Protecting athletes from their worst enemies - themselves

A mild sense of fright set in when Professor Joseph McKenna flicked to his next slide at the Sport Against Drugs convention in Dublin this weekend.

"Now here is a picture of a woman who shaves daily and has permanent stubble. As you see around the temples, she also has a receding hairline. Other side affects are stunted growth, clots forming in veins, jaundice and liver tumours," he said.

Welcome to sport in the new millennium. Nothing new really, merely experts emphasising again what athletes will do for sporting glory. Cheating and self-destruction were to the fore over the weekend.

Steroid stacking explained the woman's masculinisation. That is, taking such extreme amounts of testosterone that even if doctors wished to carry out tests on volunteers in a clinical trial, the doses would exceed levels that were ethical. In the laboratory they draw the line at issuing 10 times the normal levels for studies. For a gold medal some athletes may increase their levels by 100 fold. "Androgens do enhance performance," said Professor McKenna, "but it is costly."

In a practical sense the talks organised by the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) were geared towards protecting athletes from themselves. Dr Wade Exum, who took on the Minister for Tourism and Sport, Dr Jim McDaid, over the issues of the criminalisation of athletes and blood testing, argued that athletes are victims as much as anyone. Compulsion, dependence, denial. Trigger words to explain people rather than to demonise them.

"Athlete drug users mirror the characteristics of addiction," argued Exum, director of the US Olympic Council drug programme. Using stills of the catastrophic space shuttle launch which killed seven people and background music of the song I believe I can fly, Exum darkly declared: "There are athletes who would chose to board a doomed flight. It is considered a fact of life to use drugs in some sports. . . blood testing is seen as a panacea. It's not. If something is in the urine, it is also in the blood. Sure it's possible to detect things like EPO and HGH in the urine. Why not?"

Illustrating a healthy divergence of opinion, Professor Cowan from the International Olympic Council-accredited laboratory in London said that blood testing was inevitable and necessary. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1979 a pharmaceutical company called Jena were found to be manufacturing a hormone cocktail of testosterone and epitestosterone that would not be detected in urine testing. There was no physiological reason for the existence of the product except to be used by athletes to cheat in sport.

Since then, state-sponsored corruption has been exposed (there are still questions about China) and the feeling is that with tests now being developed for the current drugs of choice, EPO and HGH, the scientists are gaining ground.

Money is the principal obstacle to detecting the use of the 128 drugs in 12 categories that are currently on the banned list.

"To set up the lab in Malaysia for the Commonwealth Games was between £4 and £5 million. It would cost another £250,000 to £500,000 each year to run it," said Cowan, whose London laboratory carries out 5,000 tests each year. "A pharmaceutical company would think nothing of spending £10 million and knocking the project on the head. Without money what can we do?"

Another issue for debate at the weekend was the number of lawyers now being sucked into the process. "We need to have greater standards of proof to ban an athlete from their sport than courts would look for to put a person in prison," Cowan told the convention.