KEY POINTS:
It's an Olympic contest that won't produce a clear winner. If drug-testers uncover a raft of doped athletes, the games may be condemned as a farce; but if few cheats are exposed, the dopers may be deemed to have escaped.
It is the catch-22 of anti-doping. News of Ben Johnson's positive steroid test cast a pall over the 1988 Olympics. There was no such instant sensation 12 years later in Sydney. The world had to wait another seven years for that.
Marion Jones began serving a six-month prison sentence in March for lying to US federal agents about taking performance-enhancing drugs and a cheque fraud scheme involving the father of her son, sprinter Tim Montgomery, also banned for doping.
Jones, who was stripped of three gold medals and two bronzes from the 2000 Sydney Olympics, will watch these games from a Texas prison.
Drug-testing at the Sydney games was billed as the best available and yet testers had little chance of catching Jones. She was on a designer steroid (THG, tetrahydrogestrinone) and a human growth hormone, neither of which were detectable, plus the blood expander EPO, for which testing was inadequate.
She is a metaphor not just for the corruptive potential of unbridled ambition but for the challenge facing doping detection scientists. She was a doper who was among the most-tested athletes in the world and yet she never failed a test.
So what might we expect from the Beijing Olympics?
The recent run of positive drug tests may have sufficiently unnerved some dopers for them to stop, says leading sports drug scientist Dr Robin Parisotto.
"And then there will be the athletes who are pretty wise and will use the drugs up until the Olympics start and will then stop so they are cleared out of their system."
EPO, for example, can be detected in urine for only three or four days, says Parisotto, a member of the Australian team that developed the first EPO test.
More tests are being conducted than ever before (4500 are planned for this Olympics, 25 per cent more than in Athens, 90 per cent more than in Sydney) and the proportion of positive results show no sign of diminishing.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge admits the Games could yield up to 40 positive drugs tests.
"I expect there to be between 30-40 positive tests based on an extrapolation from Athens in 2004 where there were 26 from 3500 tests and here there will be 4500 tests," Rogge says.
"If we have fewer I will be extremely glad because that would suggest that with all the testing over the past four years there is a deterrent effect."
Rogge said he was disappointed that drug use in sport was still a major problem, but recognised that there will always be cheats.
"I hate doping, but it would be wrong for us to be Utopians. There will always be criminality in the world. There are 500 million people practicing sports in the world; there are not 500 million saints."
What lies beyond such figures are known drugs and methods for which there is no adequate test, and drugs that may be being used that are currently unknown as was the case with THG until a leaked sample enabled scientists to develop a test.
"There is a possibility there are other designer steroids out there that won't be detectable," says Parisotto. "It is just a matter of changing a carbon atom here or there to muck up the profile of a particular steroid."
Drugs under clinical trial is an area plumbed by athletes looking for an illicit edge. Some drugs are so new they turn up in athletes' samples before they make it on the banned list.
A new drug found in last month's Tour de France was detectable because the World Anti-Doping Authority (Wada) gained the co-operation of Swiss manufacturer Roche, which included a marker.
The drug was a third-generation form of EPO called CERA Continuous Erythropoiesis Receptor Activator, designed to treat anaemia and renal failure. It had been available for medical use in parts of Europe for only a few months.
It is longer lasting than regular EPO, requiring only monthly doses, thus reducing risk of detection. Among cyclists caught was Riccardo Ricco, winner of two mountainous stages. Ricco admitted using CERA, named his supplier and gave testers some advice. Of 10 samples he gave during the Tour de France, only two were positive. "In theory all the tests should have been positive," said Ricco. "The detection method is not efficient to 100 per cent, as the effect of the drug lasts one month."
This shows how crucial timing is in catching doped athletes and justifies regular and repeated testing of targeted athletes. There are, says Parisotto, many "false negatives".
"It takes time for the body to accumulate, metabolise and excrete the drugs. It's going to be negative for a while and then it will turn positive and then it will go back to negative again. "
Now it is known there is a test for CERA, unprincipled athletes may already be seeking the next generation EPO (Hematide), which is soon to be released.
New methods of delivering drugs, such as tattooing, pose problems for testers. Researchers at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg showed this year that delivering drugs by tattooing was 16 times more effective than injecting them intramuscularly or intravenously. That enables smaller doses to be used and lengthens the absorption rate of the drug which in turn lessens the risk of detection.
What is encouraging is that the effort to catch dopers is now a serious endeavour. The biggest advance in anti-doping came when the IOC handed over the reins to Wada in 2001. "Immediately you cut out that conflict of interest between protecting the sport or the image of the Olympics and outing the cheats," says Parisotto. "Wada's sole brief is to catch cheats and so they can move ahead untethered."
Also important was the move to test blood as well as urine, which gave the doping police a second string to their bow. Parisotto says the success of that is in the figures _ almost 90 positive cases worldwide of blood doping in the past seven years. "That's more than all the positive cases for all drugs in the Olympics since [doping was banned in] 1968."
A third move in the right direction is the announcement by the IOC that samples will be kept for eight years for assessment as new tests are developed.
Add the trend for greater co-operation between anti-doping agencies and authorities such as customs and police, and of the agencies to investigate and target suspected dopers, and the fight has never been stronger.
