The Future of Cheating in Sports
One clue to where doping is headed is the case of Thomas Springstein, a German track coach notorious for trying to get his hands on an experimental gene therapy for anemia. “Repoxygen is hard to get,” he wrote to a Dutch doctor in an e-mail revealed at a criminal trial in 2006. “Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas.”
Repoxygen never made it out of the lab, and Springstein doesn’t seem to have obtained any. Instead, he eventually received a 16-month suspended jail sentence for supplying doping products to a minor, and the athletes he supplied drugs to were banned from competition. But his effort to obtain Repoxygen made headlines during his trial, forever linking him with a new phrase in the cheater’s lexicon—gene doping.
The approach potentially does an end run around conventional tests for drugs or foreign products in the bloodstream; it alters an athlete’s own DNA to produce performance-enhancing substances. If effective, the experimental treatment would endow a patient—or athlete—with a gene that cranks out extra erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that spurs the production of red blood cells. And athletes already have been known to abuse synthetic EPO to increase stamina. Sports officials say there’s no evidence that any athlete has undergone gene doping, but they also suggest it’s only a matter of time.
The high-tech arms race between cheaters and testers has pushed both sides to the cutting edge of science. When drugs under development for medical conditions turn out to enhance performance, rogue athletes and coaches are fast on the scene. For instance, myostatin inhibitors, which provoke muscle growth in lab animals, aren’t available for clinical use, but they are already for sale on the black market.