"Our" Tamsyn Lewis has already lifted the lid on Johnny Foreigner’s attempt to swindle the Olympic Games, and maybe she has reason to be concerned. This week we round up all the drugs and masking agents competing for gold in Beijing.
The field is strong at this year’s Games, but it’s hard to go past Colombia’s finest as one to watch. Cocaine has taken a battering among amateur drug users for the best part of a decade, losing out to younger and hipper drugs like Ecstasy and crystal meth, but it’s hoping to put those days behind it as it turns professional – with a listing on the Anti-Doping Authority’s list of prohibited drugs.
So… cocaine is performance enhancing? Blogger Josh Alper of AOL Sports writes:
It’s not exactly a secret that doing too much blow isn’t going to leave you in any condition to play sports, but Dr Gary Wadler of the World Anti-Doping Agency says that not all of its effects would be negative: ‘The acute effects of cocaine probably, overall, would impair and not enhance performance. But within a two-hour window, you may actually have some enhancement – overcoming fatigue, reaction time, and so on.’
As it turns out, coke has had an illustrious sporting career. "In the late 1970s, Hollywood Henderson, a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, carried a nasal inhaler filled with a mixture of cocaine and water in his uniform during games. It bears mentioning that Henderson said he felt ‘out of control’ when he snorted during games," writes Alper.
So it may not take home the gold, but it’s sure to win over the crowd with showmanship and stamina.
Next, we can turn our attention to Europe, where athletes are trying to successfully cheat rather than get their rocks off. The big news out of Europe according to Steroid Nation is soap. In October of last year, 1996 Tour De France winner Bjarne Riis admitted to being a fan of soap, and ingesting it in powdered form to mask EPO.
Steroid Nation explains:
EPO, or erythropoietin, is the kidney hormone that induces bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. In endurance sports (and in sprinting sports too – see Marion Jones) producing more red blood cells, increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, which increases the production of the muscles. An obvious advantage.
The only disadvantage of the combo, apart from death due to EPO thickening the blood, is that "soap will dissolve any traces of EPO in the cheating athletes’ urine. In fact, it destroys all EPO, natural and synthetic. Thus the absence of EPO, while not ‘illegal’ is de facto evidence of a drug cheat."
Soap’s popularity is on the rise, reckons Steroid Nation, with "17 per cent of 3,050 athletes’ urine samples examined between 2003 and 2006 by the Swiss anti-doping laboratory," showing no EPO.
Blogger 100%InjuryRate over at FANIQ thinks he might have the hot pick for gold, and we agree:
Research in Germany has shown that delivering DNA vaccines via tattoo was 16 times more effective than injecting through the muscles or veins as the vibrating tattoo needle prepares the body’s immune system and increases the body’s response to the drug. What this means is that athletes can take smaller doses and ‘fly under the radar’ in dope tests.
But here’s my question; How in the hell did anyone find out about this? […] Unless someone said to themselves, ‘Hey, maybe if I tat myself with PEDs, it’ll help even more!’ I can’t see how anyone came to this conclusion. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when this technique was discovered. Chances are it involved a weightlifter and a heroin addict."
And we reckon this combo – also via FANIQ – might be up for silver: "athletes are also combining the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra with doses of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Both drugs increase the flow of oxygen in the blood stream and therefore boost sporting performance."
"So if you see any athlete on the gold medal stand with a raging hard-on while laughing uncontrollably, odds are pretty good he cheated."
It seems Tamsyn has a lot to worry about. But maybe she should shut her pie-hole, because Anti-Doping Agencies are hot on the trail of cheats.
Millard Baker at MESO-Rx Steroid Blog reveals that:
The Australian Government Solicitor has ruled that a secret pilot program involving the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) and Medicare was illegal. ASADA had been reviewing government Medicare prescription records and cross-referencing them with names of athletes in an effort to catch athletes using prohibited substances. Not surprisingly to anyone, the Government Solicitor determined that ASADA illegally violated athlete privacy and doctor-patient confidentiality.
Apparently, an ASADA spokesperson was unapologetic about the illegality of their methods and the privacy issues involved. "The spokesperson even bragged that they were deserving of an apology for the ‘embarrassment’ and ‘difficult position’ placed on ASADA by revelations of the illegal program."
Incredibly, ASADA did receive an apology from the AGS.
We’re in for one hell of an Olympics.
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