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Tag: biological passport program

  • For Anti-Doping Administrators, a Constant Battle Requiring Creativity & Strong Leadership

    For Anti-Doping Administrators, a Constant Battle Requiring Creativity & Strong Leadership

    Professor Arne Ljungqvist, Lord in Waiting to His Majesty the King of Sweden. (Photo: Tine Harden/Playthegame.org)

    Note: For more on Professor Ljungqvist’s fight against doping in Sweden, and its effect on Scandinavian sport culture, you can read our companion piece, also published this morning.

    STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Professor Arne Ljungvist has been fighting doping since the 1970’s, when he began with the Swedish Athletics Association and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). These days, he has retired from his day job – researching cancer and other medical topics at the prestigious Karolinska Institute – and holds two others: the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Medical Commission, and the vice presidency of the World Antidoping Agency (WADA).

    In the intervening decades, doping rose to seemingly absurd levels, but Ljungqvist believes that in some sports, performance-enhancing drugs are no longer so prevalent.

    “You can see it,” he told FasterSkier. “In measurable sport, you can see the difference. In no [Olympic] throwing event in London would the gold medalist been on the podium in Seoul 24 years ago. It’s incredible. So it’s been cleaned up.”

    But that doesn’t mean that the problem is gone – it is an ever-evolving, ever-escalating battle between dopers and administrators. In some ways, the efforts by people like Ljungqvist are still the same as they were in the 1960’s, when one of the biggest jobs was simply determining which substances ought to be banned. Administrators have always been trying to catch up with dopers, tests always lagging behind the discovery of new performance-enhancing substances and methods.

    And as they have lost patience, perhaps, the game has changed. Recognizing that they won’t be able to test every athlete for every possible performance-enhancing method at every potentially important time, administrators have in recent years embraced “non-analytical” cases where there is no positive test for a banned substance. This tool for catching cheaters was showcased last month when Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, based mostly on the words of other cyclists.

    With these changes and challenges in mind, FasterSkier asked Ljungqvist and Staffan Sahlström, a longtime ally of the professor’s, a few questions about sports today in a long interview at the offices of International Doping Tests and Management (IDTM), a company which Sahlström founded here in Stockholm.

    No-Start Rules and Biological Passports

    The International Ski Federation (FIS) was one of the first federations to try to nail dopers without an actual positive test. One of the main goals of endurance athletes who dope is to raise the capacity of their blood to carry oxygen. For a long time, there was no test for erythropoietin (EPO), the main drug used to do so. Then, too, dopers learned to reinject their own blood back into their veins, which was hard to detect. So the federation got creative.

    “FIS felt that they had problems with blood doping, and the Finnish incident proved that they were right,” Ljungqvist said, referring to the scandal that disqualified six Finns from FIS World Championships in 2001. “And the way they tried to stop it in the absence of detection was to institute this no-start rule, to say that if you had too-high blood counts you couldn’t compete because it would be dangerous to your health.”

    The rule, which stated that no skier could start a race if their hemoglobin tested higher than 16.5 g/dl for women or 18.5 g/dl for men, was designed to detect the symptoms of blood doping, if not the actual substances or transfused blood itself. To the public, FIS explained that having too-thick blood was dangerous, which was true, but not the real purpose of the rule.

    The rule did work, if its goal was to lower competitors’ hemoglobin levels before they raced. In 2006, U.S. skiers Leif Zimmerman and Kikkan Randall had to wait five days before re-testing and competing in the Torino Games. At the 2010 Olympics, Maine-based New Zealand racer Ben Koons encountered the same problem.

    According to Ljungqvist and many others – such as the aforementioned three, who say their hemoglobin levels had nothing to do with doping – it wasn’t a good solution.

    “I don’t like that,” he said of the FIS policy. “I think they were covering themselves under a false argument. And I told them that many times – that there is no proof, and particularly the individual, probably, some are born with different levels. This is a bad excuse. They were trying to combat doping with a false argument. That’s ethically doubtful.”

    Not only is hemoglobin likely under some degree of genetic control, but it can also be affected by living at altitude (which can train the body to carry more oxygen in the blood) or even by dehydration. Plus, the rule didn’t actually catch all the cheaters. Ljungqvist pointed out that Armstrong, for instance, had repeatedly taken saline infusions to dilute his blood when he knew he would be tested.

