The latest performance-boosting drugs are impossible to detect--and, for many athletes, impossible to resist

By TIM BLAIR

ustralian sprint swimmer Andrew Baildon was walking along a hallway toward the pool at the 1994 Rome World Swimming Championships when he heard a deep, masculine voice. Which was odd, because he'd only noticed female athletes nearby. "I turned around and had a look at this one athlete who was speaking," says the two-time Olympian. "She had a discoloration on her face. I wouldn't say it was a five o'clock shadow, but it was close. There was a lot of acne on her back, which is another classic sign of steroid use. And the voice was unbelievable. It was deeper than mine."

Four years on from those titles and just over two years out from the Sydney Olympics, international athletics still has the specter of drugs hard on its heels. Increasingly accurate testing methods may be forcing out steroids, but newer drugs are taking their place, along with ever more successful means of eluding detection. Last week in Sydney, at a Symposium on the Olympic Athlete at the University of New South Wales, former head physician to the U.S. Olympic team Dr. James Puffer observed: "The only athletes who get caught using drugs these days are those who are pharmaceutically unsophisticated." The faces at Sydney 2000 might not be unnaturally stubbly, but subtler signs could give their owners away: an elongated jaw suggesting the use of human growth hormone (hGH); flushed features betraying the heart's struggle to pump blood thickened to gel by the endurance-boosting drug erythropoietin, or EPO.

More alarming for some than the drugs' side effects is the inability of scientists to detect them in athletes' systems. And should a new test be devised for either hGH or EPO by 2000, it is almost certain that new drugs will be devised to take their place. "Always, athletes who cheat try to shift to new drugs," says Dr. Jordi Segura, head of drug testing at the 1992 Barcelona Games and secretary of the doping subcommission of the International Olympic Committee. "It takes the laboratories time to catch up. It has always been like that."

Before the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, it seemed as though the labs had caught up. A new, extremely sensitive testing machine, the high-resolution mass spectrometer (HRMS), was to be used at a Games for the first time; many predicted a record number of drug busts and the preemptive withdrawal of athletes before competition. But detecting drugs can be a simple matter compared to prosecuting their users. Months after the Games, it emerged that four athletes whose urine was checked by the HRMS had tested positive for anabolic steroids. But they were not disqualified, for fear that the technology, being so new, might be successfully challenged in court. Concedes Kevan Gosper, I.O.C. executive board member and vice-president of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games: "It was not a perfect outcome."

But, given the circumstances, an understandable one. To the modern Olympian's creed of swifter, higher, stronger, add "lawyer." After German sprinter Katrin Krabbe was suspended for four years for taking the banned drug clenbuterol in 1992, she sued the International Amateur Athletics Federation in a Munich civil court. The court eventually found her penalty unlawful, effectively restricting the German athletics federation to two-year bans for drug use. Krabbe's move, and other successful legal challenges in other countries, forced the IAAF to wind back its policy on four-year bans for the sake of consistency, and to avoid potentially huge legal bills. Last year Australia, formerly a champion of the four-year ban, reluctantly supported the reduction.

While clenbuterol and other steroids can at least be detected, the new breed of performance enhancers are indistinguishable from naturally occurring hormones. "With today's technology," says Dr. Ken Ho, head of the Clinical Investigation Unit at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, "it is impossible to discover if EPO comes from the body or the bottle." By making more red blood cells, EPO boosts the amount of oxygen carried to the muscles; it's especially useful in endurance sports. Human growth hormone is used in mainstream medicine to treat dwarfism, but athletes have found it can aid recovery following strenuous training and promote muscle growth in much the same way as anabolic steroids.

Unlike many drugs on the I.O.C.'s list of banned substances (which includes heroin, cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines) EPO is difficult to police because--as a legitimate medicinal drug, used as an anti-aging agent--it is not illegal to import or sell. "You could stand on a corner of George Street in Sydney and sell as much of it as you like," says Churchill fellow Craig Fleming, an Australian Customs Service inspector who has studied the international trafficking of sports drugs. Says Dr. Gerald Finerman, who was chief medical officer at the Los Angeles Olympic Village in 1984: "Unless athletes do something really blatant, you have very little chance of catching them." In January, Chinese swimmer Yuan Yuan did something blatant: she was caught trying to smuggle 13 vials of hGH--enough to supply the entire Chinese swim team--through a customs check at Sydney on her way to the World Championships in Perth. Now banned for four years, Yuan is the only athlete to be penalized for hGH--largely because she was carrying it in a bag, instead of in her blood.

