The Toughest Test for Athletes

By Peter Stoler

Olympic officials are vowing to catch steroid users

Lunging across the finish line or regaining balance after a hammer throw, an athlete competing in this summer's Los Angeles Olympic Games will usually know quickly if he has won a medal.

What he may not know for a while is whether he can keep it. The reason:

Olympic officials will be on the lookout for more than 300 drugs that athletes are forbidden to use. And, in what is the toughest action to date against drug users by any athletic body, the Interna tional Olympic Committee has instituted a testing system that seems almost certain to catch anyone who aims at getting a medal with the aid of a pill or a needle. Among the targets of the tests: amphetamines and, possibly the most dangerous drugs ever tak en by athletes, anabolic steroids.

The new doping procedures are even more rigorous than the strict routine followed at last year's Pan American Games in Venezuela. Those resulted in the expulsion from the competition of eleven world-class weight lifters who were found to have detectable levels of steroids. One of them, American Jeff Michels, 22, subsequently appealed the decision and will be al lowed to take part in the Olympic Games. Under the I.O.C.'s new testing system, a representative of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee will contact all three medal winners, as well as a fourth competitor selected at ran dom, immediately after each event is completed. The escort will take the athletes to a doping control station, where two samples of urine will be taken from each person: one will be stored under strict security and the other will be analyzed in a $1.5 million laboratory operated for the I.O.C. by Don H. Catlin, chief of the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical School Division of Clinical Pharmacology.

If a test turns out to be positive, indicating drug use, the laboratory will notify the I.O.C.'s medical commission, which will tell the athlete and his team officials.

A second analysis will then be carried out in the presence of observers from the I.O.C. and the athlete's team. If this is also positive, the athlete will be stripped of his medal. "If someone is using the banned drugs," says Catlin, "we'll find him."

The Olympic Committee added anabolic steroids to its list of banned sub stances in 1973. Since then, the drugs have become ever more widely used as men and women seek to push their bodies to still higher levels of attainment. In the U.S., where synthetic steroids were developed about half a century ago, their use is thought to extend from world-class athletes to high school football players. Soviet and East European trainers are widely believed to have been giving the drugs to their athletes since the 1950s. Nor will it be possible for athletes to escape detection simply by stopping use of steroids immediately before the Los Angeles Games: their presence in the body can be detected as much as six months after the drugs have been taken. Indeed, some doctors suspect that fear of detection may have contributed to the Soviet decision to boycott the Los Angeles Games.

Being a steroid user may cost an athlete far more than his or her Olympic medal: a growing body of medical evidence indicates that athletes who take steroids have experienced problems ranging from sterility to loss of libido, and the drug has been implicated in the deaths of young athletes from liver cancer and a type of kidney tumor. Steroid use has also been linked to heart disease. "Athletes who take steroids are playing with dynamite," says Robert Goldman, 29, a former wrestler and weight lifter who is now a research fellow in sports medicine at Chicago Osteopathic Medical Center and who has just published a book on steroid abuse, Death in the Locker Room (Icarus; $19.95). "Any jock who uses these drugs is taking chances not just with his health but with his life."

Anabolic steroids are essentially the male hormone testosterone and its syn thetic derivatives. They were developed to alleviate strictly medical problems: correcting delayed puberty and preventing the withering of muscle tissue in people undergoing prolonged recovery from surgery, starvation or other traumas. Curiously, U.S. athletes were indirectly introduced to the drugs by Soviet athletes. In 1956 the late Dr. John Ziegler attended a world weight-lifting championship in Vienna and was told that the drugs were greatly improving the performance of the lifters from the Soviet Union. Ziegler, believing that U.S. athletes could also helped by the drugs, worked with CIBA Pharmaceutical Co. to develop a steroid drug called Dianabol for use by athletes. He quickly abandoned his research, however, when he saw that the drug was being abused. CIBA ceased production of Dianabol for the same reason, although the company continues to make these steroids for medical use. These drugs, doctors say, are being brought into the U.S. illegally from Europe and Mexico and are being used by athletes without a doctor's prescription. Said a disillusioned Ziegler, shortly before he died last year: "I wish I had never heard the word steroid."

The great majority of physicians say the drugs upset the body's natural hormonal balance, particularly that involving testosterone, which is present, though in different amounts, in both men and women. Normally, the hypo thalamus, the part of the brain that regulates many of the body's func tions, "tastes" the testosterone levels; if it finds them too low, it signals the pituitary gland to trigger increased production.

When the hypothalamus finds the testosterone levels too high, as it does in the case of steroid abusers, it signals the pituitary to stop production. Problems can also arise in some cases after athletes stop taking the drugs and the hypothalamus fails to get the system started again.

The results can be traumatic. Many men experience atrophy, or shrinking, of the testicles, falling sperm counts, tempo rary infertility and a lessening of sexual desire; some men grow breasts, while others may develop enlargement of the prostate gland, a painful condition not usually found in men under 50. Women who take too many steroids can develop male sexual characteristics. Some grow hair on their chests and faces and lose hair from their heads; many experience abnormal enlargement of the clitoris. Some cease to ovulate and menstruate, sometimes permanently.

There are several other health risks. Steroids can cause the body to retain fluid, which results in rising blood pressure. This often tempts users to fight "steroid bloat" by taking large doses of diuretics. A postmortem on a young California weight lifter who had a fatal heart attack after using steroids within the past year showed that by taking diuretics he had purged himself of electrolytes, chemicals that help regulate the heart. Convincing athletes of the dangers of steroids is far from easy. Earlier this year, Author Goldman asked this hypothetical question of 198 world-class athletes: would they take a pill that would guarantee them a gold medal even if they knew that it would kill them in five years? One hundred and three said that they would.

-- By Peter Stoler