    “They notify the skiers by just putting up a message in the lockerroom, which says, you are due for your blood sampling at nine o’clock,” Sahlström explained to get at the rule’s shortcomings. “So you have a notification and even though you are observed during your notification, the bad guys could do something. And the levels are just below – a little bit too little below. So they achieved something, but it is a false excuse.”

    FIS has expanded the concept, however, into something called an “athlete biological passport.” The idea is that by tracking markers like hemoglobin through time, administrators will have some idea of an athlete’s natural levels, and if they dope, the changes will show up in tests even if the substance itself does not. Last season, FIS administered 1,432 out-of-competition tests as part of its biological passport program.

    “I think it’s well worth trying, and it’s a good idea,” Ljungqvist said of the passport concept. “We’ll see if it works. It has already been used – the International Cycling Union has been doing it, IAAF did it just before London, and they banned a few athletes based on passport information. The more sophisticated, the more detailed you can make the passport, the better.”

    As part of his role with WADA, Ljungqvist has watched the agency adopt the program itself. Next week, he’ll take part in discussions about whether WADA can expand the passport to include endocrinology data, which could help detect steroid and hormone use – as well as other future methods that athletes haven’t even tried yet. For the first time, Ljungqvist hopes, maybe administrators will be one step ahead of dopers, rather than the other way around.

    “Maybe we will finally have a good identification of the athlete’s biochemistry,” he said. “That will also be helpful when it comes to detecting gene doping, so it’s a good path to follow.”

    Strong Leadership for Clean Sport

    In the fallout from the Armstrong scandal, many clean athletes have to wonder: how do I know that the playing field is level, and that the system is working, if Lance Armstrong could get by for so long without being caught?

    That, say Ljungqvist and Sahlström, depends on a lot of things, sport and country among them. But in the U.S., athletes shouldn’t be too worried, Ljungqvist believes. He remembers what happened at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when it came out that U.S. athletes had tested positive for banned substances, but the cases had been swept under the rug by the U.S. Track and Field federation and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). At the time, Ljungqvist publicly states that the Americans had failed to do their jobs.

    “I got a direct call from the responsible people at the White House, the drug czar, who told me that they understood our problems in Sydney,” he said. “I had criticized them and it had come out in the United States newspapers. So they said, please, calm down, if you can, and we’ll do something. And they did. They created USADA.”

    Recently, Ljungqvist says, USADA has done an admirable job tackling the rampant doping in Olympic sports (professional sports are, of course, another matter). He cited first the BALCO investigation, and then the Armstrong affair, as cases where the agency laid out meticulous cases against high-profile athletes and didn’t seem hampered by political pressure.

    “They were very thorough, very serious, and very professional,” Ljungqvist said. “They are cleaning up sport in the United States. But it shows that the system had been bad… this goes back to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. They weren’t doing the job. Marion Jones is another example – tested hundreds of times, at the wrong times.”

    The turnaround was due to something that hasn’t happened in every country: the antidoping agency was separated from any organizations that might have an interest in the outcome, like the government or the national Olympic Committee. One reason that the U.S. system had been so bad, Ljungqvist implied, was that it had been enforced by two organizations which had a vested interest in U.S. athletes winning medals, and so had some incentive to avoid banning star performers.

    “I think that one of the answers [to the doping problem] is the independence of the organizations that are handling different cases,” Sahlström said. “And then it should be discussed, what is being independent? I can question being independent in some countries.”

    He would know, because IDTM handles doping tests for various federations around the world. The company started based on the pair’s out-of-competition testing program in Sweden; the IAAF asked, can you do this internationally? Since then, Sahlström  has assembled a network of doping control officers around the globe. And different countries, he says, sometimes have different ideas of what a doping agency should do.

    Then there’s the question of who is leading national agencies and international federations. Travis Tygard of USADA has gotten a lot of press lately, as have International Cycling Union President and Vice President Pat McQuaid and Hein Verbruggen. While Tygard attacked a popular American hero, the UCI leaders quietly protected a system of doping in their sport. People have called for the resignation of all three, for various reasons: Armstrong reporters are furious at what Tygard has done, while fans of pure sport are disappointed in the spinelessness of the UCI.

