How Doctors Help The Dopers

Every morning, he starts the day by taking two blue tablets, and every night before bed, he takes another, making sure no less than 12 hours have elapsed since the first dose. Since he started taking the pills, he can run faster and longer, and tests of his muscle strength confirm what he already knows: he is getting stronger.

It may sound like the routine of another conniving athlete preparing for Athens, but it's the way an 11-year-old boy in Menlo Park, Calif., is fighting muscular dystrophy. Starting in 2002, the youngster began taking low doses of albuterol, a popular asthma drug, as a participant in an experimental study at UCLA. The lead investigator of the trial got the idea for testing albuterol by searching the Internet for references to muscle-building drugs, which soon linked her to sites for body builders. The body builders had learned about the drug's effect from combing the journals of agricultural science, in which veterinarians frequently reported on the bulging muscles they saw in cattle after injecting them with albuterol. It turns out that the drug blocks an enzyme that chews away at muscle. Beef begat beefcake.

Welcome to the emerging reality of competitive sports, where high stakes and high technology are combining to push the limits of human performance--often without leaving chemical evidence that science is helping nature. Scientists and athletes increasingly find themselves in symbiotic research, both driven to achieve the same goal of enhancing physical ability, but with polar-opposite motivations. Scientists want to treat debilitating diseases, while elite athletes look to the labs for a competitive edge.

At the Athens Games, which begin this week, the cat-and-mouse contest between dopers and detectives will be sharper than ever. Athletes will be policed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an independent testing body created in 1999. WADA will forward its results to the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.), which can then bar athletes from competing if they test positive for any of hundreds of illegal or prohibited drugs. Since its inception, WADA has been playing catch-up with better-informed and better-equipped athletes, some of whom can pay their way into the world of designer drugs created to evade detection. But the agency has started to close the gap. At the 2002 Winter Games, WADA tested the arriving athletes and surprised them with a more sophisticated test to detect darbopoeitin, a bioengineered hormone that dopes blood by increasing its oxygen content. On the basis of those results, the I.O.C. stripped three athletes of their eight medals.

There is speculation, which WADA won't deny, that the organization will pull the same trick in Athens with a test for synthetic human growth hormone (HGH), which stimulates muscle and bone growth. It's popular among competitors because unlike easily detected steroids, excess HGH levels are difficult to distinguish from normally circulating levels. And WADA is also reserving the right to nab dopers after the fact--the I.O.C. will keep the samples from Athens and subject them to detection methods WADA may deploy over the next few months.