Over the past few weeks, even before the torch was lit, dozens of athletes from around the world have tested positive for banned drugs and have been barred from the Beijing Olympics.
Sports officials say this shows their new anti-drug attack is working. "The gap between regulators and cheaters has narrowed, and it will continue to narrow," says David Howman, director of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the international organization that oversees drug testing for the Olympics.
WADA and the International Olympic Committee will perform more than 4,500 doping tests during the Olympics, almost 1,000 more than four years ago. The IOC's Beijing lab operates around the clock with 180 scientists and staffers. It has added two new tests for human growth hormone and erythropoietin, two previously undetectable drugs that by most accounts have been widely used by elite athletes.
Still, that may not be enough.
Many knowledgeable observers say that cheating remains rampant, and that athletes, coaches, and trainers - as well as the doctors and scientists they work with - have found new ways to outmaneuver existing tests, and have developed new doping technologies for which no tests exist. The competition in Beijing, they say, will feature hundreds, perhaps thousands, of athletes who have eluded WADA's chemical dragnet.
"They're ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand," Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale says of WADA and other agencies that oversee testing. A Toronto sports medicine specialist who has decades of experience working with elite athletes, he estimates that more than a third of the 11,000 Olympians in Beijing have used a banned substance in the year or so leading up to the Olympics.
He and others say that many key tests have severe limitations. Take, for instance, the test for human growth hormone (HGH): It can only detect the substance in the 24 to 48 hours after the drug is injected. To avoid a positive test, an athlete simply has to stop injections a few days before being tested. That interruption would almost certainly not affect performance because the benefits of HGH, which appears to increase muscle mass and strength, can last for weeks or months. (Athletes can be tested randomly, but these tests are infrequent; in any case, observers say, it is relatively easy to avoid these tests by not answering calls or "going out of town.")
