Quebec anti-doping lab to head west for Games

The mandate for the anti-doping effort at the Vancouver Olympics is simple.It's "to make athletes afraid to dope," and "to make the life of the dopers miserable," according to Dr. Christiane Ayotte, director of Canada's only permanent drug-testing laboratory.Ayotte and about half her staff and some of the equipment from the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in Laval, Que., will be shifted to a temporary lab at the Richmond Olympic Oval for the Games in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.Aided by an international team of experts, they will process about 1,000 blood and urine tests per week during the Games.All this for what Ayotte hopes - but is not so gullible as to expect - will be not a single positive test at the Games."We don't want any," she said on a recent visit to the Laval lab. "But if, let's say, we have no positive tests, then the lab can take pride in this because they can say the athletes who dope were aware of the lab's capacity and they decided to be more careful."Now, my less naive side would tell me that some athletes will certainly try their luck. And it's not because we have zero positive findings that we can ensure that none of the athletes who competed during the Games would have used doping practices in the past. The traces may have left the system, but the benefits may still be felt by the athletes."Ayotte is at the forefront of the battle against the drug-makers and blood-dopers who try to help athletes cheat their way to sporting glory.Her busy lab has about 30 permanent staff, plus student interns, who in a normal year process about 18,000 tests, including those from Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, as well as samples from every pro tennis tournament in the world.Huge refrigerators are filled with stored samples as technicians lean over high-tech instruments at their work stations.Between the Laval workers and the international help, she will have a similar-size staff at the Vancouver Games. For the Olympics and the Paralympics combined, they will analyse about 2,500 tests.An on-site testing facility is needed at the Games because Olympic rules say test results must be produced within 24 to 36 hours of a competition, so tests are completed before an athlete can enter another event.The Laval facility, part of a sprawling, gated science park in a suburb north of Montreal, will continue its regular work during the Games.As Ayotte spoke to The Canadian Press, a nearby technician was stirring urine samples for a curious task that illustrates the lengths some athletes will go to beat the system - pregnancy tests for male athletes."It may sound strange," she said. "But we do that because you can take substances excreted by the bodies of pregnant females and some athletes would be tempted to use this to make the system produce more testosterone."The male hormone testosterone is one of the main targets of dope-testers as it and its many variants are among the hardest to detect."The hardest molecules are those that could be formed naturally by the body - testosterone and all the related steroids and growth hormones," she said. "When we find testosterone, we have to determine that it is in an amount that is abnormal for the male population, and that it is synthetic and not produced naturally by the body."For those tests, they use an instrument called an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, rather than the standard mass spectrometer used to detect other banned chemicals.Of particular interest to dope-testers at the Winter Games are the endurance sports - cross-country skiing, biathlon and long-distance speedskating - where stamina enhancers like erthropoietin (EPO) and blood-doping that have plagued cycling and other summer events are most likely to be found.Many athletes in what WADA calls at-risk sports undergo frequent blood tests, with the results recorded in a "passport" to show the normal range of cells in their blood. Blood doping involves taking blood from one's own body, extracting and preserving the oxygen-absorbing red cells, and reinjecting them before competition to enhance endurance.EPO, a naturally occurring hormone that has been synthesized by chemists, promotes the production of red blood cells.Effective tests for blood doping have been around for less than a decade, but Ayotte said measures are improving each year.Hockey players will also have to be on guard as an old favourite, pseudoephedrine, was recently put back on WADA's banned list after a brief reprieve. The stimulant that is found often in cold remedies was once used liberally by some NHL players, who would down Sudafed before games for a little energy boost."Athletes can use it as a decongestant prior to competition, but they should be very careful not to exceed what's written on the box and to avoid it as much as possible," Ayotte said. "It is a stimulant."It was wrongly taken off the list because it is a doping agent and we know it was being taken. Athletes should be extra careful about medication for sinus congestion."But most doping headlines in recent years have involved EPO, blood-doping or masking agents designed to foil the testing process. Ayotte cautions that straight-up steroids have not gone away."The good old drugs and steroids are still being taken," she said. "We still from time to time have positives for stanozolol, the drug that made Ben Johnson famous, or infamous."But there are new drugs, new techniques. When athletes were first blood doping, they had to adjust to the test and we have at least forced them to use it in a safer way. Now we have to move ahead. We have to collect samples at the right times. The techniques now allow us to have the right samples."Ayotte's lab, which opened just ahead of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, is one of 35 around the world, including two in the United States, in Salt Lake City and at the University of California in Los Angeles.