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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports
Cheaters can't be stopped. Testing costs a fortune. It's shockingly easy to beat the system. The drug cops are perpetually playing catch-up. Says who? Drug-testing expert Don Catlin, that's who. He's the doping detective who helped break the BALCO scandal wide open—and the man who's about to launch a radical new campaign to finally solve the problem.

By Brian Alexander


	THE JUICE: Brian Bishop, a technician at the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, with a rack of urine samples (Jeff Minton)

I KEEP WAITING FOR DR. DON CATLIN TO SOUND THRILLED, or at least mildly pleased, about the mushrooming furor over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Catlin, after all, helped break the now-infamous BALCO doping scandal from this very office, a small, dark, paper-strewn space inside the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory. The lab is one of the world's top facilities for analyzing biological samples from athletes to detect the use of banned substances like anabolic steroids, the blood-oxygen booster erythropoetin (EPO), and scores of other prohibited drugs that aid performance.

But Catlin—a tall, balding, 67-year-old M.D. with a handsomely craggy face—just frowns when I prod him. He sips from an old coffee mug and says the current media blitz reminds him of every other time doping has hit the news: There's a lot of noise, and yet doping persists. He thinks about this a moment and then issues a bleak verdict on the drug-policing system in which he's toiled for the past 25 years.

"People are following this old model—run 'em down, chase 'em, find 'em, assume they are guilty, drag them into testing," he says. "And athletes still get away with stuff, and I maintain you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you."

This realization has left Catlin profoundly frustrated. A few hours after we first meet, we sit in his lab chatting about doping politics and watching a young woman scan a computer readout from a testing machine. Suddenly, Catlin blurts out, "I don't want to do it anymore. I am 67 years old. I can walk out of this lab, turn the key, chuck it out, and say, 'That's the end. I'm going skiing.' "

Millions of dollars' worth of high-tech gear is whirring all around him. Beyond these walls there's an entire international bureaucracy devoted to catching cheaters. If Catlin is right, and all that won't stop doping, the sports world has an even bigger credibility problem than most of us realize.

And sports definitely has a problem, what with the recent congressional hearings about Major League Baseball's steroid scandal and lingering suspicions that many events—from the Olympics to the Tour de France—are tainted by cheating. In the past two years alone, U.S. anti-doping authorities have uncovered 77 violations. Most recently, homegrown cycling fans suffered a major blow when Tour stalwart Tyler Hamilton was hit with a two-year suspension after allegedly transfusing another person's blood into his body in an effort to boost endurance.

In response, sports and legislative leaders are piling on bigger punishments for doping offenders and demanding ramped-up testing. But Catlin is convinced more of the same won't help, and his voice can't be ignored: He's an insider who knows all about what science can and can't do to stop doping. He ran the drug testing for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, and the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games. These days, his lab conducts tests for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the body that oversees drug testing for American athletes in all Olympic sports. He performs testing for the NFL, the NCAA, and minor league baseball. That's a tidal wave of tests, about 35,000 urine (and, occasionally, blood) samples per year, making his the busiest lab of its kind in the world.

Catlin also helps develop new tests, with help from the 40-some researchers and technicians in his lab—including six Ph.D.'s. In 2000 the lab figured out how to differentiate natural testosterone from an artificial drug form made from yams. Just before the Salt Lake Games, Catlin and his team came up with a way to test for darbepoetin, a long-acting form of EPO, a drug that athletes inject to increase endurance. That test was used to bust cross-country-skiing gold medalists Johann Muehlegg, of Spain, and Larissa Lazutina, of Russia.

More recently, Catlin has played a starring role in the BALCO case, the biggest scandal of them all and a strong indicator that, as Catlin has long argued, there are labs out there secretly working to help cheaters outfox the doping police. In a sprawling affair that's still under grand-jury investigation in California, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a Burlingame-based company run by a musician-turned-businessman named Victor Conte, allegedly sold potions called "the Clear" and "the Cream." According to illegally leaked grand-jury testimony described in the San Francisco Chronicle, these turned out to be steroids used by big-name athletes like baseball's Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, plus a slew of track-and-field stars. (Giambi has admitted to taking THG; Bonds maintains that he had no idea the substances he was provided by BALCO were steroids.)

BALCO came complete with a B-movie mystery plot. In June 2003, a syringe was mailed by an anonymous source to USADA. (The source turned out to be Trevor Graham, a former coach of track star Marion Jones, who is under investigation by USADA but has not been formally accused of anything.) USADA sent it to Catlin, and his lab deciphered the syringe's contents as a previously undetectable, custom-made steroid that he called THG. Because doping authorities are allowed to hold on to urine samples for up to eight years, Catlin's lab was able to test urine taken from athletes who participated in the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in June 2003.

When the results came in, four stars of U.S. track and field, among them U.S. shot-put champion Kevin Toth, tested positive. The current world-record holder in the men's 100 meters, Tim Montgomery, reportedly admitted to the BALCO grand jury that he had used THG, too. Montgomery, who denies using any performance enhancers, has since been charged with doping by USADA. At press time, a hearing was scheduled for early June.

At first, Catlin was encouraged by the busts, but now he believes BALCO only proved what he already suspected: Doping has gone big-time, and the current anti-doping regime can't hope to stop it. "The system has failed to deal with the problem," he declares. "And it will fail now."

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BRIAN ALEXANDER writes about the cultural frontiers of biomedicine. He's the author of Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion (Basic Books, 2003)

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