    “It’s difficult to be the governing body – you have to run the sport,” Sahlström admitted. “If you are not strong as Professor Ljungqvist has been in the IAAF, and if you have weak leadership that says, okay, we need to protect our athletes because they are our asset and they can’t be found doped and we will lose sponsorships, or TV rights, et cetera, then that’s something that we should be looking into.”

    Whether it’s at the USOC, USSA, USADA, or FIS, athletes have to rely on their leaders – and that’s a big question. It’s made tougher, Sahlström said, because most of these high-level administrators keep their jobs for a long time – sometimes decades. The lines can blur after such long relationships, he suggested, and administrators can bow under the pressure from athletes and coaches to ignore problems with doping.

    “If you have a fairly closed family like the professional cyclists, they all know each other,” Ljungqvist said. “Sports-wise, it’s a small group. It’s easy to organize something and people protect each other.”

    In insular sports such as cycling, Sahlström agreed, it’s a tougher problem.

    “For leaders to start to clean out something, it takes some courage, and I’m not sure that every leader today has that,” he said. “Who are the leaders? Are they strong enough? If there are leaders who have been part of an old regime, I’m not accusing anyone, but if you have been in that area, then no. If you come into a federation with new eyes and ears you can say, okay, something has to be done. But if you have been part of it, you would be biased.”

    Should American skiers be worried, though? Of course no sport is perfect. But as Americans, the athletes should trust USADA, the pair said. And as skiers – well, at least it’s not cycling.

    “The confidence in the system, I wouldn’t doubt it,” Ljungqvist said.

  • September Edition: This Month In Journals

    September Edition: This Month In Journals

    FasterSkier is starting a new, once-a-month series looking at new research in the field of sports science. Periodically, we’ll flip through some of the world’s best peer-reviewed medical journals and summarize, in plain English, studies that we think will be of interest to skiers. Here’s our first installment – enjoy!

    * Those dopers who claim that their blood measurements were funny because they just did a really hard workout might actually have a point. A team of Australian researchers showed in a paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine that hemoglobin mass (Hb Mass) does, in fact, increase after an endurance race effort.

    Blood. Image via creative commons.

    Back in 2008, a German group led by Dr. Nicole Prommer at the University of Bayreuth suggested in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise that Hb Mass, which unlike the Hemoglobin concentration (Hb) measurement used in biological passport programs by anti-doping organizations is not influenced by fluctuations in blood and plasma volume, should be used in anti-doping efforts.

    But the Australian team followed up on previous work done since 2008 and put 18 sub-elite triathletes through their paces in an Ironman, and then compared them to 8 control athletes who hadn’t done the race. They found that the racers’ Hb Mass increased by 3.2 % from before the race to directly afterwards, while the control subjects showed no significant change.

    Noting that this increase corresponds to the illicit benefit of the infusion of one bag of blood, the researchers discouraged WADA from including Hb Mass in their biological passport program, at least until further work can be done to determine how long the effect lasts after a hard effort.

    More information: Gough, C.E., Eastwood, A., Saunders, P.U., Anson, J.M., and Gore, C.J., (2012) Spurious Hb Mass increases following exercise. International Journal of Sports Medicine 33:691-695.

    * In the September 1 issue of the British Medical Journal, a team of researchers from several Boston-area hospitals and medical schools published a meta-analysis (review of past studies) of the effects of progestin-only contraception on the risk of thrombosis, a condition in which a blood clot forms in a vein or artery; 300,000 Americans die from venous thrombosis each year. As FasterSkier reported last summer, the use of hormonal birth control appears to have an indirect, if not necessarily direct, impact on athletic performance in female skiers. In addition, U.S. star Kikkan Randall suffered a scary run-in with Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT), which she attributed to her use of birth control.

    creative commons/flickr user Anna.

    As the Boston team wrote, when hormonal birth control became available in the 1960’s, the corresponding increase in thrombosis incidence was pinned on estrogen, the first of two hormonal elements in the typical birth control pill (progestin being the other). Over the last 50 years, pills have gradually decreased in their estrogen concentration, and the types of synthetic estrogen and progestin used in birth control have also changed. It has been assumed that progestin-only pills, which were put on the market beginning in the 1970’s, carried a smaller risk of thrombosis.

