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Chinese athletes have pulled out, a British cyclist hastested positive, and an Uzbek team official has been caught with vials of human growth hormone. So, Sydney 2000 will be the cleanest Olympics ever? Rymantas Kazlauskas is determined they will be. As director of the Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory in Sydney, he’s got the unenviable job of catching every track or field star who might be using performance-boosting drugs. And making sure that the innocent aren’t accidentally caught in the net. Rachel Nowak asked him how he’s keeping one step ahead of the cheats.

Is there a fear that drug cheats may be one step ahead of you, that there is a drug out there that you don’t know about?

You are implying that there are people out there developing drugs specifically for doping. My experience is that they are using drugs that are already on the market that are beneficial in medicine. People are obtaining these substances and using them to enhance the performance of healthy individuals. We believe we know what sort of drugs are likely to be used or have been used by athletes-I mean a minority of athletes. Some of those drugs we can test for, and what we can test for is increasing. Some we cannot test for.

Which drugs can’t you test for?

At the moment, growth hormone.

So what will be your most difficult challenge in the games?

From our point of view, it will be to analyse samples in an appropriate time. We will get 2000 competition samples over a 15-day period, with a maximum of up to about 170 a day. That is an enormous amount of work. We do approximately 5000 samples a year at the moment, and our normal turnaround time [per sample] is 15 days. We will try to do Olympic samples in 24 hours.

How do you go about collecting the samples and testing them?

The sample collection is not part of our assignment. It is done by SOCOG, the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, under the direction of the International Olympic Committee and the IOC Medical Commission. They collect the samples and courier them to our laboratory. Our responsibility starts once the sample walks through our front door, where it is signed for. The chain of custody is an important feature of the whole operation. Everything is checked-the bags the samples come in, and the samples themselves to make sure that all the seals are correct.

Let’s talk about urine samples. At the collection site, the samples are split into an A and B sample. In the laboratory, the B sample is locked up intact in case an athlete requests a B sample analysis. The A sample gets opened, and it is split into sub-samples that are tested separately for narcotics, diuretics, anabolic steroids and stimulants. We also do some peptide hormone tests like HCG. Human chorionic gonadotrophin is the pregnancy hormone, which we check in males.

Is it true that inspectors will make random visits to athletes and ask them to provide on-the-spot urine samples, known as “knock and pee”?

It is not the term that I’ve used. But yes, there will be out-of-competition testing. The people doing the collection have to know the whereabouts of the athletes quite accurately so that they can turn up either at a training session or where they are living, and just knock on the door and say: “We want a sample to be provided here and now.” Once the athlete has been notified, they are chaperoned to make sure that they don’t do anything to mask the presence of drugs. There are 400 of those types of samples collected at random and very few people know who those athletes will be.

How many drugs are out there? And how-in very broad terms-do they enhance an athlete’s performance?

There are a lot of drugs out there, a lot more than we know. There’s the narcotics, which are just to reduce pain. The stimulants, amphetamine-like substances which presumably spur people to work a little harder. They also increase aggression.

Diuretics are split into two categories. If you are in a weight class, a good way of dropping your weight is to pass water. After you’ve had the weigh-in you can then rehydrate yourself, and you’re back at your old weight. So that’s a form of cheating. The other way that diuretics are used is as a possible masking agent-you increase the amount of urine that you pass to dilute any drugs that might be in that urine. If the concentration is low anyway, the laboratory may end up struggling a little bit to find the substance.

Then you’ve got anabolic agents. There are two groups within that category. Anabolic steroids are used in conjunction with weight-training programmes and diet to increase muscle mass and strength. The other substances within this category are the beta-2 agonists. These are basically asthma medications. They open up the airways as their main use. But they have another effect: they can actually reduce the amount of fat and increase the amount of lean meat, so to speak, which is very desirable for an athlete. Some of those drugs are restricted and you have to have permission to use them. Others are banned outright.

The last category is the peptide hormones. HCG is used by some males to stimulate production of testosterone, or raise testosterone levels back to normal if they’ve been using anabolic steroids. It has been banned for a long time. EPO increases the number of red blood cells so you get better oxygen transport. EPO and growth hormone [another peptide hormone]-are the big problems in terms of testing. The challenge has been finding the measurements that can tell you the difference between the hormone that is naturally made by the body and the administered hormone.

