Olympic dope tests don't stand up: expert
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Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones escaped drug detection during the 2000 Olympics. (AFP: Don Emmert)
While the world will soon get to see the performances of the elite athletes at the Olympics, it is inevitable that the spectre of performance-enhancing drugs will also make an appearance in Beijing.
Barely a week goes by without anti-doping authorities issuing warnings of one sort or another.
But scientist Donald Berry from the University of Texas says testing standards are not necessarily what they are made out to be.
Writing in Nature magazine, he argues a positive test result may not necessarily be a positive.
"The major flaw is that they haven't quantified the accuracy of the testing process," he said.
"They have a testing process that they use. I'm not certain that it's sufficiently well-defined to be validated. It needs to be well-defined.
"For example, if the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone is greater than four, then we do the following thing; and if this happens, then that. That is, the whole process has to be laid out.
"Then that has to be validated in a study, an experiment in which there are known positives and known negatives so that we can assess what the false positive rate is, what the false negative rate is and therefore be able to conclude in a specific case how likely is it that the person was actually a doper, based on the results of the test."
Drug-testing authorities say that they are going to catch cheats and that they have a new test.
They say nobody should assume that they can get away with cheating.
But Dr Berry isn't so sure.
"I don't think any of it is good science, frankly, from what I've seen," he said.
"Some of it may be bluff and indeed that may be the best way of handling the circumstances. But when they've got a new test, that new test has to be validated.
"Indeed they are probably catching dopers. But that's just because there is lots of doping going on, and not so much that their test is all that good."
Dr Berry says there might be a degree of deliberate concealment in dope-testing methods, in order to avoid giving clues on how to get around the tests.
"It's not an easy question. Do you tell the mouse how the mouse trap works? On the other hand, concealing the methods is also concealing them from critical appraisal and scientific investigation," he said.
- Adapted from a story first aired on AM, August 7.