    But as FasterSkier found last summer, there hasn’t been much in the way of controlled, high-quality testing on this issue. The team led by Drs. Simon Mantha of the Lahey Clinic and Jeffrey Zwicker of Beth Israel and the Harvard Medical School encountered a similar problem. A search using terms like “progestin”, “progesterone”, and “thromboembolism” in the top three scientific search engines returned over 2,000 papers, but after screening, only eight addressed the question of progestin and thrombosis.

    Not a single one of the studies was randomized, one of the cornerstones of strong scientific and medical research, to compare outcomes for women taking the progestin and those in a control group. Instead, all eight studies used existing groups of patients. Five of the eight studies were case-control, taking patients with known outcomes (thrombosis, no thrombosis) and looking back at their histories to examine the cause. The other three studies were cohort studies, which take groups of patients with known risk factors (for example, progestin vs. not) and then examing the prevalence of a disease (for example, thrombosis) going forward.

    The Boston team then effectively combined all of the women in the various studies and ran a global test, determining that the relative risk factor for thromboembolism (either venous or pulmonary) for progestin-only users compared to the general population was 1.03, deemed an insignificant risk (this would mean that progestin users would have a three percent greater chance than the general population of developing thrombosis). Interestingly, the relative risk factor for women using an injectable progestin (rather than a pill of IUD) was 2.67.

    Mantha and Zwicker’s team concluded that the lack of increased risk might be due to the fact that progestin-only “mini-pills” contain much lower doses of the hormone than do the more common combined estrogen-progestin pills. But they also called for more studies, saying that the small amount of research on this subject could mean that some studies were biased.

    More information: Mantha, S., Karp, R., Raghavan, V., Terrin, N., Bauer, K.A., and Zwicker, J.I., (2012) Assessing the risks of venous thromboembolic events in women taking progestin-only contraception: a meta-analysis. British Medical Journal 345:4944.

    * Do girls drop out of sports more frequently than boys, and when children or teenagers of either gender quit athletics, why is it? These are a few of the questions addressed by Dr. Jose Francisco Guzman of the University of Valencia and Dr. Kieran Kingston of the University of Wales in a recent paper in the European Journal of Sports Science.

    Following a group of 857 Spanish children ages 11 to 19, all of whom participated in some kind of organized sports, for 19 months, the researchers tried to determine why athletes quit using a model called “self-determination theory.” They looked at how self-motivated the athletes were, how they perceived sports to impact their studies, and how satisfying they found athletics, among other metrics, and pooled athletes by age and gender.

    They found that there was a correlation between an athlete’s level of motivation and their perception of how their sport might hamper their studies; taking it one step further, the researchers guessed that motivated athletes were less likely to consider athletics a drawback to their academic success. Regardless, they found that this combination led athletes to stay in their sports longer.

    Interestingly, the team saw that dropout rate did not change significantly with age or gender, and concluded that their model could be applied generally to assess and predict how many children would stay in sport.

    More information: Guzman, J.F., and Kingston, K., (2012) Prospective study of sport dropout: a motivational analysis as a function of age and gender. European Journal of Sports Science 12:431-442.

    * Summer may be basically over, but a study published in the October issue of the European Journal of Applied Physiology suggests a way for athletes to better cope with heat during training: pre-cooling. But was does that mean? If you’re running a race in the summer, do you have to sit in an ice bath before hitting the start line?

    Because heat stresses the body in many ways and can athletic performance, previous research had suggested preemptively cooling the body to try to curb heat stress. A paper by researchers at Charles Sturt University in Australia, led by Dr. Geoffrey Minett, examined various durations of pre-cooling and their effects not only on athletic performance but also on neuromuscular function.

    The Australians used eight subjects in their study, all men in their mid-20’s who were club-level athletes in team sports. At roughly 91 ºF and 33 % relative humidity, the men were asked to perform two 35-minute exercise sessions separated by 15 minutes of rest. Each session included both maximal sprints and “shuttle running” intervals of 50 seconds, with jogging and walking recovery in between, measuring how far the athletes ran in each 50-second interval.

    Each subject did the workout three times, with randomly assigned pre-cooling treatments: either no cooling, ten minutes of cooling, and twenty minutes of cooling. The treatment itself was complex and comprehensive: an iced towel over the head, neck and shoulders, dunking the hands in cold water up to the wrists, placing ice packs on the thighs, and wearing an ice vest.

