The EconomistFebruary 10th 2018 55
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S
KIERS, skaters, ice hockey players and
other snow-loving athletes have trav-
elled to Pyeongchang for this year’s Winter
Olympics to vie for supremacy. But the
South Korean city is also the venue for an-
other contest—one between the bodies re-
sponsible for anti-doping rules.
Last year, aftertip-offs and suspicious
test results in previous events, the Interna-
tional Olympic Committee (IOC) banned
43 Russian athletes from future Olympic
competitions, stripping ten of them of
medals they had won in the 2014 Winter
Games in Sochi. In December, after an in-
vestigation into drug-screening records
leaked by the former head of the Moscow
Anti-Doping Laboratory, it accused Russia
of state-sponsored doping. It barred the
country from competing in Pyeongchang,
condemning the “systematic manipula-
tion of the anti-dopingrules and system”.
That conspiracy’s existence could hard-
ly have come as a surprise to the IOC. The
World Anti-Doping Agency (WA DA), set
up in 1999 to standardise rules across
sports and regions, had already investigat-
ed Russia on suspicion of widespread dop-
ing. It had called for Russia to be barred
from the Summer Olympics in Rio de Ja-
neiro in 2016. But instead, the IOCdisqual-
ified a third of the team and allowed the
rest to compete under the Russian flag.
This time round, no sooner had the IOC
repeated scandals. Sports less dependent
on simple brawn and endurance, such as
baseball, cricket and football, were once
thought to be at little risk from doping; no
longer. Even animals are at it. Last year four
dogs who ran in the Iditarod, an annual
long-distance sled-dog race in Alaska, test-
ed positive for a banned opioid painkiller.
The number of banned performance-
enhancers, now around 300, rises when-
ever another is discovered to be in use.
They variously lessen pain, increase alert-
ness, speed up recovery and encourage the
production ofmuscle mass oroxygen-car-
rying red blood cells. Anabolicsteroids,
synthetic versions of testosterone that
were the mainstayof state doping pro-
grammes in the Soviet bloc, remain popu-
lar. A newer development is blood dop-
ing—transfusing blood or taking a
synthetic version of erythropoietin (EPA),
a hormone produced in the kidneys, to in-
crease levels of red blood cells. Last week a
database of more than 10,000 blood tests
from 2,000 winter-sports athletes was
leaked to the Sunday Times, a British news-
paper, and ARD, a German broadcaster.
Hundreds of skiers’ tests suggested they
had used EPA. Some had blood so thick
that they should have been in hospital.
Much of the doper’s skill lies in judging
quantities and timing. The “Duchess Cock-
tail”, a mix of steroids created in Russia, is
absorbed by swilling it in the mouth with-
out swallowing. That shortens the period
during which it can be detected by a blood
decided to bar Russia than it partially back-
tracked, inviting 169 of the country’s ath-
letes to Pyeongchang as “Olympic athletes
from Russia”. Then, a week before the
games, a third international sporting body
stepped into the fray. The Court of Arbitra-
tion for Sport, to which some Russian ath-
letes had appealed, overturned bans on 28
and shortened penalties for 11 others. The
IOC refused to accept its decision. As the
opening ceremony approached, appeals
and counter-appeals continued.
Banned practice
The row is symptomatic of a wider pro-
blem. As prize money and sponsorship
deals get bigger, so do the incentives for
coaches and athletes to find ingenious
ways to cheat. But the agencies charged
with stopping doping lack independence
and money. The rules they are supposed to
enforce are riddled with loopholes. The re-
sult is a system thatlooks tough on doping,
without uncovering much of it.
There would be a lot to find. Though
Russia’s institutionalised dopingis proba-
bly an outlier, individual doping is rife
throughout elite sport. In 2015, the most re-
cent year for which data are available,
WA DA found nearly 2,000 violations,
across 85 sports or disciplines and 122 na-
tionalities. Athletics, cross-country skiing,
cycling and weightlifting have all suffered
Doping in sport
Whatever it takes
The use of banned performance-enhancing drugs is rife in sport. No one seems to
want to do much about it
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