http://www.sport.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2002/04/30/soat hl01.xml
Drugs in Sport: Steriod use 'rising' By Gareth A Davies THE use of banned substances by elite athletes is on the rise worldwide, it was claimed yesterday. Dr Don Catlin, the director of the International Olympic Committee's testing laboratory at the Salt Lake City Games, revealed at a British Medical Association conference in London that he knew of at least four new "clandestine steroids" being marketed illegally for athletes' use. He added that many anabolic steroids which are in use still remain undetectable to the testers in a covert game between what he described as "mom and pop operations" - highly-qualified rogue chemists farming steroids and smuggling them across the world - and IOC testers. Dr Catlin, widely regarded as one the world's most eminent scientists in the doping field, and a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology in Los Angeles cited the example yesterday of the difficulties in policing doping. In March this year Dr Catlin's lab at UCLA uncovered a suspicious substance in an unnamed woman athlete's urine. After detailed analysis, and "luck and good judgement" it was found to be the anabolic steroid norbolethone, which the IOC does not currently test for. Dr Catlin stressed that it was of extreme concern because norbolethone, which underwent clinical trials in 1967, had been discarded by laboratories four years later due to its high levels of toxicity. In clinical tests more than 30 years ago, norbolethone had shown to develop huge muscle growth without any hair in the rat model. "If you've had a supply of norbolethone for five years, and nobody has been testing for it you have got pretty far," he explained. Dr Catlin, who highlighted that there are "too many tests, not enough funding" also touched on what is likely to become a controversial subject. He believes that it may become necessary in future years to test testosterone levels based on ethnicity, with early research indicating that men of Caucasian, African and South American descent show higher levels of testosterone than Asians. "I don't like the idea of testing," he said. "But it's all we have until we see a way of shifting the culture. The really clever ones get away with it. Is there a way to truly change the drugs culture? I believe so, but athletes take drugs because it's a condition of winning in many sports."