But it faces a conveyor belt of new drugs and methods ripe to be hijacked and an endless supply of athletes prepared to take the risks. "The inquiries never stop," Dr Lee Sweeney, a University of Pennsylvania scientist researching cures for muscle-wasting disease, told an interviewer recently. The calls from athletes, coaches and trainers began four years ago when news broke that he had used a gene controlling growth hormone to bulk up his "Schwarzenegger mice".
"They ask if they can be treated," says Sweeney, who is now increasing muscle-mass in dogs by 20 per cent by using a gene which inhibits myostatin production, of these callers. "They're ready to volunteer for any experiment. Some even say they'll pay me."
Professor Ron Evans, of the Salk Institute in San Diego, got a similar response after his study into an "exercise pill" _ which could help diabetics and the obese _ got widespread publicity a week ago. His in-box filled up with emails from sports people, including a few saying "I have the compound, how much should I take."
Mice given the pill _ a drug containing isolated DNA _ ran faster and for longer; one study showed a 44 per cent improvement in running time, another more than 70 per cent. The treated mice became leaner even when fed a high fat diet.
"We're on the edge of an era where we're going to create new drugs that can simulate exercise," says Evans. "That genie is out of the bottle. We can anticipate that sports is the most likely place where we are going to see abuse. That could now happen very quickly."
Evans' team made a urine and blood test for their drug and have shared it with Wada but that is not common practise.
Gene technology is explained in numerous scientific articles and is relatively easy to implement. Theodore Friedmann, of the University of California, who heads Wada's Gene Doping Panel, estimates that there are thousands of labs globally with people trained in molecular biology.
"There is so much money in sports," he told the Miami Herald, "put a couple of unscrupulous people together, and it wouldn't surprise me if an athlete attempted gene doping."
This is despite most of the hundreds of gene therapy trials over the past 20 years having been unsuccessful or inconclusive.
Wada sensed several years ago which way the wind was blowing and in 2003 banned "non-therapeutic use of genes, genetic elements and/or cells that have the capacity to enhance athletic performance". It has backed that with money, having committed a quarter of its research budget (US$7.8m) for 2004-07 to 21 projects intended to develop ways of detecting it. Now a further $6.5m is up for grabs.
A sting operation conducted over the past 16 months that resulted in the doping suspension last week of seven female Russian track and field athletes, five of them Olympians, suggests some athletes still employ old fashioned means of beating drug tests.
The women, who include Yelena Soboleva, ranked one in the world this year in 800 and 1500 metres, and Tatyana Tomashova, who won a silver medal in the 1500 at the Athens Olympics in 2004, are alleged to have used urine from other people to beat doping tests. Suspicious anti-doping officials compared samples taken from the women in 2007 with those taken in recent months and found their DNA did not match.
The number of suspensions, and the varied events involved, raised the possibility of corruption and systematic attempts by coaches or officials to undermine drug-testing protocols. The world athletics body (IAAF) suspects the athletes were tipped off by officials processing visa applications of the drug testers.
On the eve of the Games, Wada chairman John Fahey warned that the public would "desert sport" if they continued to believe it is not clean.
"In the blue riband event of athletics [100m] a number of offenders have been successful there and I hope and pray we do not have another event of that nature."
However, Fahey also said that he was confident that Wada was getting increasingly smart in the way it targeted certain athletes for dope tests.
The revelation that the four members of the Spanish road cycling team had given a total of eight tests between them since arriving in Beijing was thus a little unfortunate.
If the suspicion is to be removed, it would also help if Wada had greater powers of intervention, yet the laboratory handling Games' samples is run largely by Chinese technicians (only 18 of 130 people working in the lab are not Chinese), restricting Wada to an observer role. Wada will submit an observers' report at the end of the Games, but if it suspects any foul play during the course of the Olympics, its hands are tied.
With China's questionable history on doping and the ardent wish of its totalitarian government to top the medal table and to avoid the titanic embarrassment that would ensue if a positive drug test was reported for one of its stars, it makes sense to question the independence and transparency of the testing system.
Running on air ... and dope
September 24, 1988, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was the fastest man on Earth and just a few strides from Olympic glory. Two days later, his scorching 9.79s 100m dash was wiped from the record books and he was stripped of the gold medal.
Johnson's became the most reviled drugs cheat in Olympics history.
But what is not recalled about the race in Seoul 20 years ago is that two other track stars, captured here by the Herald's Paul Estcourt that afternoon, also tested positive for drugs at some point in their careers, prompting one writer to label the race "the dirtiest in history".
Carl Lewis, running second _ Johnson's great American rival _ failed three drugs tests during the United States Olympic trials in 1988. Documents showed Lewis, who was awarded the gold medal, tested positive for banned stimulants found in cold medications. The athlete, who won nine Olympic golds, always insisted he unknowingly ingested stimulants in a herbal remedy and had the test results overturned.
Under international rules at the time, Lewis should have received a ban but it turned out he was just one of more than 100 athletes who were allowed to escape censure and thus compete in the Games.
Britain's Linford Christie (pictured second from left) was elevated from third to second after Johnson was disqualified. In later years, Christie was banned for using steroids. Another runner, Dennis Mitchell, came fourth and was banned in 1998 for two years after a test showed high levels of testosterone.
The US sprinter Calvin Smith (far left, wearing number five) won the bronze.
Smith never failed a drugs test and later said: "I should have been the gold medallist".
