Katowice (Poland) (AFP)
In 2019, the fight against doping still looks like the game of gendarmes and thieves - or cat and mouse - but in a more sophisticated version, where the first hope to have gained some ground on the second, according to experts at the World Conference on Doping in Sport.
On Tuesday, an Austrian police officer, who participated in the so-called Aderlass investigation ("bloodletting" in German) on a blood doping network dismantled from Germany in early 2019, sent a cold during the conference, which ends Thursday in Katowice (Poland).
For this investigator, Franz Schwarzenbacher, the Aderlass affair, it is "thirty sportsmen", especially in the elite of cycling and cross-country skiing, who have resorted to autotransfusions, "sometimes twice a day", to EPO and growth hormone.
"These athletes were tested a lot, a lot of times, with urine and blood tests, and all tests were negative", between 2011 and 2019, the officer noted.
"So there is a flaw in the system," he added, saying that police investigations were more effective than anti-doping controls, with more than 300,000 per year worldwide for a result of less than 2% positive.
- "complex" -
To improve their performance, some of Mark Schmidt's clients, the German doctor in the heart of the network, injected their blood in the two hours preceding the competition and withdrew it within two hours of the race. During these periods, blood samples for the biological passport, which would reveal suspicious blood values, are more rare, especially before departure, so as not to disturb the preparation of the athlete.
Anti-doping officials rely heavily on new techniques, such as the less restrictive dried blood spot. But the method is not yet developed. And autotransfusions are always undetectable.
Nevertheless, for the director of the Austrian Anti-Doping Agency (Nada), Michael Cepic, if the cheaters have improved their methods, it is because the vice has tightened.
"It's getting harder and harder to get" without the blood passport flashing, "he told AFP. According to him, the German doctor told the investigators that he advised athletes "not to fool around with EPO (...) because the level of detection is very high".
An opinion shared by the director of the anti-doping laboratory of Ghent (Belgium), Peter Van Eenoo. "The system is not perfect (...) But twenty years ago, many substances were undetectable, this is no longer the case," he said.
According to him, the cheaters went down even lower than the "micro-doses", and the effects on the performance are less important.
- "be unpredictable" -
Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) boss Australian Brett Clothier said blind spots are found in "small dose" doping product combinations with "very short detection windows". ". "The most sophisticated cheats are still very, very difficult to catch," he summed up.
Escaping unannounced out-of-competition testing is another method of cheating, the experts said. High-level athletes registered on the lists ("target groups") of international federations or national anti-doping agencies are obliged to be localizable, to be able to lend themselves to such controls. After three "no show" over a period of twelve months, the offender incurs two years of suspension, which almost happened to the US sprinter Christian Coleman, saved on the wire for a matter of dates.
But some "manipulate the system," said Brett Clothier. "They have gaps, like the possibility of missing two controls.If they know they will be positive, they just do not open the door", abounds the boss of the lab Ghent.
"Be unpredictable!", He added, for example by advising to test a suspect athlete "every first Monday of the month for six months" to install him in a comfort zone, then to surprise him "the third Thursday of the sixth month ".
© 2019 AFP