Drug Patrol

Olympic watchdogs are ready It has been the talk of the locker rooms for years. East Germany's muscular women swimmers are suspected of training on body-building anabolic steroids. So are weight lifters, shotputters and javelin and discus throwers of many countries. Soviet female gymnasts have been accused of taking pituitary blockers to slow down growth. Swimmers, runners, cyclists and hockey players are widely believed to compete while "hopped up" on stimulants, especially amphetamines. Though practically all drug use is forbidden under Olympic rules, competitors, coaches and sports physicians alike say flatly that the taking of drugs is widespread.

Now, on the eve of the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., next month, the International Olympic Committee's medical commission is determined to keep competition "clean" this time around. Says William Shuler, a former Canadian armed forces officer who will be director of medical services at Lake Placid: "Anyone who might be considering using drugs should be warned. He's more than likely to get caught."

Entrusted with the policing effort are Pharmacologist Robert Dugal and Chemist Michel Bertrand of Montreal's National Institute for Scientific Research. The two men, who performed similar duties at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, are armed with millions of dollars worth of sophisticated laboratory equipment, including 16 gas chromatographs, four of them linked to mass spectrometers. The devices are sensitive enough to pick up one trillionth of a gram of amphetamine in a urine sample. They can also detect other stimulants and painkilling narcotics taken 72 to 96 hours before the test and steroids used as long as six or seven weeks in advance of the competition.

The tests will be administered to two athletes selected at random from each team in every game played and to any athlete whose performance seems unusually good. In individual events, the first four finishers will be tested, as will two or three competitors chosen at random. Within an hour after the event, the athlete will be sent to a testing site where at least 50 milliliters (less than 2 oz.) of urine will be collected. The sample will be sent to the laboratory in two bottles: one will be stored in a sealed box in a refrigerator; the other specimen will be analyzed immediately. The urine will be placed in the gas chromatograph, which separates out constituent elements one by one. For example, amphetamines come out in three minutes, narcotics and steroids in about 20 minutes. Their presence is signaled by a "spike" in a pengraph tracing made by the machine. No spike, no drugs.

If the test is positive, though, the drug will be identified by the mass spectrometer. This device, by bombarding the drug molecules with ions (charged particles), produces a pattern, or "fingerprint," of the unknown chemical. Since each drug's fingerprint is unique to it, the chemical can be readily identified. If a forbidden drug is detected, the Olympic medical commission will inform the chief of the athlete's delegation of the incriminating results, and a test on the refrigerated sample is done. If the first results are confirmed, the game is forfeited and the athlete may face losing a medal and being disqualified from the Olympics.

Dugal and Bertrand plan to analyze the urine of 175 athletes every day. And lest any think that they are home free after a clean test, there is the cautionary tale of the East bloc Weight Lifter Valentin Christov. After an early test at the Montreal Games showed that he was clean, he apparently began stoking steroids. A gold medalist, he was automatically selected for a second test. This time the drugs were detected in his urine and he lost his medal and went home in disgrace.

Dugal and Bertrand expect such incidents to be the exception, however, even though they will be using vastly more sensitive equipment than in Montreal. During the 1976 Games, 2,049 tests produced only eleven positives, eight of which were for anabolic steroids. A similarly small tally at Lake Placid would please Dugal. Says he: "We're not there so much to catch people using drugs as to discourage them from doing so. I'd be happy if we didn't get a single positive reading." -

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.