told Play-The-Game conference.

“The central role of Ziegler in this process was recognised, with wonderful irony, in the name of a California-based business which supplied athletes with steroids by mail order; the company was called the John Ziegler Fan Club.

The Dubin Commission provided perhaps the clearest picture of the network of relationships between doctors, athletes and coaches in relation to doping.

The Canadian sprinter Angela Issakenko testified to the Commission that she obtained her first prescription for Dianabol - the steroid which, incidentally, Dr Ziegler had helped to develop - from Dr Gunther Koch, a physician practising in Toronto in 1979.

In 1983, she went to a different drug programme following the visit to Dr Robert Kerr in San Gabriel, California, while from the autumn of 1983 until 1988, her drug programme was supervised by Dr Jamie Astaphan, who also supervised the drug programme of Ben Johnson.

That is how complicated the trade if performance-enhancing drugs has become.

Governments hold the key to stamping this vice but if they are accused of seeking to win Olympic medals by hook or crook one can not help agreeing with sceptics of the total liberation of subterfuge in sport.