By Jeff Eisenberg
Daily Bruin Contributor
When 2,500 athletes descend on Salt Lake City for next
month’s Winter Olympics, urine will once again be in the
spotlight.
Sixty members of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory travel
today to Salt Lake City to begin collecting blood and urine samples
from some 1,000 competitors as part of the International Olympic
Committee’s drug testing policies.
“We are the only North American lab qualified for this
sort of assignment,” said Dr. Don Caitlin, founder and
director of the West Los Angeles lab and a member of the IOC
Medical Commission. “Most of our staff has received training
and experience for over 10 years, (and) a couple of them were with
us in ’84 (for the Summer Olympics in Los
Angeles).”
Establishing a temporary lab in Salt Lake City has presented a
unique challenge for Caitlin and his personnel.
“We built a whole new lab modeled after the one in Los
Angeles,” said Caitlin, who also hired 25 new staff members
and leased over a million dollars worth of technical equipment
specifically for the Games. “We have had to shuttle people
back and forth between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles each
week.”
Despite all of the logistical issues, preparation has run
smoothly, and the temporary lab received accreditation from both
the IOC and the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation
(A2LA) earlier this month.
Nonetheless, Caitlin and other members of his team feel that a
permanent lab based in Los Angeles would be more effective.
“It would have been better to do it here in L.A.,”
Caitlin said. “Unfortunately (the IOC) dictated to the Salt
Lake Olympic Committee (SLOC) that we must bring the lab over
there.”
Temporary doping labs have been used in past Olympics, including
the Winter Games in Albertville, France in 1992 and Nagano, Japan
in 1998.
The IOC awarded the UCLA lab with a $3.5 million contract to
carry out all of the drug testing during the 2002 Olympiad. The
money will cover virtually all expenses, including food and lodging
for lab employees in Utah, as well as the price of leasing the
proper equipment and transporting it to Salt Lake City.
Had the IOC permitted the UCLA lab to perform all of the
necessary testing in Los Angeles, it might have cost less money,
but at the expense of security and reliability.
The SLOC would have had to lease a corporate jet to shuttle the
samples between Salt Lake City and the Santa Monica Municipal
Airport. Whenever a test came back positive, both the athlete and
IOC officials would have had to fly to and from Los Angeles as
well.
This lengthy delay could have led to questions concerning the
credibility of the lab if the outcome of a test were challenged in
court.
Perhaps the IOC would be more lenient with its doping control
policies if the competitors were not performing in the
international spotlight. Testing for the Paralympics, which
will follow the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, will occur at the
permanent lab at UCLA.
Olympic doping control begins only minutes after a competition
has concluded. Within an hour after one of the defining moments of
an athlete’s career, the medal winners and other
randomly-selected participants are led into a private stall where
an IOC official observes as they urinate into a cup.
After that potentially uncomfortable moment, the sample is
treated with security more suitable for the Hope Diamond than human
waste.
It is placed in a sealed vial, locked in a bag and delivered by
escorted courier to the temporary lab at the University of Utah
Research Park. The facility will be patrolled day and night by
guards and closed-circuit television cameras.
Safely inside the laboratory walls, the vials are opened and a
series of roughly 10 tests designed to identify over 300 potential
substances in the athlete’s urine begins. While the procedure
has improved significantly in the past decade, it is still being
perfected.
“It is a sampling process. You can never give a 100
percent guarantee that everyone will be caught,” said Randy
Querry, A2LA’s program manager for the Proficiency Testing
Accreditation Program. “There is no way you can review each
one.”
Caitlin agrees that the lab will not catch every
perpetrator.
“With those drugs that we have tests for, I am real
confident,” he said, referring to the steroids and stimulants
which are routinely detected. “(Other tests) are very
difficult to develop.”
SLOC officials are especially concerned with the use of human
growth hormones like erythropoietin (EPO), the pharmaceutical
version of a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production.
Despite mandatory blood screening and improved testing procedures,
Caitlin believes it is likely that some athletes will use growth
hormones, yet find a way to skirt the rules.
A method of testing for growth hormones that is 100 percent
accurate will not be ready for several years.
Despite these shortcomings, Caitlin believes that doping control
is vital to maintaining the integrity of the Olympics.
“It is absolutely essential,” said Caitlin, whose
UCLA lab also does testing for the NFL and NCAA. “Without it,
competitive sports would go all to pot.”