Leaving the Pack Behind

Paula Radcliffe used to be the pluckiest loser on the track. Knowing only one way to run — at the front — made her a favorite with the fans but for 10 years failed to win her major titles. After leading the 10,000-m races from the gun at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and at the World Championships in Edmonton last year, she was overtaken in the home straight to take fourth in each. The British runner was, though, successful off the track — winning world half-marathon and cross-country titles for the past two years. This year her track results changed. Radcliffe won gold in 5,000 m at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester last July, and followed that a little over a week later at the European championships in Munich by setting a new European record for 10,000 m: 30.01.09, crossing the finish line some 300 m ahead of her nearest rival. “I always knew I could win,” she says. “It was a case of improving and coming back again.”

The Munich victory prompted a churlish journalist from the French sporting daily L’quipe to question the sudden improvement in her performances. But he picked the wrong target. Radcliffe is one of the sport’s leading antidrug campaigners, and runs with a red ribbon on her vest to show her opposition to drug abuse. After L’Equipe’s innuendo, she made a point of asking the International Association of Athletics Federations to test her outside competition — though she had already tested negative five times in the past year.

Radcliffe knew she would be a target for drug doubts after her efforts to help clean up the sport made headlines at the Edmonton championships. During the heats of the 5,000 m she held up a homemade banner reading “epo cheats out” to protest the inclusion of Russia’s Olga Yegorova, who had tested positive for the oxygen-boosting drug, erythro-poetin, and was banned, but was reinstated on a technicality. Radcliffe doesn’t regret her stand. “That protest was not against Yegorova,” she says. “It was against all epo cheats. The testing impetus and development had stood still. I feel this helped turn the tide.”

In April Radcliffe won her first full marathon in memorable fashion: beating a world-class field in London by a huge three and half minutes, and missing the world record by just one-tenth of a second. On Oct. 13 she runs her second marathon, in Chicago, and will be out in the front as usual, not only from the start, but probably at the end too.

DOPING
Testing Times For Enforcers
In a pre-emptive strike against genetically enhanced muscles, the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency last week added “genetic doping” to their list of prohibited substances and methods. The ban, which defines the problem as the nontherapeutic use of genetic elements and/or cells that can enhance performance, will come into effect from the beginning of next year.

Could genetic doping really be used by athletes, or is this still the stuff of science fiction? In the U.S., scientists have already used cell manipulation to rebuild muscle mass in mice. Athletes could be next, with some experts fearing that genetic or cell doping could surface as early as the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. Says Charles Yesalis, a professor of exercise and sport science at Pennsylvania State University: “This is a brewing storm of potentially great magnitude.”

Trouble is — as with many other banned substances, like human growth hormone — it is almost impossible to test for genetic or cell doping. To detect cell tinkering, for example, would likely require a biopsy. This leaves enforcement bodies, always one step behind the drug cheats, in a bind. Do they risk their credibility by ignoring the issue, or do they risk it by acknowledging a problem for which they have no detection methods and no solution? As always with drugs in sport, it’s a no-win situation.