Anti-doping efforts require game of catch-up with ‘metrics of intelligence’

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More than 6,000 athletes are in Toronto to compete at the Pan Am Games and simple math shows not nearly all of them will be drug tested. Budgets don't allow it. About 1,900 anti-doping tests, both blood and urine samples, will be collected.

One of the most encouraging signs of progress in the pursuit of drug cheats came at the 2012 London Olympics – not from the smattering of athletes caught during the Games, but from the 30-plus competitors who never arrived in the first place because they raised red flags in pre-competition tests.

The chase to catch up to sophisticated dopers cannot rely on having medallists pee in a cup while their victory is still fresh – despite what the Games' cheeky anti-doping hashtag, #PeeIsGold, might lead some to believe. It is a year-round, 24-hour-a-day game of cat-and-mouse that requires the close co-operation of sporting and anti-doping bodies around the world, and the intelligence to know where to target finite resources.

"The best way to deal with this issue [at] a major event is to do it before," Sir Craig Reedie, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said in an interview hours before the Pan Am opening ceremonies.

A former competitive badminton player who hails from Stirling, Scotland, Reedie was chosen in 2013 to lead the body that organizes world anti-doping efforts. WADA's annual budget is just shy of $30-million (U.S.), half from governments and the rest from the International Olympic Committee. It has conducted $65-million in anti-doping research since it was set up in 1999.

And "it's not nearly enough," he says.

"We could do more, we'd like to do more," but many countries' funding has been hampered by an "age of austerity," he said Friday.

On the bright side, the $4-million anti-doping budget set aside for Pan Am 2015 seems "perfectly reasonable." And he has plenty of praise for the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport – which contracts out anti-doping controls during the Games – as well as Christian Ayotte, the respected director of the Montreal lab that will handle the samples.

Yet as clever and agile as testers may be, he knows they are counting on a vastly disparate network of national federations to have weeded out the worst offenders in advance, in part by tracking banned substances through customs, associations with suspicious coaches or doctors, or missed tests.

"Quite clearly, there are some countries across the world in the whole of the Olympic movement where the doping efforts, their anti-doping measures, are less complex than you would see here," Reedie said. "And that's almost entirely a basis of resources."

As an antidote to such concerns, Toronto 2015's anti-doping team will use a range of "metrics of intelligence" to decide when, where and who to test beyond medallists, said Matthew Koop, the anti-doping lead for this year's Games.

Sporting delegations will speak up if they feel an athlete could be at risk of doping; world rankings will be used to flag lower-ranked competitors who excel out of nowhere for extra attention; special attention is paid to countries known to have weak or developing anti-doping programs; and biological passports, a new method used to flag abnormalities in an athlete's blood or hormonal levels, can also be scrutinized.

"We do what we can. And we know we're not going to catch all the cheaters," Koop said. "But we definitely try to design the program in such a way that the athletes know that we're here and we're testing."

Perhaps a more potent deterrent, however, is the practice of storing samples for retesting, which is now allowed up to 10 years later, and Reedie hopes Pan Am samples will be stored for later analysis.

Regulations have also evolved to allow athletes to be tested any time, day or night, shedding the 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. window that often limited testing at past events. That is crucial to combatting so-called micro-dosing, whereby an athlete takes frequent, tiny doses of a drug so its traces will leave his or her system in a matter of hours.

Yet Reedie believes micro-dosing is still confined mostly to "specific drugs in specific sports." He brushed aside a report by BBC reporter Mark Daly – who claims he micro-dosed the blood-booster EPO over 14 weeks under a doctor's supervision without triggering limits in his biological passport – as "some Scottish guy" who had shown no scientific evidence to back up his story.

The bigger problem, Reedie said, remains the ever-expanding list of illegal substances, many of them manufactured in countries such as China.

"In order to test for a new designer steroid that has come onto the market, we need to have a sample of that so that we know what to look for," Koop said.

Keeping pace has proved tricky. WADA and the IOC have built relationships with pharmaceutical companies to stay informed about new drugs coming to market. After Roche Pharma told authorities of a new form of EPO, known as CERA, a test was quietly developed that caught several cyclists at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Tour de France.

"We are always in the catch-up mode," Reedie said. "We're running a little bit behind. But not so much so that people should think that they can carry on doing what they're doing and get away with it."