So popular was the drug in Atlanta that the Olympics there were reportedly known among athletes as the "hGH games." The Games in Sydney might earn a darker title. In the late '80s, when EPO was first encountered in sports, it was implicated in the deaths of five Dutch cyclists; since then, as many as 15 more athletes are believed to have died from side effects of the drug. The EPO-triggered overproduction of oxygen-bearing red cells leaves athletes' blood "so viscous and thick that they end up with all sorts of volume-overload and clotting problems," according to Bob Goldman, president of the National Academy of Sports Medicine in Chicago. The result can be heart attacks or strokes, most commonly during sleep, as the user's metabolism slows. By 2000, more signs of EPO abuse may become apparent. Says John Hawley, director of the High Performance Laboratory at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa: "We don't know the long-term effects of EPO. No one has taken the drug for more than five or six years."

Superficially, EPO manifests itself in muscle tremors, greasy skin and acne. The side effects of hGH are more grotesque: excessive growth of bones in the face, hands and feet. Athletes may develop what is known as "hGH jaw." Again, the effects of long-term use are unknown, although former Los Angeles Raiders lineman Lyle Alzado, who admitted in 1991 to taking hGH and steroids, believed the brain cancer that ultimately killed him in 1992 was caused by overuse of the drugs.

The quest for ways to detect the abuse of hGH, EPO, and other hormones could be an Olympic event in itself. Three international scientific teams are trying to develop a test for introduced testosterone before the 2000 Olympics. A five-lab, $2 million drive to find an hGH test, headed by Dr. Peter Sonksen, professor of endocrinology at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, is promising, but is at such an early stage that researchers have not yet decided whether urine or blood should be the testing medium.

Whatever they devise, S.O.C.O.G. chief executive Sandy Hollway says he's prepared to run with it: "For timing equipment and other areas, we'll stick with tried and true. But for drug testing, I'd be rather inclined to try something leading-edge." Funding for Sonksen's test is provided by the I.O.C., together with the European Union. Says Sonksen: "A few years ago research was something the I.O.C. didn't even consider. Now they are funding it very heavily."

The I.O.C. and other athletics bodies had little choice but to step up research funding after 1988, when the winner of the Seoul Games' premier event, the men's 100-m final, was disqualified for steroid use. Such was Canadian Ben Johnson's power off the mark that he almost threw himself head first to the ground as he launched into one qualifying run. In the final, he locked into the track surface like a Top Fuel dragster; he seemed still to be accelerating as he crossed the line in just 9.79 sec., a time yet to be beaten. If the world, and other athletes, needed an example of the power and menace of steroids, it was in Johnson's speed and his bulging, reddened eyes.

One of the biggest hurdles to controlling drug use has been that, while the I.O.C. was able to conduct testing during the Olympics, testing outside the Games period remains in the hands of individual countries' athletics organizations. Says John Whetton, head of physiology at England's Nottingham Trent University: "Either some countries didn't want to know about drugs or they couldn't afford to know, but you could see the records falling by huge amounts. [By the late '80s] it was fairly clear that we'd passed through a decade of increasing drug abuse in sport."

One initially successful IAAF response was to form a "flying squad" of drug testers, with Whetton at the helm, to arrive with as little notice as possible in countries such as Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, and throughout Africa. "It was so predictable," says Whetton. "When we went to Nigeria, we could even forecast the percentage of drugs we would find just by looking at the athletes. We knew 25% would test positive to something"--usually steroids or amphetamines.

Whetton and the many examiners his group trained in different countries are now frustrated because they lack the means to detect the newer breed of drugs, which they are certain are being used. These include testosterone, which, like EPO or hGH, is a naturally occurring hormone and as such cannot be banned. The IAAF looks instead at the ratio of testosterone to that of epitestosterone--another hormone, but one that doesn't aid performance--found in athletes' urine. A wildly disproportionate testosterone level is a signal that synthetic testosterone has been taken. In most men the t/e ratio is 1 to 1. But to allow for the fact that some have higher natural ratios, the maximum acceptable for Olympic competition is set at 6 to 1.

