Tonight, we're looking at the science behind the news.
In our next installment of the science behind the headlines, supported by Inspiring Australia,
the Australian Science Media Center, and of course, RIOs.
Remember that tonight, we are live streaming this particular event, so you will actually
be able to follow on the discussion, whether you are in the audience here or if you're
at home, by following Twitter or the chat room.
If you are going to use Twitter, please use the hashtags RIOs and Drugs in Sport.
Tonight, we're discussing the science behind the recent revelations of drug taking that
now seems to be endemic across all sports.
In January this year, Lance Armstrong sat down with Oprah Winfrey, and in five yeses,
he admitted to cheating, doping, lying, bullying, and fraud.
His confession cast shockwaves through cycling, then sport more generally with accusations
of doping in other sports starting to trickle forth.
In February this year, the Australian Crime Commission released a report into Australian
Sport indicating, among other things, that drug taking was taking place in Australian
sport and by Australian athletes.
This controversy is the biggest shake-up in sport in Australia since the introduction
of one-day cricket.
Both AFL and NRL leagues are reeling from the publicity of their highly suspicious supplement
regimes that have prompted some teams to go into damage control.
Essendon Football Club has sacked its sports scientist, and the Cronulla Sharks have sacked
everyone, including the coach, although he's subsequently being rehired.
Tonight, we ask, what are the athletes taking, what are the effects, and what can be done
to stop it?
But what are we testing for, and how are we doing it?
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, why is taking a pill considered cheating
at all?
All big questions to consider, and to help me to do that tonight, I'd like to introduce
my panel, Doctor of Exercise Physiology and Head of the School of Human Movement Studies
at Charles Sturt University, Professor Robert Roebergs, the registered physiologist, I'll
go with psychologist, senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales and editor-in-chief
of the scientific journal Performance, Enhancement and Health, Dr Jason Mazanoff, and from a media
officer from the Australian Science Media Centre, Anna Cadine, would you please give
my panel a big round of applause?
Also, be aware that those of you in the audience here, as you're watching these clips, there
will be some blank spots in clips where we couldn't get licensing for those particular
shots of these clips.
Without further ado, I'd like to play the first of those clips so you can see what I
mean.
This is an interview with Tyler Hamilton and Lee Sayles from the 730 Report.
Please play clip one.
Let's go back to Oprah Winfrey's interview with Lance Armstrong, and in both cases,
these athletes had been taking EPO, testosterone, and had been blood doping.
So, Robert, what were they doing?
What is EPO?
What is the testosterone?
What is blood doping?
Well, let's just go back just one step, right?
If you're an elite athlete and you're involved in a contact sport or you're involved in a
sport that's kind of clocked by distance or speed, power is everything, and for an athlete
power is how rapidly you can generate force by your contracting muscles.
So we can look at sport and athletes in the context that, well, if you're looking at very
explosive type activities like in our contact sports, they're looking at muscle bulk connected
to power.
If you're doing an endurance-related sport, you're looking at the ability of muscles to
generate power repeatedly over time for long periods of time.
So if you're looking at the muscle size connection, you're talking about anabolic agents, which
is the testosterone and the growth hormone.
And now today, we have analogs that improve the body's response to a given amount of endogenous
or within the body, anabolic steroidal growth hormone.
We're talking about certain anabolic agents that can now actually mimic some of these
hormones, and that was released by the ACC report.
On the endurance side, EPO is the abbreviation for erythropolidin.
It's a hormone synthesized in the kidney by specialized cells.
Its role is to actually stimulate increased red blood cell production.
It's very potent, it's potentially dangerous, and there have been athletes who have died
over the years for abusing EPO.
Blood doping has been around for 30, 40 years.
It's been well known in the cycling fraternity.
It's where an athlete has blood removed from their body anywhere from half a litre to a
litre.
And then several weeks later, once the body's recovered from that blood loss and they have
normal blood volume again and normal red blood cell mass, part of that removed blood is re-infused
back into the body, and it raises red blood cell content and the ability to transport
oxygen to the working muscles, and that enables them to have more power for prolonged periods
of time.
