Doping and the stampede

Doping in sports is once again in the limelight. Urine tests showed that Manila Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games) medallist in taekwondo, Esther Marie Singson, took a banned substance. The discovery was reported in all major newspapers last week.

The Philippine Taekwondo Association (PTA) confirmed that the urine sample of Singson, a member of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) champion women’s taekwondo team in the current season of the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP), showed traces of diuretics. Singson had insisted she took herbal slimming tea without consulting PTA officials in order to make the 55 kg weight limit in her class. Diuretics are standard ingredients in herbal slimming teas. They are drugs that stimulate urine secretion that in turn helps bring down one’s weight.

Using diuretics does help reduce one’s weight but could result in dehydration and thus leave one at a terrible disadvantage unless one takes it to mask or conceal an even greater sin, use of steroids.

Singson’s case will be taken up by the SEA Games Federation during its General Council meeting in April. If the Council finds Singson guilty, she will be stripped of her medal and may have to return the cash given her for winning the gold medal last December.

Unperturbed by all these, Singson has continued with her career and has gone on to lead UST to the UAAAP women’s championship and to capture the coveted Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in the UAAP taekwondo competitions. It is not clear whether UST, the UAAP and PTA officials were privy to the findings on Singson’s diuretic use prior to the start of the UAAP competitions or as the competitions were in progress.

The international sports community is hot on the trail of users of banned substances for the simple reason that use of such drugs goes against the very rationale of the Olympic and sporting movement which is participation in sports for peace and brotherhood.

Over the last several years the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has further tightened its rules in the use of drugs in IOC-sanctioned sporting competitions. Up to the late’90’s, marijuana (cannabinoids) was not in IOC’s list of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs.

I recall that when I was Chairman of the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC), I had taken up sometime in 1997 reports of certain athletes who were allegedly using marijuana in the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex with then Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) president, Cristy Ramos-Jalasco.

Cristy pointed out that marijuana was not in the IOC’s list of banned substances. I then had to treat the matter as a criminal act being perpetrated within a government-managed facility by athletes receiving financial support from the government. The action we took had nothing to do with the Olympic movement.

Marijuana was however included by the IOC in its list of banned drugs sometime before the 2002 winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. As a result of this crackdown, the gold medal was stripped from the winner of the freestyle snow- boarding event in Sapporo.

International agreements govern monitoring and application of rules regarding performance-enhancing drugs. Laboratories that perform tests to determine presence of banned drugs in urine (or most lately in one’s blood) are accredited by the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA). Governments, National Olympic Committees and international sports federations are signatories to conventions on anti performance enhancing substances. No National Olympic Committee and international sports federation can participate in and/or organize international sports contests unless they are all signatories to these agreements.

With these international agreements, the hope is that governments themselves will not promote the use of banned drugs for the purpose of raising its prestige in the international community.

The East Germans (when there was still a West and East Germany or the German Democratic Republic or GDR) have since then been proven to have adopted doping as an official sports policy.

In a paper entitled "Hormonal doping and androgenization of athletes: a secret program of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government", authors Werner W, Franke and Brigitte Berendonk reveal that several classified documents saved after the collapse of the GDR in 1990 describe the promotion by the government of the use of drugs, notably androgenic steroids, in high performance-sports (doping).

Top secret doctoral theses, scientific reports, progress reports of grants, proceedings from symposia of experts and reports of physicians and scientists who served as unofficial collaborators for the Ministry of State Security ("Stasi") reveal that from 1966 on, hundreds of physicians and scientists, including top-ranking professors, performed doping research and administered prescription drugs as well as unapproved experimental drug preparations to a variety or persons including minors of each sex.

The use of high-end hormones could result in two tenths of a second time difference in speed events, a few centimeters advantage in throwing contests, additional kilos in weightlifting and extra points in bodybuilding. The subsequent loss or gain of millions of dollars in incentive prizes and commercial endorsements could very well remind us of the recent Philsports stampede and the fact that the race for the prizes in that entertainment show is possibly no different qualitatively from the drug-laced races for first place in sporting contests.