That, however, means anyone with a low natural ratio can boost his testosterone levels to 6 to 1 and stay inside the legal limit. Says Australia's I.O.C. medical commission delegate, Ken Fitch: "The ones that are cheating by using low-dose testosterone are killing us." Some remain safe even if they use high doses. Says Whetton: "With certain ethnic groups the ratio is inverted. There is more epitestosterone than testosterone; you get a ratio of 0.2 to 1. These guys could take huge amounts of testosterone and stay within the rules."

Frustration over drug testing extends, naturally, to the competitors. Carl Lewis, who collected a gold medal in Seoul when Johnson was disqualified, last year accused U.S. athletics authorities of hiding the extent of drug use after four positive tests among U.S. athletes: "The structure has broken down and the doping problem is being ignored and sometimes supported." In 1996, American backstroker Jeff Rouse called for Australian Samantha Riley--let off with a warning after taking an outlawed painkiller--to be banned: "We really need to take a strong stance, no matter what the circumstances under which a positive test was a result." That approach is unfair, says Australian Olympic ice racer Richard Nizielski, because it treats simple errors the same way as deliberate, systematic drug use: "Honest mistakes are worse, because you're always tainted with it."

That's if athletes aren't already tainted by the popular belief that drug use is widespread. Such cynicism may be well founded. Every two years since 1982, Bob Goldman has conducted an informal questionnaire among Olympic-level U.S. athletes, asking: If you were offered an illegal substance that guaranteed you would win and not be caught, would you take it? In 1995, the answer from 195 of 198 athletes was yes. Asked if they would take a banned substance that would enable them to win every competition for five years but then kill them, more than half the athletes said yes. "With the money athletes can make now, the kids don't really care about taking drugs," says Goldman.

Instead of being surprised that athletes take drugs, says sports scientist Hawley, we should marvel at any athlete who doesn't: "These people train from a very young age to do one thing fantastically well and it becomes the entire point of their lives." John Konrads, Australia's 1,500-m freestyle gold medalist at the 1960 Rome Olympics, says today's elite athlete is so obsessed with victory that a positive drug test is more likely to make him indignant than ashamed: "He's lived every minute of his life to win a medal. The view would be that he had to take drugs to keep up with the rest of the competitors."

The agony and humiliation some endure in hopes of Olympic glory reveal the ferocity of that obsession. Whetton recalls athletes trying to avoid giving positive urine samples by performing "urine transplants": taking "clean" urine from another person and using a catheter to insert it into their own bladders. "The catheter has to be coated in antibiotics and a local anesthetic," says Whetton, "because it's painful like you wouldn't believe." But even recourse to simpler methods--one Sydney athletics trainer told TIME he can ensure a "clean" test for certain drugs with an injection administered minutes before a sample is taken--shows the lack of perspective that swimmer Baildon says is common in modern athletes: "In the end, an athletic performance is only a minuscule part of your life. People are reluctant to look at the big picture."

For athletes, administrators and especially host nations, the Olympics is the big picture, and no Olympic city wants its summer of glory ruined by large-scale drug discoveries. Says Dr. Don Catlin, director of the I.O.C.-accredited drug-testing laboratory at the University of California Los Angeles: "The last thing the Olympic people want is a slaughter. They don't want to catch a whole bunch of people in the middle of a nice Games. They tend to avoid those things by announcing in advance that they have a new test, and that if you're using a particular drug, to stop or you're going to get caught." Which is what Peter Sonksen intends for any hGH test his studies may deliver: "What we'd like to do is use it in 1999 as a pilot year, to publicize it and iron out any bugs."

By 2000, any legal bugs should also be removed from the HRMS, making the 1.5-ton, $500,000 device a potent weapon against steroids and other, older drugs. "With the old mass spectrometers, we could detect a level of drugs equal to one drop of water in a swimming pool," says Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory director Ray Kazlauskas, who will use three HRMS units to hunt for drugs at the 2000 Games. "With the HRMS, we can detect a drop in Sydney Harbour."