I thought that is what the new EPO test does?

You’re right. EPO will be tested for the first time at these Olympics. The IOC has given us the go ahead. We will use both a blood and a urine test. The urine test is an electrophoretic method that looks at the difference between natural and manufactured EPO. It is a very time-consuming process, and it cannot be used for every urine sample. The blood test can be done fairly quickly. Any samples that are suspicious will be verified using the urine test. The two together go to producing the evidence that will incriminate the athlete.

So what other drugs are there that you don’t have a test for?

The main one I guess is growth hormone. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is being fairly heavily used, but we really don’t know. I suspect that a lot of the material that is being used as growth hormone is fake. There is little scientific evidence to say that growth hormone is particularly effective, which is the reason we went towards the EPO test.

Some observers are saying that a blood test for human growth hormone has been developed. Why hasn’t a test been sanctioned?

The human growth hormone test has not been developed. Preliminary work has shown some markers for its detection but this has not yet been validated so cannot be applied at the Olympic Games.

Some people say that up to 90 per cent of athletes use performance-enhancing drugs. What do you think of that figure?

Well, personally I think very few athletes are using drugs. For many years there have been very strong testing programmes, at competitions and out of competitions, and the number of athletes being caught appears to be very small. In terms of how many athletes will be using hormones like EPO and growth hormone, we haven’t been testing these so we really don’t know the answer to that. But they are very expensive drugs, so they are not available to many athletes from the start.

But you do have athletes claiming that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is rife-in cycling for instance. What do you make of those claims?

That is difficult to reconcile with drugs-testing programmes. They aren’t showing that there are large numbers. If it were the case, we would be eliminating most athletes.

But what about EPO and cycling?

Until we know by testing for EPO, we won’t have a handle on it.

One reason why athletes are more likely to question a positive drugs test is the controversy over the anabolic steroid nandrolone. Do you accept that your test cannot tell the difference between breakdown products of nandrolone and naturally produced metabolites?

The IOC reporting level for nandrolone breakdown products is well above any level that could be expected to occur naturally. That’s definite. The controversial part then becomes what was the source of that ingested nandrolone. A lot of different sources have been suggested such as uncastrated boar meat, which I believe is extremely rare. You also have the so-called health foods that are actually anabolic steroids in disguise and are sold in some places like North America-they have to really rethink that. The products are also available on the Internet. Some of these products are not labelled correctly, so the athletes may be unaware that they are taking preparations that contain these materials. Of course, at any appeal hearing many theories can be put forward. Whether they are true or not is up to the panel to decide.

How about relaxing the rules on drug taking and allowing athletes to take drugs as long as they are not actually harming themselves, to allow drugs to become another legal part of a training programme?

The use of drugs has been greatly reduced overall by testing programmes. I hate to imagine where we’d be now if it had been made a free-for-all. I don’t believe that legal doping is achievable because I don’t believe you can separate out the health issues. In my experience, athletes don’t take the normal prescribed dosages, they take larger dosages that are well above the recommended levels, and they take them for a long period of time.

What of the future? The days when athletes can have themselves genetically engineered to have bigger muscles or more red blood cells are not far off. What will happen then? Is there a plan in place?

From our point of view, it is a very frightening future because of genetic engineering. You think we’ve got a problem now with administered EPO? What if someone introduces an EPO-producing gene into the arm or leg of an individual that produces EPO at a constant level? That is going to require an enormous amount of research to be able to tell the difference between that EPO and natural EPO.

How far in the future do you think this is?

It is very hard to say. We are going back to the problem that we discussed at the very beginning-why are these drugs being made? These innovations are for therapeutic uses. So for example, rather than giving a patient an EPO injection every day, you could introduce the gene into the individual. For their health and their quality of life, that is going to be a major improvement. Unfortunately, as with drugs, healthy athletes will look towards them as ways of cheating.

Do you have any admiration for athletes who use drugs? After all, they are prepared to take great risks with their health to push themselves to their limits.

Personally, I believe that they are very foolish. Potentially they are damaging their health, and reducing their lifespan and their quality of life after they stop being athletes. Some of the drugs may cause damage that does not show up for several years. Anabolic steroids may give rise to cancers later down the track. Various problems arise. I don’t believe it is worth what they gain.