From the Vancouver Sun today. The whole article is here, because the site
is a subscriber site.
Doping affects the body and the brain
Jack Todd
CanWest News Service
March 21, 2005
MONTREAL - A week ago Wednesday, speed skater Clara Hughes flew to Calgary
from Inzell, Germany, after winning silver and bronze medals at the world
championships. That Friday evening at the Calgary oval, she completed the
10,000 metres in 14 minutes, 19.73 seconds, breaking German skater Gunda
Niemann's 11-year-old world record by nearly three seconds.
The 10,000 is not an officially recognized distance for women, but it looms
as a kind of ultimate challenge, the Mount Everest of speed skating. More
remarkable still is the fact there is absolutely no doubt Hughes, the only
Canadian to win medals at both the Winter and Summer Olympics, did it
without doping.
Four days later, jet-lagged but happy to be home, Hughes spoke with her
usual eloquence about doping in her sport and the world-wide effort to put
an end to cheating. In her own career, which encompasses bronze medals in
cycling in Atlanta in 1996 and speed skating in Salt Lake City in 2002,
Hughes has seen first-hand the damage doping can do.
"In cycling, it started around 1995," she said. "The speed of the races
changed, the way the athletes looked changed. All of a sudden you'd see
someone who looked totally different and had turned into a different racer
in a couple of months, and you know that's just not possible. I changed my
goals and decided that it might only be possible to win the one-day races.
"I saw what doping can do to your body and your brain. I saw people
destroyed by that. For me that was the eye-opener. To see what I saw was
just horrifying, shattering. You'd see someone with five per cent body fat
and then in the off-season they were bloated because they went off the
drugs.
"That led to depression and all these psychological side effects. One day
you're suddenly amazing and then nothing and everyone else, all those people
around you who were urging you to cheat, they've moved on and you're left to
deal with the repercussions. It's really sad."
Hughes insists she was never tempted to cheat.
"No way," she said. "I was fortunate never to have people around me who
tried to make me think that way. When you compete in endurance sports, it's
such a grueling thing to do. There are so many devastating results and
disappointments. For me, I've always realized how important it was to do it
the right way. I've seen what good people went through when they didn't."
One of the hardest things for a highly competitive athlete to do is to stay
clean while losing to athletes who are obviously doping.
"I've known for a fact," said Hughes, "that in some of the biggest races in
my life I lost to people who were cheating. What can you do? I know the
truth, so for me that's enough. If I lose, I blame myself. I'm human. I
don't always eat the right food. Sometimes I'm lazy and I don't train hard
enough. Sometimes I overtrain."
- - -
If there is an ultimate goal for the World Anti-Doping Agency, this is it:
to make it possible for clean athletes such as Hughes to win, and to prevent
young people from destroying their lives and their bodies with risky,
sometimes utterly untested drugs.
In its brief existence, WADA has made remarkable progress by any standard.
WADA chairman Richard Pound, not a notoriously patient man, puts it this
way: "Five years ago, if I had said that in five years we will have an
international anti-doping code that will be obligatory for the Olympic
Games, that we'll have the same rules applying to all sports, all countries,
all athletes, that we'll have a single dispute resolution system, that we'll
have an international convention under UNESCO and that we will have put in
$20 million worth of research into anti-doping, no one would would have
believed it possible. It's been very encouraging."
The difficulties of enforcing a uniform international doping code are
obvious. Only this week, Greek sprinters Katerina Thanou and Costas Kenteris
were cleared by an arbitration panel within their own federation of charges
that they intentionally refused to take a doping test by leading testers on
a merry chase over three continents. The IAAF may refuse to accept the
finding of the arbiters, but the difficulty is there.
WADA clearly needs greater support and understanding from within the
political and judicial systems worldwide. In the early 1990s, Christiane
Ayotte, working at the Doping Control Laboratory in Pointe Claire, Quebec,
became suspicious of the drug clenbuterol, which was being used to build
muscle in cattle and horses. Ayotte developed a test for the drug; German
sprinter Katrin Krabbe tested positive for clenbuterol and was suspended for
three years. She went to court in Germany and was awarded $690,000 US when a
German judge ruled that the suspension was too long by two years.
Still, said Pound, "the gap is narrowing. The perpetrator is always ahead of
the enforcer. Always, because the perp makes the first move and determines
when and how, so there's that advantage, but the gap is a lot closer now."
Of necessity, closing the gap involves a three-pronged political,
educational and scientific effort -- with the latter the most important.
"The science of anti-doping is a very young science," said Dr. Olivier
Rabin, WADA's director of science, "but good science can only help. The
important thing is to bring in the best science to point to a scientific
solution. Now you've got an agency such as WADA whose role is to think about
anti-doping strategies 24 hours a day and to work with national anti-doping
organizations, national Olympic committees, the international federations.
We say, 'OK, let's be smart, let's work together, let's have expert
discussions on what to do and how to do it.
"It makes a difference. It can only improve."
- - -
Despite WADA's international effort at education, despite the suicides of
young athletes depressed when they go off steroids, despite the explosive
doping scandal in Major League Baseball, there are still those who argue
that athletes should simply be allowed to dope themselves anyway they
please.
"That's ridiculous," said Hughes. "You're looking at human lives. You're not
even giving a kid a chance to do a sport the right way. If you allow
cheating, you're forcing her to destroy herself physically and emotionally
in order to compete."
Ayotte sees it much the same way: "What do I say to this? Some athletes stop
using dope. Sometimes that means they have to quit the sport because they
can't compete. This is where we have an obligation to act. How many young
sprinters were forced to quit because Ben Johnson and the other cheaters
were taking their place? Is this fair? How many young athletes will abandon
skiing or swimming or hockey because they refuse to dope? If we stop
cheating, we do this for your sons and our daughters."
Montreal Gazette
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