    The treatments did have their desired effect. Core body temperature was significantly lower in the 20-minute pre-cooled group compared to the others, and that effect lasted the entire workout. Other physiological variables, such as heart rate and blood pH or glucose levels, were unaffected. Muscles, however, also showed the benefits of pre-cooling: the maximum voluntary contractions (MVC), in this case the force applied by the right knee extensor in response to an electric stimulus, were higher both mid- and post-exercise in the pre-cooled athletes.

    All of this led to performance increases for the 20-minute pre-cooling treatment. The times of the maximal sprints in the second bout of a session declined more drastically in athletes having only the control (8.82 %) or ten-minute (6.95 %) pre-cooling treatment, whereas the 20-minute pre-cooled athletes declined a modest 6.09 % during the second bout. Distances covered during the shuttle-running portion of the workout were significantly higher for the 20-minute athletes as well.

    The researchers concluded not only that pre-cooling was beneficial, but that the dose was important: ten minutes of the treatment did not produce the same performance increase shown by twenty minutes of cooling.

    More information: Minett, G.M., Duffield, R., Marino, F.E., Portus, M., (2012) Duration-dependent response of mixed-method pre-cooling for intermittent-sprint exercise in heat. European Journal of Applied Physiology 112:3655–3666.

    * Publishing in the same journal online ahead of the print edition, ew: score one for icky science. In an attempt to understand why athletes so often exhibit signs of asthma or general bronchial constriction, a Madrid-based research team looked at what the athletes coughed up. Sputum!

    Lead author Dr. Beatriz Sastre of the IIS-Fundacion Jimenez-Dıaz Immunology Department and five Spanish colleagues rounded up 68 subjects, divided between athletes and non-athletes and asthmatics and non-asthmatics; the athletes were Spain’s Olympians from 2008. All the subjects were put through breathing “challenges”, which meant chemically inducing a constricted airway. Between the asthmatic and non-asthmatic athletes, the researchers actually didn’t find any difference in inflammation of the airways.

    In the sputum samples, the researchers found that athletes had expelled more bronchial skin cells – meaning that there were injuries to their airways that left them spewing tissue. They also tested the presence of several kinds of white blood cells, finding that healthy control subjects expelled fewer of three different kinds of white cells (eosinophils, neutrophils, and basophils) than athletes and asthmatics; athletes showed higher levels of neutrophils and basophils than even asthmatic non-athletes. Basophils, for example, initiate inflammation.

    Given the lack of inflammation difference between asthmatic and non-asthmatic athletes, and the fact that athletes seem to have more epithelial airway injuries and also more white blood cells which promote inflammation, the study concludes that exercise can induce airway difficulties in all athletes – even the best-trained ones.

    More information: Sastre, B., Fernandez-Nieto, M., Rodriguez-Nieto, M.J., Aguado, E., Sastre, J., and del Pozo, V., (2012) Distinctive bronchial inflammation status in athletes: basophils, a new player. European Journal of Applied Physiology

  • Canadian Anti-Doping Efforts Move Forward with Blood Passport Program

    Canadian Anti-Doping Efforts Move Forward with Blood Passport Program

    Between April 2010 and March 2011, the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport (CCES) administered 3,708 urine tests and 436 blood tests in its efforts to curb doping by Canadian athletes.

    In the last quarter of that year, skiers and biathletes faced 75 urine and 51 blood tests – all of which came back clean. 34 Canadian athletes in various sports are currently banned from competition due to doping violations, and not a single skier or biathlete is among them.

    But like the rest of their countrymen, these athletes are being enrolled in a new CCES testing regimen, called the Athlete Biological Passport program or ABP.

    When athletes are tested their numbers will be logged in a “passport”, allowing future investigators to track measurements like blood hemoglobin over time. Even without a positive test for a controlled substance, uncharacteristic spikes in these markers could be used to prosecute doping cases.

    The passport system will be added as athletes submit to traditional tests, so it shouldn’t prove to be any more inconvenient than the current system, and some coaches even hope that it will lead to less-frequent testing for clean, low-risk athletes.

    First: Why For, WADA? Because of FIS…

    The concept of a biological passport has been discussed for years, in part because doping strategies evolve quickly and testers don’t always know what they are looking for. With passport programs, the idea is that anti-doping agencies can look at patterns in blood markers – like red blood cell count or hemoglobin – which indicate that an athlete is doing something to change the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood. Even if they can’t detect a banned substance, this is often enough evidence to prove a rules violation.

