Le Tour des Drugs

Talk about a rude awakening. just a few weeks ago, France was riding high on the strength of its surprise win over Brazil in the World Cup. Then came the Tour de France–or, as some bicycling fans are calling it, the Tour des Drugs–which limped to a finish last week under a deepening cloud. Five cyclists and team officials have been placed under formal investigation for using or helping riders to use artificial substances to boost their performance. As the police widened their probe, a Dutch team and all four Spanish teams indignantly quit the race, and the remaining riders staged two unsportsmanlike slowdowns in protest.

The drug scandal may have been an embarrassment to France, but nobody who reads the sports pages could have been terribly surprised. Performance-boosting drugs, once considered the specialty of shady East-bloc coaches, are becoming as common as Gatorade. Even as the Tour de France was sputtering along last week, two U.S. athletes, Olympic gold-medal shotputter Randy Barnes and sprinter Dennis Mitchell, were suspended by the International Amateur Athletic Federation on suspicion of “doping.”

The problem has become so pervasive across so many sports–football, track, swimming, gymnastics, weight lifting and biking, to name just a few–that many young athletes assume they will need to take some sort of drugs if they’re ever going to compete at the highest levels.

Although the use of performance enhancers is prohibited in most sports, it isn’t just a question of cheating. The drugs can kill athletes–or make them very sick and shorten their career. Yet they keep taking the stuff, relying on so-called drug gurus to dose them in undetectable ways, and on ever more elaborate strategies to beat drug tests. One of the most devious: using a catheter to pump someone else’s urine into their urethra just before a test.

The variety of sports drugs is enormous, but a few are especially popular:

CREATINE A nonprescription supplement widely available at nutrition stores, creatine primes muscles to recover quickly from workouts. Users can thus pump iron more often and bulk up faster. The major known side effects are dizziness, diarrhea and cramping.

ERYTHROPOIETIN (EPO) This is the drug under investigation at the Tour de France. EPO is a natural protein that stimulates production of red blood cells, which carry oxygen. Taken as a supplement, it loads the blood with red cells and delivers more oxygen, permitting greater endurance. The downside: excess red cells turn the blood gelatinous, forcing the heart to work harder. Some two dozen heart-attack deaths have reportedly been linked to EPO use.

ANABOLIC STEROIDS The best-known performance boosters, these hormones (testosterone is one) signal the body to pump out more amino acids. Like creatine, they permit muscles to recover faster from tough workouts. But the side effects include elevated cholesterol, uncontrollable outbursts of anger, possibly liver disease and cancer. Men can develop low sperm counts. Women may grow hair on their faces, lose hair from their scalps, get acne, stop menstruating and see their breasts shrink. (See related story in PERSONAL TIME.)

CYPROTERONE ACETATE Sometimes called the brake drug because it puts the brakes on sexual development, this hormone is the drug of choice for female gymnasts. Reason: the breasts and wider hips that come with maturity make a girl less agile and graceful than her prepubescent competitors.

HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE (hGH) This drug has become so popular with athletes for its muscle-building effects that the 1996 Atlanta Olympics were informally known as the Growth Hormone Games. But hGH can also promote strange bone growth: abusers sometimes develop bulging foreheads, cheeks and jaws, along with bigger hands and feet.

Unfortunately, many of these performance boosters can’t be picked out in a urine test, and even blood tests are tricky. Naturally occurring substances such as testosterone and EPO will always be present in some amounts. Moreover, new drugs come along all the time. Officials at the Atlanta Games detected a substance called bromantan in several East European athletes; its purpose is unclear, but it seems to improve performance in hot weather. Bromantan isn’t used widely in the West–at least, not yet.

The truth is that no one can even agree on which, if any, performance boosters should be allowed. The International Olympic Committee has scheduled a workshop later this month and an international conference next January to try to set some ground rules. Even with tougher standards and more sensitive tests, however, sports officials will probably never catch up to the ever increasing number of drugs and the growing sophistication of users. The Tour de France debacle happened not because cyclists took drugs but because they weren’t sufficiently devious. They will probably just be more careful next time.

–Reported by Alice Park/New York