And they're all very, very effective, as has been established by research.
I also heard that with blood doping, you can use parts of CARV's blood.
Is this true?
Can we go trans species here?
I guess there's been some rumors and some evidence that, yes, some regular league players
have been doing that.
That hasn't been really researched, but certainly there's evidence that, yes, there are some
components of animal blood that can also provide some benefit on the anabolic side.
All right, so Jason, would you say that there is definitely a benefit of taking these things?
I mean, they are all normal parts of the human body, aren't they?
The question about whether or not performance enhancing drugs are actually performance enhancing
is actually a lot more vex than we think.
So if, for example, look at the fine specimen you have here of an athlete, as an athlete
I might get great academic.
If you load me up on human growth hormone and anabolic steroids, I'm not going to go
and win a medal.
We have to remember that it is not the be all and end all of performance.
There's a paper which came out in the International Journal of Drug Policy just yesterday, which
is a linear regression about what effect has doping had on the times in the 100 metres
final of the Olympics, the men's final, the famous 1988 race being the starting point,
and there is absolutely no effect for doping.
They haven't been able to find one.
Now there could be sampling problems in there and they note that.
But what they've shown is that the change in running time over the period in question
is as would be expected, irrespective of whether you introduce anti-doping laws or anything,
which either means that the drugs were already there, or that they're actually having no
effect.
And the conclusion that they draw is that the drugs that are being used for the 100
metres final in the Olympics don't actually have an ergogenic effect.
So if that's the case, why are they being taken?
As a psychologist, I'd love to say that it's because athletes feel that they need to.
There's no question that these drugs do have some kind of impact.
If you think about the tour, it's an incredibly long race and if you get a really minute
percentage increase over that entire race, 1% could be 30 kilometres.
So they do have some effect.
It's just not as big as we might think it is.
But when you're talking about elite sport, the margins are so small that even those
tiny margins can make a big difference.
I've got a comment there.
So anybody who was watching Lance Armstrong during his reign in the Tour de France, most
exercise physiologists would have said, this is just unbelievable.
So when you get elite athletes and you take them up and have them compared against each
other, the physiology doesn't explain performance.
Things like psychology does, perhaps the recovery interval, other aspects can really better explain
performance between elite athletes.
But then when you get Lance and being all that he was on, there were times in the races
and I remember vividly the time when he got thrown off his bike by his handlebar, hooking
onto a handbag or something, and he got left behind and he just powered up and to have
that degree of separation at the elite end of an athlete's scale just speaks of supplementation.
So you were on to Lance years ago, were you?
Well, I was quietly telling my students that this is too good to be true, but I was just
amazed how little conversation was going on at that time for how the physiology difference
that was there was so stark but not really talked about.
Probably because no one wanted to believe it.
So many people were taken aback by what Lance did.
Well, it was a dream.
It was a dream.
It was that this superhero of a man could win seven Tour de France's and then to come
out and say, well, actually it wasn't me, it was drugs, shattered a lot of people.
They lost a hero.
Now upstairs in the Australian Science Media Centre, I mean your main role is to connect
scientists to journalists, journalists to scientists.
When the whole crime commission report came out about blood doping and the Lance arms
from thing blew up at the beginning of the year or as late last year, how did it affect
you guys?
Was there much traffic?
Was anybody interested in...?
For Lance, no.
And basically because by then it was more about the man.
It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't what he'd done.
It was him.
It was the Oprah interview and we all sat up there with amazement of all his responses
and his admissions, but there wasn't really science at that stage.
There were no questions.
Everyone wanted to know what he'd been doing, but they didn't want to know what that was
exactly.
It was more about had he done it, is he going to admit it and in the process, who would he
hurt doing it?
So in January, during the Oprah interview and things like that, we didn't get anything
basically.
But for the AEECC report, we reacted to it.
We hadn't had very many questions about it, but we thought maybe we should be putting
ourselves out there and just setting a few of the records straight because there are
a few issues about there, about the use of peptides and those things sort of arose.
So we felt we had to jump in then and that wasn't on the back of anyone asking us, but
we figured it was probably important that we got a few people out there.
How do athletes take these drugs?