    The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) approved guidelines for passport programs in December 2009.

    “The passport concept is based on the knowledge of drug effects or side effects in medical practice,” WADA wrote in its guidelines. “From this perspective, the substance itself is not detected but rather its effects on the body become apparent. Typically, the effect of the drug remains perceptible and detectable longer in the body than the substance itself.”

    WADA itself generally does not perform doping control tests. Instead, they assist and monitor two classes of anti-doping efforts. The first is by the international governing bodies for each sport, and the second is by the national anti-doping agencies in each country.

    Skiing was one of the first sports to adopt the passport program, and in fact did so long before WADA.

    “FIS has had an athletes biological passport programme implemented since 2001,” FIS Anti-Doping Administrator Sarah Fussek wrote in an e-mail to FasterSkier.

    Why? Endurance sports have a high incidence of blood doping and erythropoietin (EPO) use, but such violations are hard to detect analytically.

    “When I took on the role as FIS Anti-Doping Expert, the EPO test only recognized two certified pharmaceutically produced EPOs,” Rasmus Damsgaard said in a 2010 interview with FIS. “However, it was common knowledge that 100 not registered EPO’s were available on the black market.”

    Even if he was sure that an athlete was doping, Damsgaard couldn’t necessarily do much about it. After looking at samples, he could see unusual blood profiles and sometimes even detect a black-market EPO. But only an analytical finding of one of those two varieties of EPO could lead to a sanction through WADA.

    “Over recent years, doping regimes have become much more scientifically planned and have taken full advantage of the weaknesses in traditional protocols with all available pharmaceutical resources,” WADA noted in its 2009 guidelines.

    WADA knew that it had a problem on its hands, and when Damsgaard urged the international agency to change its guidelines, it did. EPO sanctions are now easier to hand out for a variety of reasons, including more sophisticated tests. But an increasing number of doping cases have relied on “non-analytical positives” drawn from concepts like using an individual hemoglobin upper limit for each athlete instead of a single limit for the entire testing pool.

    Since its implementation, the blood passport program has become ubiquitous in skiing, with FIS conducting 1530 blood passport samples on skiers and 238 in nordic combined over the course of the 2010-11 season.

    Back to Canada

    But while FIS has been covering its own bases, national anti-doping agencies are required to shoulder the burden as well. Many do not have the resources available to an international federation, and also face challenges because they need to work with athletes in a variety of sports who might resort to completely different drugs requiring many separate testing protocols.

    Why are two sets of doping tests necessary? The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) handed out 38 doping violations in 2010 and the CCES sanctioned 30 of its own athletes. Being monitored by two agencies ensures that more athletes are kept clean.

    And while it might seem like being tested by both a sport federation and a national agency is too much to ask of busy athletes, FIS coordinates testing with each country’s organization to minimize duplicate testing.

    Canada believes that it is one of the first countries to implement a biological passport program, and called it a “turning point” in the fight against doping.

    “We are one of the first national anti-doping agencies in the world to implement the guidelines in their entirety, and the guidelines are incorporated directly into the rules of the Canadian Anti-Doping Program,” CCES Anti-Doping Operations Manager Matthew Fedoruk wrote in an e-mail. “There are currently approximately 20 agencies in the world including international sport federations and anti-doping agencies operating under the WADA guidelines.”

    Because CCES is following WADA guidelines, their testing program will look a lot like the FIS system. In Canada, all of an athlete’s doping control data will be compiled electronically and after each test the agency will assess whether an athlete shows deviation from his or her own pre-established baselines in nine markers, including hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red blood cell count.

    Statistically speaking, these baselines can’t be established immediately – as more tests are conducted, the reference range will become more apparent. For this and other reasons, the passport program will not replace CCES’s traditional anti-doping measures, but rather complement them. And passport programs have already proven to be effective when paired with substance-specific testing.

    “Longitudinal blood profiling in the area of anti-doping is not that new a concept, as some federations such as FIS, ICU, and IAAF have had passport-like programs for a number of years,” Fedoruk wrote.

    More and more doping trials have relied on this sort of evidence, and CCES hopes to add to the weapons in its arsenal in order to work more effectively.

