How fast is too fast?
When 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen shattered the world record in the women’s 400-meter individual medley, some wondered whether she was aided by performance-enhancing drugs… even though she’s never tested positive for a banned substance and the International Olympic Committee declared her post-race test was clean.
So why do great Olympic feats raise suspicions? Nature’s Ewen Callaway explains whether and how an athlete’s performance history and the limits of human physiology could be used to catch dopers.
First of all, a clean drug test during competition doesn’t rule out the possibility of doping. Athletes are much more likely to dope while in training, when testing is less rigorous. Out-of-competition tests are more likely to catch dopers, but it’s not feasible to test every elite athlete regularly year-round.
Tracking an athlete over time, on the other hand, and flagging anomalous performances would help anti-doping authorities to make better use of resources.
‘Performance profiling’ could be a good and cheap way to narrow down a large group of athletes to suspicious ones, argues Yorck Olaf Schumacher at the Medical University of Freiburg in Germany, who proposed the idea in 2009. “Because after all, the result of any doping is higher performance.”
- To do this, sports scientists need to create databases that record how athletes improve with age and experience (for each sport and each event).
- These types of longitudinal records of performances would then be fed into statistical models to determine the likelihood that they ran or swam too fast, given their past results and the limits of human physiology.
In a pilot project with Olympic biathlon (a winter sport combining skiing and shooting), scientists developed a software program that retroactively analyzed blood and performance data from 180 biathletes over 6 years to identify those most likely to have doped.
But ultimately, is performance is too far removed from taking a banned substance and influenced by too many outside factors to convict someone of doping? Perhaps the final verdict is only ever going to be reached by testing.
[From Nature News]
Image by Dominic’s pics via Flickr