Let's take EPO, testosterone, they're just straight injections?
Yeah, that's the favorite avenue, venous or intramuscular injections.
Yes.
Blood doping, of course, that would be a cannula, would it?
Yeah, through a band.
And then a drip bottle, yeah.
So because these things are normal things, parts of the human system, what's the detection
ranging?
How do you detect it?
Well, in the good old days, 30 or more years ago, for example, the testosterone growth
from the adologues are from animals, so they differed structurally to the human type.
So they are relatively easier to detect.
So nowadays, with these anabolic peptides that are out there, it's a bit more difficult,
although they're different than what's really occurring in the human body.
So they can be detected that way.
And then there's the response, but the response is then, so if you're looking at muscle bulk
or if you're looking at erythropoietin, if you're looking at red blood cell mass like
hematocrit, like Tyler was talking about, they look for out of range values, but with
normal human variation that adds uncertainty, so you can have someone probably taking these
things.
So if they start off on the low end, they put them up on the high end, but it can be
acceptable.
So you'd actually, I imagine it would be more of a problem with things like testosterone.
You'd need to track someone over time to see if their system elevates in testosterone.
Yeah, so...
And they're not just naturally endowed with a large testosterone output.
Well, that's right.
So these modulators that are out now, for example, that really improve the body's response
and secretion of some of these hormones, you probably have to look for these modulators.
But see, in human biochemistry, these molecules have what's called a half-life.
So the body metabolizes and breaks these down, and so there's only a certain time frame where
you can really more confidently look at whether or not these substances have been taken.
That breakdown time, Tyler Hamilton referred to them as glow times, and apparently he said
that he wouldn't have been able to have got through hundreds of drug tests if he didn't
have a good team of scientists telling him when he was glowing and when he was clean.
And that they would actually manage his drug...
Can you talk to us a bit?
I mean, how does that work?
You can actually manage someone's drug-raging around the testing?
Well, we can't talk a lot about it.
One, as researchers, we're not allowed to research this stuff because it's unethical,
actually, the researchers.
So we know a lot about it based upon the people who do.
And then in terms of the time frames...
That's a bit of a problem being a researcher, not allowed to research the subject of researching.
Well, that happens a lot, though, doesn't it, in science and depending upon what topic
you're at.
But anyway, so we have to look at the athletes who do it and try and search them out and
then try and ascertain some of these details.
But you know what?
It doesn't like to give out a lot of information.
I mean, a lot of their stuff is pretty secret.
They don't...
One of the people I know about these time frames, and so the people who might be taking
it and abusing it find out from trial and error and who gets caught, and therefore that
window was a little too long or too narrow.
But they're very much substance-specific and certainly you're right.
It's a well-established, well-rehearsed, pretty well-orchestrated series of events that these
athletes get exposed to.
Jason, two questions you can choose.
Which one you'd like to answer.
How would you go about detecting drugs in a sportsman or if you were their coach, how
would you go about making it so that they're not detected?
Hmm, good questions.
What was the first one again?
Well, how would you detect...
What regime would you put in place to try and catch drug cheats in sport?
Yeah, look, my answer to this is going to be horrendously obtuse.
The problem is that high-performance managers, I guess, you've got a drug regime for athletes
at the elite level and the question becomes legality and illegality.
Which can change?
Caffeine used to be banned, now it's not.
So the question then becomes, as a high-performance manager of sport, my question is, how do I
risk manage this issue?
It's not, oh, you know, oh, can't do that because it's bad, no.
If I look at this in terms of pure business, I have to think about what other teams might
be doing and then how do I respond to that?
Now do I think they're going to get caught?
If I think they're going to get caught, then I should probably stay clean because then
I'll be the victor because they'll be taken out of the competition.
So when you talk about, as a manager, it's actually a very different question because
they're going to be looking at, and we've seen it with Essendon, and the claims now
that are coming out, they want to sail close to the wind because that's where performance
advantage lies, that's where competitive advantage lies.
Sport is business at this end of the market, okay?
It's not this romanticised, Hellenic, idealised, you know, people are doing it for virtuous
reasons and noble reasons, it's bollocks, it's complete big business up there.