    “The recent UCI cycling cases before the Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS) have shown the scientific and legal validity of the WADA ABP Guidelines,” Fedoruk wrote. “Athletes have been sanctioned for abnormal blood profiles which have been shown to be the result of blood doping (i.e. use of autologous blood transfusions or pharmaceuticals that boost the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood (e.g. EPO)) without the actual presence of those substances being detected.”

    Reactions from Coaches and Athletes

    While Fedoruk could not comment directly on which athletes had already been enrolled in the program, he indirectly indicated that both skiers and biathletes had begun the passport process.

    “Due to the risk of endurance athletes using blood doping substances and methods, the ABP program is primarily focused on endurance sports,” he wrote. “Athletes may be included in the program at anytime.”

    Chris Lindsay, High Performance Director for Biathlon Canada, thought that his athletes probably already had passports, although he could not say for sure because CCES doesn’t provide that information.

    “I suspect this means that they will be putting athletes on the passport program as testing occurs,” Lindsay told FasterSkier. “I can say that the majority of tests in the past six months have been urine and blood, which means that theoretically every athlete on the team could be ‘passported’ already.”

    Athletes confirmed that hunch.

    “Yup, I’ve been involved in the program already,” said biathlete Brendan Green.

    In both biathlon and skiing, coaches supported the ABP concept.

    “I do think it’s a step in the right direction,” said Cross Country Canada Head Coach Justin Wadsworth. “They’ve know for a long time blood parameters can only vary so much over any given time frame, and if this can be used to help slow down doping in some way it can only be good. Do I think this will be revolutionary? Probably not, because it’s been in play with other sports for some time, but again, it all helps.”

    Lindsay said that Biathlon Canada supported any program which would reduce doping in his sport, but also had some more specific praise of the program. He hoped that the passport program would lead to less frequent tests for athletes deemed low-risk.

    “What most people don’t understand is that our athletes are randomly tested in the training environment,” Lindsay said. “These tests are not infrequent – and often cause major disruptions to the planned training. Testing can take an hour or more, and when you arrive at training planning on doing an hour of roller skiing, an hour of shooting, an hour in the gym, then eating lunch, then going to physio, then meeting with your coach, then going for another roller ski shifting everything by an hour is a big deal.

    “Moreover when just a few athletes in your training group are tested it divides the day’s activities and burdens the coaches with managing two groups instead of one.”

    What About the U.S.?

    Since USADA has never publicized a passport program of their own, FasterSkier contacted USADA General Counsel Travis Tygart to find out whether they were considering a program like the implemented in Canada. Were the northern neighbors getting a leg up on anti-doping efforts?

    The answer, actually, was no.

    “I can confirm that we do both blood and urine testing longitudinally on our athletes,” Tygart said in a phone interview.

    So while USADA has yet to announce a biological passport program, they are in fact keeping track of some of the same data that such a system would monitor.

    Because USADA hasn’t spilled the beans, U.S. athletes and coaches aren’t necessarily aware of this (just as FasterSkier was not until talking with Tygart). US Ski Team Head Development Coach Pete Vordenberg wasn’t familiar with the Canadian program, but said he supported efforts like it.

    “I am absolutely into measures taken to make sure our sport and all sport is healthy, fair and that everyone follows the rules of the game,” Vordenberg wrote in an e-mail. “I am absolutely into showing youth athletes that it is possible to win at the top level of sport and be a clean, ethical and healthy athlete and so I am into proving that we are training, competing and living completely clean, ethically and healthily.”

    The reason that USADA doesn’t publicize its longitudinal testing program is that, like many other aspects of anti-doping work, the agency believes that the more cheaters know about a testing regimen, the easier it is for them to cheat.

    “We didn’t want the athletes to be able to easily beat the test,” Tygart said.

    But there have been indicators that USADA is keeping track of this data, including the Michelle Collins case in 2004. The former world champion sprinter was convicted as part of the BALCO investigation despite the fact that there was never a positive analytical finding. While she later admitted to doping, a large part of the case was built on blood and urine tests which USADA had performed.

    Tygart said that for any country, a passport-type system is valuable.

    “It’s one additional tool,” he wrote. “It’s not the be all end all. But it’s very important and it’s a good program… and it’s important to be willing to follow up on a non-analytical finding.”