At the Lillehammer Winter Olympics in 1994, tests on blood, rather than urine, were used in Olympic competition for the first time. Such tests have been used to detect EPO during the Tour de France cycle race since 1996, and in the world short-course cycling championships in Perth last August. Experts are divided on the advantages blood has over urine. Says Sonksen: "At Atlanta I did a little survey among athletes being urine-tested and the large majority would prefer blood testing. It's cleaner, it's done and it's over with." But Whetton sees barriers to increased blood testing: "Apart from being invasive, it can be against an athlete's religion. It can cause all kinds of upsets. It can cause you to faint." And again, there is a catch: while blood testing will reveal abnormally high levels of EPO, it can't show whether the hormone was produced by the body or introduced. Cyclists with high levels are thus required to sit out competition for "health reasons."

Even if EPO and hGH are brought under control, however, a new wave of drugs is sure to arise, their use driven by the wealth that rewards a gold medal. Says Australia's Fitch: "We keep working at it, but it's a hard road. The bastards are so clever and they've got so many people helping them out." Says Dr. Mel Cusi, a Fellow of the Australian College of Sports Physicians: "We know that the commitment of athletes to cheat is very high. Unless the I.O.C. is prepared to meet that commitment, they are always going to lose." Another undetectable synthesized hormone, IGF-1, normally used to treat aids and cancer, recently became the drug of choice among power athletes.

If IGF-1 becomes as popular as EPO and hGH are believed to be, the cycle of designing tests and validating them in court will begin again. Says UCLA's Catlin: "You must get the right answer, you must be able to prove it's foreign, and you have to show that without any margin for error." And while that process continues, says swimmer Baildon, the research that goes into drug taking stays three or four years ahead of research into drug detection. John Hawley, who has advocated legalizing drugs in a bid to control their use in sport, believes powers other than those of science or sports authorities will prevail: "I hate to say it, but I think in the end it comes down to market forces." At the Olympics, the only commodity is gold. And the forces that drive athletes to seek any advantage, legal or illegal, may prove unstoppable.

DRUGS IN SPORT: A HISTORY OF DISHONOR

A spate of deaths in international cycling in the 1960s led to the first calls for drugs to be banned from sport, and for athletes to be urine-tested. In 1967, British cyclist Tommy Simpson--a user of various stimulants--died during a televised stage of the Tour de France. The first Olympic drug tests were introduced at the Mexico City Games the following year. By the early '70s, state-run drug labs in East Germany and the Soviet Union were working in lockstep with coaches and trainers to breed a generation of superathletes, and a range of doping methods that would defy detection.

"After every workout I got a cocktail with vitamins," East German swimmer Kornelia Ender, a quadruple gold medallist at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, told SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in 1992. Petra Schneider won gold for East Germany at the 1980 Moscow Games, but now suffers severe heart and liver problems she believes are linked to the "vitamins"-- actually steroids--she was given. East German shot-putter Heidi Krieger claims that steroids effectively turned her into a man; now known as Andreas, Krieger has had a sex-change operation to complete what she describes as an irreversible process. Western sport has been characterized more by individual drug users than drug regimes. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson's 100-m time at the Seoul Olympics may never be beaten, but he is better known for the positive test to the steroid stanozolol which denied him a gold medal.

Serial doper Johnson returned to sprinting after a two-year suspension, but was banned for life in 1993 after tests revealed a testosterone count 10 times above normal. Australian cyclist Martin Vinnicombe won silver at Seoul but tested positive for steroids in 1991. His former manager, Phill Bates, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1996: "He knew the only way to win was to cheat." Earlier this year, after four years of stunning improvements in Chinese women's swimming, five team members were sent home from the Perth World Championships under suspicion of drug taking. The courts have been as much a part of recent drug charges as vials and chemical analysis. Two years ago, a Munich court ruled that former East German sprinter Katrin Krabbe could sue the IAAF over a four-year suspension for steroid-taking, a move that prompted authorities to reconsider the severity of the penalties they could impose. Future drug penalties may be shaped by any legal action resulting from the case of Irish swimmer Michelle de Bruin, who, as Michelle Smith, won three gold medals at Atlanta, but who now faces a charge that she altered a urine sample obtained in January. De Bruin has vowed to fight any sanctions against her in the civil courts--potentially adding yet another layer of complexity to an already labyrinthine problem.

--Reported by Susan Horsburgh