Now they're going to do what they need to do to make sure that their sport is more attractive,
it's faster, it's stronger than another sport.
Now when you look at, say, the AFL competing with the NRL, how do they get market share?
We have to make our game better and harder and faster.
When you do that, you put pressure on the athletes, they're the people who have to go
in, week out, weekend week out, and produce.
They have very little time to recover, they've got to start looking at, well how do I get
back on the field?
So professional cyclists, for example, if I'm not on the bike, if I'm not racing, I'm
not getting money.
So I've got to get back on the bike as fast as I can, I was talking to a guy in Melbourne
about this problem, and his body broke because he was trying to maintain a training regime
to be competitive with other cyclists, some of whom were doping, he just couldn't do it.
So if you ask me then how do I try and drug-proof a team, my answers start coming back as fundamentally
older sport, actually start looking at how you structure sport so that athletes don't
have to take drugs to survive.
So things like have shorter seasons, don't have as intense events, have more time between
intense events if you want to run them.
So don't force, for example, our swimmers to go from event to event to event in the
lead-up to the world championships, maybe have them have fewer events, then when they
get to the world champs, give them a good couple of months off, let them recover.
I mean, you see the guys who come off the tour to France, they're broken people, they
really give them the time off, let them come back naturally so they don't need to use
EPO, anabolic steroids and so on to help that recovery period.
It's a much more far-reaching answer than I was expecting.
I feel like I asked for the time and found out how the watch was made, but that's very
difficult.
Let's move along to our next clip.
This is Stephen Dank, former Esed and Sports Scientist, after being asked about the nature
of supplement programs that he brought into the AFL.
This is what Stephen Dank had to say.
But that speaks directly to what you were just saying, that the pressures in sport are so
much these days that it's not a case of managing the drugs, it's managing the sport that needs
to be addressed.
That's big, but like the guys at Essendon, what were they taking?
That wasn't EPO and testosterone, that was vitamins and peptides.
Well, first of all, the ACC report is an intelligence exercise.
We don't know the facts yet, they're still not released.
If you listen to that full interview, there's supposition that they were anabolic peptides
and other byproducts of animal blood and then certainly vitamin B supplementation.
The main address verbally has been, oh, it's mainly vitamins, but there's supposition that
there's other things involved.
It's just really hard to comment too much on this without more evidence and Assad's
job now is to get to that evidence and then release it, which I think we're all agreeing
is becoming a very slow drawn out task right now.
So yeah, it's unclear, we still don't know exactly what it was, but there are the candidates.
I thought it was a masterful piece of media management the way that it was dealt with
because following on from what you're saying, a large part of this is driven by the whole
gambling industry that's sprung up around sport.
And so what do they do?
They have a report, they release, they say, what was it, six teams in the NRL are suspected,
we're not going to tell you which ones.
I wouldn't mind opening a book as to which six clubs they were and that way we could make
some money on the side.
But coming back to a point that you made earlier about managing what other people are doing,
Lance Armstrong said something very interesting that at the time, when Oprah asked him if
taking banned substances was cheating, he said at the time, no, the definition of cheating
is to gain an advantage on arrival or foe that they don't have.
I didn't view it that way, I viewed it and in this case he was talking about doping as
creating a level playing field.
That's a masterful piece of mental arithmetic to be able to...
I hope he's not teaching all these kids that two wrongs make a right.
But that plays on from what you were saying about what is everybody else doing?
What is a competitive advantage?
I've put this up in some of the stuff I do online.
We haven't actually gone through and actually analysed the tours in question, they just
didn't do it.
Now this is where I start being suspicious.
This was about Lance.
I mean the French have had it in for Armstrong for a long time and goodness knows that Travis
Tigger and Lance Armstrong, so Travis Tigger being the head of the US anti-doping agency,
they really don't like each other as you can tell by some of the flying lawsuits they've
threatened at each other.
This was about Lance, this was not necessarily about doping and cycling.
If they were serious about it, they would go through and they would analyse all of those
samples, they would go back and they would do the same non-analytic investigative job
and they would find the first clean winner.
