The brave new world of gene doping

LockerRoom: The other day, with nothing but a bottle of cooking sherry with which to bridge the gap between The Jeremy Kyle Show in the morning and Richard and Judy in the afternoon, I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness, when suddenly, for no apparent reason, Escape to Victory popped up on the television.

Michael Caine, Sly Stallone, John Wark, Pele and the boys! Playing footie in a WW2 prison camp! Essentially the worst film ever made (the suspense is rather drained away for anyone blessed with the literacy skills to be able to read the title), Escape to Victory suffers nonetheless from those symptoms which make virtually all sports movies indigestible. Sport in the movies is uplifting and redemptive and all sugary. Goodness triumphs.

Why does nobody ever make a movie about drugs in sport?

I suspect the theme itself tests badly with audiences. Most people are happy to buy the illusions which big-time sport peddles. News that things ain't as they appear to be doesn't go down well with the folks.

Sport is the last arena where you can insist on your right to be deluded. Thus, certain moments from the swimming pool at Atlanta '96 are still treasured by many Irish people, and you would rather wear an Al Qaeda T-shirt in most America towns than ask a tricky question about Lance Armstrong.

There's a good movie to be made about the entire drugs-in-sport business though. In Turin this week, drug testers pulled some stunts which have scared the cattle. American skier Steven Nyman was about to give an interview in the TV area just past the finish line when an official leaned over the fence and asked Steve to sign a form submitting himself to an unannounced test.

Now, for anyone with a memory stretching back even to the summer of 2004 and those poor, misfortunate Greek sprinters and their tragic motorcycle accident, this seems an entirely reasonable thing for drug testers to do. The reaction has been strong, however. Incursions into the TV zone are sacrilegious.

"He was standing beside the RAI cameraman and said to Steve, 'Sign here'. I stopped Steve and said let's take care of business first," recounted US team spokesman Marc Habermann. Damn right too.

Habermann then had a quick word with International Ski Federation official Mike Kertesz. Mr Kertesz was also shocked to his ski boots. He requested that the anti-doping official not operate in the television area.

"I have no idea what his accreditation said or where he was allowed to go," said Kertesz. "But he was standing next to the highest-paying TV company at the Olympic Games and it wasn't the ideal spot for him to be asking Nyman to sign a form . . . I redirected him out of the TV compound."

Why though? As a viewer, I'd like to see evidence of drug testing. I'd like a ticker tape scrolling underneath the action telling me who's been tested, how often they've been tested and what the results are. I'd like to be informed of those things which don't show up in testing.

I'd like to see guys and gals saying, "Sorry, I can't evade you're questions just now, I have to go for a drugs test."

The whole point of getting the athletes to sign the form as soon as possible after they complete their event is that, once they have signed, they have only an hour to submit blood and urine samples. The hope is that this minimises the chances of the athlete gobbling down a masking agent which would muddy the waters and beat the test.

A smart athlete, though, will know the TV area is off limits to testers, and the longer they take sanctuary in there offering clichés to the cameras the longer they have for the masking agent to settle in.

Next question please. Puh-lease! Anyone?

Of course, if your black-market pharmacist is offering you masking drugs in this day and age, then you don't need to look at the rankings to know you're not among the elite. It's time to change your pharmacist of choice. Masking agents are for absolute beginners and those too parsimonious or too scared to get with the newer programmes.

In Turin this week what they are dreading is evidence of gene tampering. Almost as much as they dread finding some evidence of gene tampering, they dread finding no evidence at all. They know as surely as night follows day gene tampering is out there.

If we laugh at the suggestion of having a scrolling ticker tape underneath pictures of the Olympic events to give us a fuller picture of what really goes on in sport, we only have to cast our minds back to the old East Germany. Instantly we are haunted by the ghosts of Games past. We were all wide-eyed believers back then.

In Germany in the past few weeks, they have been absorbing evidence that a track coach who has been accused of supplying his primo dope to minors has also been dabbling in a little gene doping. A search of the computer emails of Thomas Springstein (he's a former coach to Katrin Krabbe and Grit Breuer, both suspended for using the rather quaint steroid clenbuterol in 1992) uncovered references to repoxygen, a drug developed in Britain which (and I'm quoting here from other people's work) "delivers the gene for erythropoietin (EPO) to muscle cells in a vector configuration that brings the gene under the control of an oxygen-sensitive gene switch".

So you don't take synthetic EPO anymore and risk getting caught. You alter your own gene configuration and make your own unnatural amounts of EPO and supply as much oxygen and red blood cells as you like to your muscles. Tested on mice, the drug brought about a 30 per cent increase in body mass.

Apart from the news that mice have found a way to get bigger, this is frightening for two other reasons. First, due to commercial imperatives, repoxygen is stalled at the pre-clinical development stage with its manufacturing firm Biomedica in Britain. Springstein, though, was not just aware of the product, but his email suggested he needed to get some before last Christmas. Are the leaks from above-board pharmacies to black-market cheaters really that bad?

Second, gene therapy will be very, very difficult to detect and could have catastrophic long-term effects on athletes. Repoxygen is designed to allow the body to switch the gene on and off in response to low oxygen levels, but nobody really knows what the long-term effects of usage will be.

Nobody knows, but that, of course, will deter nobody.

In Germany these days sports fans scarcely know where to look if they want to avoid disillusion. Running parallel to the Springstein case is an action being taken by Karen König, a European swimming champ in 1984. Her action states that from the age of 11 she was given pills by coaches who told her that she was taking only vitamins to help recovery after training.

König's claim is modest. She seeks just €10,000 from the German Olympic Committee, but her case is important as it will open the floodgates for more than 137 other athletes to also sue.

Meanwhile, in Hamburg, a hearing is starting in the case of 190 former East German athletes who are suing the pharmaceutical company Jenapharm, which manufactured the oral-turinabol steroid that many young East German athletes were given.

These lingering cases from survivors of the East German regime are harrowing. Former athletes living in chronic pain, some with liver failure, some with bad heart conditions, others whose genes mutated to the extent that a sex change was the easiest way to cope. And these are the survivors.

We're on a new frontier right now with cheating. Gene therapy will change everything and the consequences down the road could make East Germany look like the sporting paradise so many people pretended it was.

The important thing though, the really important thing, is that drug testers shouldn't be allowed near the TV area. That would be highly inappropriate, wouldn't it?