Athletics: Drug cheats die

ABANDONING all doping controls and allowing sports competitors to use whatever drugs they like would create a human timebomb of illnesses, deformity and even death.

That is the warning from the Los Angeles scientist behind the secret tests which trapped sprint ace Dwain Chambers and a handful of other top stars in a steroid snare this summer.

Professor Don Catlin is the head of the Olympic-accredited LA laboratory which during the summer, acting on a tip-off from one of the world's top coaches, developed the test for the previous undetectable designer steroid, tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG.

It was traces of THG which were found in the urine sample taken from Chambers when he was training in Germany just before August's World Championships, and which could see the British sprinter banned for life.

Prof Catlin has been at the forefront of drug detection in sport ever since tests were first introduced at the Olympic Games in the 1970s.

He says: "If you scrapped all the rules and let everyone take what they wanted, then you take away every young athlete's choice and every young athlete's dream.

"At least now they have the choice: they can do it clean, or they can cheat. But if you scrapped the rules, everyone would have to take drugs. There would be no option. Clean athletes would have no chance.

"But the consequences would be terrible. With the amount of drugs some of these guys are taking, the damage to their health would be permanent. Some would die young. It would be a time-bomb."

Catlin points to the some of the former East German athletes now suffering the consequences of long-term steroid misuse. Court cases in Germany took evidence from 142 female athletes who will suffer menstrual and gynaecological problems for the rest of their lives as a result of being given courses of steroids, in some cases from the age of 14. "There is not a single day without pain," says Brigitte Michel, a former international discus-thrower.

Others have experienced birth defects in children as a result of the drugs they took to make them improve at sport.

When using these male hormone drugs, as well as growing bigger muscles and recovering from training faster, many of the women also grew facial hair, their voices deepened and some developed Adam's apples.

The most severe case from the East German regime involves Heidi Kreiger, the 1986 European women's shot put champion. She was given so many steroids by her coach that she eventually had to have a sex change, and "Hormone Heidi", as she had been known, became Andreas.

Kreiger's coach was the notorious Dr Ekkart Arbeit, who earlier this year created a storm in this country when Olympic heptathlon Denise Lewis appointed him as her coach.

Steroid users are also known to develop short tempers - known in body-building gyms as "Roid Rage". In one Roid Rage case, a bodybuilder killed his own child by throwing the infant against a wall.

Finding "undetectable" drugs has often seen athletes taking ever greater risks. Distance runners, cyclists and cross-country skiers in the 1990s resorted to EPO, an artificial blood-booster normally used for cancer and AIDS patients that can delay the onset of fatigue.

But the drug is so effective at thickening the blood that in Holland and Scandinavia there were several cases of athletes in their 20s and 30s dying in their sleep, their blood so thick it had over- strained the heart.

Especially popular among sprinters in America was hGH, or human growth hormone, which is used to assist children with retarded growth. But hGH has the side-effect in athletes of making the hands, feet and jaws of users continue to grow.

Catlin is also aware that the ultimate price for steroid use is premature death. There have been several cases in the US of former sports stars developing heart and liver complaints, and some cancers, leading to their deaths in their 40s and 50s. And hGH is believed to also make the heart and other organs continue to grow, sometimes to unhealthy sizes.

It is this that has left a shadow over the death, at just 38, of Florence Griffith Joyner. The American heroine of the 1988 Olympics died in 1998 after an apparent heart seizure in her sleep.

But Flo-Jo had transformed her body in her mid-20s, and was later accused of using hGH. Her post-mortem showed some signs of excessive growth of her organs, including her heart, which contributed to her death which may have been a direct result of drug use.

Half of top 12 sprints tarnishedDwain Chambers' positive drug test means that of the top 12 100-metre sprinters of all time, six have now faced accusations of using banned drugs. And that's before all the samples collected at this summer's World Championships are subjected to re-tests for THG.

9.78sec Tim Montgomery (USA)

9.79sec T Ben Johnson (CAN)

The positive drug test that shocked the world saw the Canadian stripped of his 1988 Olympic gold medal and world record. Fifteen years on, and the best the world has to offer has managed just 0.01sec quicker.

9.79sec T Maurice Greene (USA)

9.84sec T Donovan Bailey (CAN)

9.84sec Bruny Surin (CAN)

9.85sec Leroy Burrell (USA)

9.86sec Carl Lewis (USA)

The only man ever to retain the Olympic 100m title, if only by default after Johnson's disqualification, it was revealed earlier this year that Lewis himself had failed a drug test before those 1988 Games, and was only able to compete because of an American cover-up.

9.86sec Frank Fredericks (NAM)

9.86sec Ato Boldon (TRI)

Training partner of Maurice Greene, working under John Smith, the former 200m world champion escaped with just a warning in 2001 when he tested positive for a stimulant.

9.87sec Linford Christie (GBR)

Tested positive for stimulant at 1988 Olympics but was "given the benefit of the doubt" and went on to win Olympic 100m gold in 1992. Several brushes with doping officialdom later, Christie's career was brought to a close with a steroid positive in 1999.

9.87sec Dwain Chambers (GBR)

Europe's fastest man's track career could be brought to an end by the THG findings announced last week.

9.91sec Dennis Mitchell (USA)

Adverse test for high levels of the hormone testosterone famously saw the American Olympic medallist say that he had had six beers and sex four times with his wife the evening before his test, on her birthday, "because the lady deserved a treat". Despite the excuse, he was banned for two years.

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