Pan Am Games: 1983 Drug Battle Continues in ’87

Four years after their first major offensive in a makeshift laboratory in Caracas, Venezuela, amateur athletic officials admit that they are far from winning the war against performance-enhancing drugs. But they believe they have fired enough shots to at least let athletes who use banned substances know they are in a fight.

According to a report by the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO), 30 athletes, including 15 medalists, tested positive for drugs--anabolic steroids in most cases--during the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas.

Members of PASO’s medical commission contend that the biggest drug bust in international athletics would have been bigger if several athletes had not either left Caracas before their events, faked injuries so they would not have to compete, or purposely finished out of the medals, all presumably in attempts to avoid the strict drug testing administered by Dr. Manfred Donike of Cologne, West Germany.

Since then, statistics provided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) show that 1.8% of all tests in international events have been positive.

If that holds true for the 1987 Pan American Games, which will begin Saturday in Indianapolis, fewer than 20 of the 1,000 or so tests will be positive. All medalists and others selected randomly from among 3,900 athletes entered will be required to report to doping control.

“We don’t anticipate a repeat of Caracas,” said Dr. Ronald Blankenbaker, a vice president of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis and the representative to PASO’s medical commission from the Pan American Games organizing committee.

“The only potential problem will be if there are--and I can’t imagine this--some athletes who don’t know we’re serious about drug control. I believe everyone who comes here who’s taking drugs knows they stand a good chance of getting caught.”

Although other doctors involved in amateur sports agree that fewer athletes will test positive than four years ago, they say that does not necessarily mean that fewer athletes are using performance-enhancing drugs. As sophisticated as the drug tests have become, doctors say the athletes may have become even more sophisticated in beating them.

“On the whole, we’ve made mammoth progress,” said Dr. Don Catlin, director of the UCLA analytical laboratory, which was used for the 1984 Summer Olympics. “But that progress has come in the area of education and understanding the prevalence of drug use. As far as the number of athletes using drugs, I’m not sure anything has changed at all. Nobody is saying the problem is gone because of testing.”

For most offending athletes, the drugs of choice remain anabolic steroids, synthetic derivatives of the male hormone testosterone that are believed to increase strength.

In testing numerous athletes for research and with no threat of sanctions, Catlin found the results disturbing, he recently told a gathering of the National Assn. of Collegiate Directors of Athletics in San Diego.

“It’s sickening to look at the samples and see 50, 60, 70% positive results in some high-risk sports,” he said.

In an interview this week, Catlin said he considers athletes from eight or nine sports in the high-risk category, among them weightlifters, throwers in track and field, cyclists and, increasingly, distance runners.

Dr. Robert Voy, chief medical officer of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), agrees. “I would not say we have made the progress we want to make in steroids,” he said. “Athletes still can use steroids during training and get off (them) in time to pass the tests.”

To achieve that, Voy said, athletes have switched from oil-based steroids to those that are water soluble. He said that oil-based steroids are more effective for increasing strength but also are detectable for six to eight months after use. The water-soluble steroids generally remain in the system for only three to six weeks, he said.

“There’s no evidence that usage of the short-acting steroids has stopped or even slowed,” Catlin said. “It may have even increased.”

But though a ‘roid is a ‘roid is a ‘roid from an ethical standpoint, doctors consider the change a victory for their side.

“The athletes aren’t taking the long-acting steroids,” Catlin said. “That’s medically important because the long-acting ones have the most harmful side effects.”

Meanwhile, athletes find new drugs almost faster than the doctors can identify them.

The latest weapon in avoiding positive tests is Probencial, a drug that is believed to mask steroids in the system. Even though it is detectable, the IOC has not had time to put it on the list of banned substances.

“That’s the latest fad,” Catlin said. “I expect the Pan Am Games to have a fair amount of that.”

The war also has escalated on another front, blood doping. In that procedure, blood is withdrawn from athletes, who continue to train in a blood-depleted state. The blood then is injected back into the athletes, who get an oxygen boost from the transfusions. Blood doping has been found most often among cyclists and distance runners.

Even though blood doping is banned, there was, until recently, no test for it. But Dr. John Baenziger, assistant director of the Indiana University laboratory in Indianapolis that will be used for testing during the Pan American Games, said blood doping now can be detected.

The test, however, requires blood samples, and according to IOC rules, athletes are required only to submit urine samples.

“There are a lot of legal ramifications, but I don’t want to imply that it’s 100% that we won’t test for blood doping,” Blankenbaker said. “The chance is slim but not zero. Athletes who think there is no chance might be taking a risk. It might be part of an investigation.”

But Voy said that evidence would have to be substantial before blood could be drawn from an athlete.

“If there was an athlete with needle marks on his arms and tubes hanging out of his elbows, I guess they could test for it,” he said.

The Indianapolis laboratory, only the third in North America to be approved by the IOC, after those in Montreal and Los Angeles, is considered a significant improvement over the one that was hastily assembled in Caracas.

Only 10 days before the 1983 Pan American Games opened, organizers informed PASO’s medical commission they had neither the time nor the money to complete the laboratory. PASO made an emergency call to Donike, recognized at the time as the leader in drug testing. He brought his technicians and portable equipment from Cologne to Caracas.

Donike, a consultant to the Indianapolis laboratory, probably will not be personally involved in the 1987 Pan American Games, but several of his technicians will be.

Whether PASO officials instructed Donike in 1983 to get tough, or whether he did it on his own, probably never will be established. That would require someone to admit the testing in Caracas was more diligent than it had been in the past, something no one involved with the laboratory there has been willing to do. But the fact is, Voy said, most drug testing before 1983 was simply for show.

“They were sink tests,” Voy said. “That means someone tested the athletes, poured the samples down the sink and called all of them negative.”

Three months after the 1983 Pan American Games, the USOC, which had lagged behind other nations’ Olympic committees, established a drug-testing program, creating a position for Voy.

The USOC since has tested about 6,000 athletes. All athletes who participate for the United States in the Pan American Games will have been tested before arriving at Indianapolis.

But Voy said he will not be able guarantee a drug-free U.S. team for international competition until the USOC is allowed to test athletes at random and without warning during training.

Other countries, such as Norway, have found that to be an effective deterrent. Voy said, though, that the USOC probably would face legal challenges if it tried to implement a similar program.

He also said that such a program would increase his annual costs from $600,000 to $1 million.

“If we were able to test athletes two or three times a year, there would not be a window of opportunity for them to use drugs,” he said. “There would not be time for an athlete to go onto a 10-week drug cycle and then get off in time to pass the test.”

Voy said that athletes are reluctant to give up the drugs because they believe their competitors in other countries, particularly those in the Soviet Bloc, use them.

He said that he has been convinced otherwise.

“We’re seeing a leaner, faster type of Eastern European athlete,” he said. “We’re not seeing the bulked-up, juiced-up athlete we used to see in the past. I believe the Eastern Europeans have gone through the hard-chemical approach to sports.

“The key to the Eastern European performances is they can do training our athletes just cannot do. Soviet athletes recover from competition with massages and electrolyte treatments. Our athletes recover on beer and pizza.”

Neither is on the IOC banned list.