Friday 11 March 2016

Sharapova, Pound and Seppelt: Tacking Doping in Sport 2016

I’ve just come back from this two-day conference at Twickenham stadium. To get there I waited once again at the bus stop I used to spend my teenage life hanging around – a situation made me feel both strangely young and old at the same time. But what of the conference? You might expect a set of talks from regulators and lawyers to be dry and drab. However, at times more sparks flew than even at the most vitriolic academic meeting. Actually the latter are usually sedate – though intellectually stimulating events – with tempers and egos well in check (at least until the bar opens).

So what caused the fuss at Twickenham? Surprisingly it wasn’t the Maria Sharapova meldonium affair. This just led to incredulity as to how someone would keep taking a drug – for whatever reason – when it was so clearly advertised as coming on to the banned list and an effective test had clearly been developed. The fact that Sharapova has been joined by 99 other athletes in the space of a few months suggests either a massive breakdown in anti doping education or a significant level of stupidity amongst dopers.

So who did get everyone excited? Not Dick Pound for once with his usual erudite exposition of Russia’s recent failings. Not even Jonathan Taylor from Bird & Bird who did his best to wind up – well everyone really. No they were both upstaged by the showing of Hajo Seppelt’s new ARD documentary; this revealed that banned coaches were still active in Russia. He followed this up with some direct barbs at the WADA president, Sir Craig Reedie, accusing him of firing one of his top investigators and having a conflict of interest between his role at WADA and the IOC (where he is a Vice President).


I felt a little bit sheepish giving my own talk immediately after Hajo’s Tour de Force. Especially as what I was talking about essentially amounted to studying not doping. I discussed whether much of doping’s effectiveness could be due to the power of the placebo effect i.e. the athlete runs faster because they believe they have a secret advantage. This contrasts with the nocebo effect, where the athlete runs slower because they believe their opponent is doping and hence can’t be beaten. The problem is to do the definitive placebo doping study I would need to give EPO to a elite athletes whilst telling them I was giving them a meaningless injection. This would reveal exactly how much of EPO’s benefit is due to its biological, rather than its psychological effect. But it is hard to see a research ethics committee agreeing to this level of deception. Such a pain when morality gets in the way of a good piece of science!