Now I wonder the legitimacy of that if the first clean winner was the 87th place cyclist.
So when we talk about the level playing field, I mean this notion that sport is somehow about
being fair is naive.
It really is.
Sport is a discriminatory activity, just like education.
We are there to sort out the winners from the losers and the best people from the people
who probably should do something else.
So when it comes to this, I mean you had Eddie the Eel from Equatorial Guinea came out in
the 2000 Olympics and the guy had never seen an Olympic swimming pool before.
How is that fair compared to the Germans or the Australians?
And that's the question, what's entertaining?
I think this is really, this is it.
Sport has gone from being this wonderful Victorian pastime of gentlemanly honour, preparing
them to take over the natives and whatever colonial outpost we're talking about.
And it's moved into this thing of like it's not about fair, it's all about what you can
produce so that people will watch it, you can sell advertising space, sponsorship.
That's the important thing.
Yeah, I was amazed at that comment more from what didn't happen after it than really what
it was about because sport is never based on a level playing field.
And the whole idea of competitive sport is to generate as unlevel of playing field as
you can, whether it be by better training or better recruitment, better approaching
your true salary cap or in some teams actually exceeding your salary cap.
And to do that in whatever way possible, then there's this line that's drawn by some
external agency, WADA, that says, oh no, that's now unethical, okay, now that's okay.
So this year is about ethics and somehow or other, and it's a bit of a mystery, we have
to decide what becomes unethical.
And that's really the gray zone because there are many arguments you could make for some
of the things going on that now, as was well explained by Jason, I mean the player's health
is also really, really important.
And I'm amazed at how little power a player has to protect him or herself in today's sporting
arena.
Let's bring up our next clip, which we're going back here to Tyler Hamilton.
This is his take on the whole question of the efficacy of cheating.
The phrase I saw him dope in nine, does that mean he saw the needle going in the, I mean
when he said I saw him doping, what was he physically seeing at the time?
Well probably, I mean we don't know in these Tour de France cyclists, to dope effectively
and to minimize the risk because let's not forget, this is a strategy that is potentially
life threatening if done wrong.
So you need a big, well-funded system with highly skilled and trained personnel which
would mean medically trained to assist in this.
And so, you know, let your mind wander, I mean would there be caravans full of ivy tubes
and this or that, and I would probably say yes.
I mean, one of the other issues with these athletes is the dehydration and they would
have to be put on intravenous saline or fluid to be able to race the way they race the next
day because you can take the body two or three days to get over severe dehydration and these
athletes are doing it day after day after day.
So you let your mind wander, I mean it would be very, very easy to walk through a caravan
perhaps and see, yeah, medical.
And a saline drip isn't considered a cheating or an unfair advantage?
Apparently by water, my understanding is no.
Annika, does it worry you that these guys can actually rationalize away cheating quite
often?
They should do it quite easily.
Only a little bit.
I have a big sports person.
I play it and I watch it and especially the AFL stuff which is, I'm a big Crows fan and
we'll ignore last Friday's game, but just the idea that sport, it's almost like sport
can't be fixed because the idea that it's an uneven playing field plays to the fact
that you play to win and unless you aren't playing to win, you're not playing sport,
you're not playing your game and that's almost the only way you could level it out is to
take away...
Hang on, playing to win, is that really all sport is about and if it is, then you just
justified doping.
Well, that's what I mean.
There are rules.
There are rules.
But as you say, if they don't win, they don't get money.
The problem with the lower end of the AFL sporting teams is people like the teams like
Port Adelaide have so much trouble, except not of late for now they have a new sponsor,
because they're not performing well enough, so there is obviously that element that unless
they perform, they don't get money, they can't survive, so they need the drugs to perform.
Is that true of the under 12 netball team?
Well, hopefully they're not taking drugs.
No, but here it is.
I mean, you're talking about sport has to be about winning, except when it doesn't, which
is junior sport when it's supposed to be character development and so on.
So, I mean, let's clarify what...
Is there a difference between elite sport and non-elete sport that means we actually
have to have different rules and at the moment, anti-doping is only applied at the elite level.
There is bugger all that happens anywhere else.
