The New Zealand Herald‘s Dylan Cleaver talks with Graeme Steel, Chief Executive of Drug Free Sport NZ, about the future of drug testing in sport.
An excerpt (read in full here):
Olympics: Anti-dope chief confident Kiwis clean
At 6250 tests, London 2012 will be the biggest anti-doping operation in history, but it is the rapid, well-intentioned advancements in the medical community that loom as the biggest threats to a “clean” Games.
That is the opinion of New Zealand’s sports doping tsar, Graeme Steel, who, on the eve of the Olympics, said he was confident the NZOC was sending a clean team to London.
As the recent positive test during the Tour de France of Luxembourg cycling star Frank Schleck demonstrated, elite sport is unlikely to ever rid itself fully of the spectre of cheating. Steel said international trends suggested that EPO was still the one to look out for.
“Most of the sophisticated doping is not the use of basement-developed products – THG is one example of where that happened with Balco [the San Francisco lab accused of supplying steroids to several high-profile US sports stars including Marion Jones and Barry Bonds]. But most of it is not that,” Steel, who heads Drug-Free Sport New Zealand, said.
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“Genetic engineering is hovering on the horizon. That’s a scary area,” Steel said.
The results of GE programmes – if any actually exist yet – could be a problem for future Games, but in the here and now, World Anti-Doping Agency president John Fahey recently issued a stark warning to athletes planning to launch Olympic campaigns on the back of illegal assistance.