Now, if this was actually a big public health issue, let's take it down to the bottom end
and the cycling Australia review by Justice Woods says, look, the elite level, whatever,
let's get into club cycling, let's get into where it actually matters down the bottom.
This right, I'm on a rant now.
Continue on.
Stop calling it cheating, okay?
It really annoys me when people, they're drug cheats, it's sensationalizing an issue and
it avoids the main issue.
We are talking about people who feel that they have to take drugs to do their job, okay?
To call them cheats is to somehow say that, okay, look, these people are wrong.
You're demonizing.
This is what happened to Lance Armstrong.
We smashed him because we put him up on a moral pedestal and then we were disappointed
to find out that what we demanded he do as consumers, all of a sudden, the veil comes
back and we go, holy crap, that's what you have to do to win the tour?
Now, that to me, we've got to start looking at it and saying this is more than just about
who wins.
It's interesting that we didn't smash Lance Armstrong for going through chemotherapy in
order to beat cancer, but we're taking drugs in a different setting.
That's when it becomes problematic.
And am I actually reading you right that perhaps we should take the attitude of drugs in sport
should be allowed, providing they're properly regulated and managed?
My position was and always has been that drugs need to be controlled in sport.
I reject the laissez-faire and this is the problem with the whole debate.
I see someone who comes out and says, I disagree with anti-doping and then I get blackballed
by pretty much everyone up and down the food chain as someone who is for drugs.
I am for letting everyone use everything.
Now, the question that I, when I sat down, I had a good, long, hard look at myself and
I had a look at my infant son and I said, do I want him to grow up in a system where
he has to use drugs?
No, and I hope to God that he doesn't show any promises an elite athlete.
But if he does, I'm incredibly well equipped to manage that process now and if he's going
to have to use drugs to get through his career and come out at the end of it, being able
to walk, not having his brain smashed in through multiple concussions, I want him to use those
drugs and I want him to use those drugs in a way which is going to mean that he has a
sustained, healthy life for a normal lifespan.
I've got to say Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton, they don't look like sick men to me.
I hope I look that good when I'm their age.
It's a question of context too, isn't it?
Because if your son was to go into rock and roll, I mean, Keith Richards, where would
he be without drugs?
He doesn't look as good as Lance Armstrong.
And what would happen to the rave scene, I mean, really?
Yeah, but hang on, let's go to the other side of that.
So there are many exercise physiologists who are fascinated by pushing human performance
limits.
So if we do that and we say, let's really try and make men and women perform to their
extreme best, that in and of itself adds to the risk of the competition.
So if you get bigger and bigger and bigger men playing rugby league football, it becomes
a more dangerous and more dangerous and more dangerous arena, and you can apply that to
whatever dimension of sports you want to look at.
If you make cyclists cycle faster, momentum is physics.
If they crash, they're going to get hurt more severely.
So you know, there comes a reason, and it's complex.
I mean, I don't have an answer, but it's just that if you push the limits, it gets
more dangerous.
So you wouldn't necessarily follow Jason's advice?
Well, I think Jason's earlier advice was the key issue, but it butts up with money.
I mean, we need to manage sport so that the athlete's considered more.
And if adding more games to a season in a football code or if adding more consecutive
days of competing in any other event is more and more risky and demands that they do have
to take supplements to survive, finish, maybe a better word, that event, then that's just
like Jason said, it's pushing them to have to do it.
So that sports management in the world now, where sports is dollars and Olympics is dollars,
and when we always look at how many gold medals this country got versus another country after
the Olympics, and like in Australia, we just complain to heck about our swimmers for not
getting as many gold medals.
I mean, come on, it's really an endemic situation.
And I mean, Jason hit on the head, I mean, how are we going to regulate sport to be protected
from that?
It's just complex.
It's hard.
It's lively and exciting discussions, ladies and gentlemen, and it is time to go to the
intermission.
In fact, I'm getting a hurry up, no, because I've already run over time.
We're going to take a brief 10-minute, in fact, no, we'll take a full 10-minute intermission.
But before we do that, could you please give a big round of applause to our three speakers
this evening?
