The cat’s out of the bag!

This could be the collective statement of athletes who’ve been getting some help from the diamond-shaped blue pills of Viagra outside the bedroom – i.e. as an anabolic agent.  Viagra may be among the prohibited compounds endorsed by anti-doping organizations, principally the World Anti-Doping Agency.

This comes up as a WADA-financed research is nearing culmination. The study, being conducted by the Marywood University in Scranton, PA involved lacrosse players, is aimed at finding out if Viagra provides unfair competitive edge to athletes. If Viagra is proven to be a performance-enhancing drug it can be put on WADA’s banned list on September 2009 at the earliest, five months before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, according to New York Times.

Aside from the Marywood study, several researches have been initiated to pinpoint the exact effects of Viagra on the performance of athletes. More from the New York Times:

Through the decades, athletes have tried everything from strychnine to bulls’ testicles to veterinary steroids in a desperate, and frequently illicit, effort to gain an advantage. Several years ago, word spread that Viagra was being given to dogs at racetracks, said Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, based in Colorado Springs.

Interest in the drug among antidoping experts was further increased by a study conducted at Stanford University and published in 2006 in The Journal of Applied Physiology. The study indicated that some participants taking Viagra improved their performances by nearly 40 percent in 10-kilometer cycling time trials conducted at a simulated altitude of 12,700 feet — a height far above general elite athletic competition. Viagra did not significantly enhance performance at sea level, where blood vessels are fully dilated in healthy athletes.
A 2004 German study of climbers at 17,200 feet at a Mount Everest base camp, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, found that Viagra [cialis] relieved constriction of blood vessels in the lungs and increased maximum exercise capacity.

At this point, there is no evidence of widespread use of Viagra by elite athletes, Mr. Tygart said. Yet, because the drug is not prohibited and thus not screened for, there is no way to know precisely how popular it is.

Viagra is the popular trade name of sildefinil citrate which was made commercially available in 1998 in the United States and has become a household name because it’s been found to be effective in treating what used to be a hush-hush condition – erectile dysfunction.

Viagra was originally developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris, but it has been discovered that it has minimal effects on angina but impressive outcome on penile erections.
In bodybuilding circles, Viagra is popular as a pre-contest drug because it positively affects the release of nitric oxide (NO), the chemical compound that relaxes or widens the smooth muscles, allowing ideal blood flow. This further leads to improved transport of oxygen to muscle cells and increased rate of release of lactic acid, a compound which takes part in the body’s energy production.  This results to the so-called pump that many bodybuilders – and athletes – seek because it translates to high endurance.

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Tags: 2010 Winter Olympics, anabolic agent, bodybuilding, performance-enhancing drug, sildefinil citrate, steroids, University of Marywood, Viagra, WADA

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Perhaps, it was the posh venue of Beverly Hills Hotel that had changed the tune of one of the most vocal of MLB’s naysayers.

From USA Today:

The most unexpected comments didn’t come from the dozen presenters at Monday’s Growth Hormone Summit, a day-long event organized in part by Major League Baseball.

It came from an attendee whose employer has long been critical of MLB’s anti-doping efforts.
“We are very happy Major League Baseball has taken some steps to take on this problem,” said Osquel Barroso, senior manager of science at the World Anti-Doping Agency. “The fact they invited us here is important. We are willing to work with them.”

Barroso struck a different chord than other WADA officials. As recently as July, WADA President John Fahey said fans of MLB would turn away from the sport if they’re “not confident with the performances that they’re seeing.” Fahey’s predecessor, Dick Pound, called MLB’s early testing efforts “a joke.”

“We always felt that WADA didn’t understand the efforts that were being made by baseball to deal with the problem,” said Bob DuPuy, MLB’s president and chief operating officer.

The Human Growth Hormone Summit is a conference organized by the team-up of MLB and UCLA with the law firm of Foley and Lardner. According to the UCLA website, the summit, entitled Growth Hormone: Barriers to Implementation of hGH in Sports, “will spotlight the scientific, medical, legal and ethical issues that must be addressed before human growth hormone testing can be considered a routine part of sports anti-doping measures.

On Monday, the discussions focused on the efficacy of synthetic hGH.

Thomas Perls, a professor at Boston University School of Medicine, said there’s a lack of scientific evidence that HGH by itself is actually a performance-enhancing drug.

Don Catlin, however, said:  “To me there is no question (hGH) works. I know you can’t prove it, but that’s no different than 25 or 30 years ago with anabolic steroids.”  Catlin is the founder of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Lab and director of Anti-Doping Research.

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London is under pressure to toughen its stance on use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Will the 2012 Summer Olympics host city give in?

Presently, the International Olympic Committee is yet to receive any definitive action by the British government regarding legislation that will outlaw possession, supply and distribution of performance enhancing drugs.

The IOC would prefer that Britain should follow the path other European nations have taken. Countries like Sweden, Italy, Greece, and Germany have stricter doping laws where violators and suppliers can be imprisoned.

IOC’s chairman of medical commission Arne Ljungqvist, said he would be pushing for a change in the British law.

“I think legislation is very important that criminalizes certain offenses as detailed in the WADA code because it allows public authorities to intervene where we cannot,” Ljungqvist said, who is also a board member of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

“We as sports authorities have our limited possibilities regulated by our code. We can do testing but we cannot do searches,” Ljungqvist added.

Britain is expected to have a new independent anti-doping agency in place by next year but it is still recalcitrant as far as criminalizing doping.

“This is on my agenda so that Britain does have a law in place at the time of the Games which will allow them to take the same action as the Italians did if a similar situation occurred,” Ljungqvist said.

Ljungqvist was referring to the incident at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin when the Austrian cross-country skiing team was exposed of practicing blood doping. Italian police conducted search on said team’s accommodations and came up with banned substances and paraphernalia.

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A big “OOOPS” from the anti-doping officials.

The 300 or so test results, which had initially been reported missing by a team of independent observers during their recent visit in Beijing, have been traced by the International Olympic Committee. All tested negative for prohibited compounds.

According to the AP report, the team of 10 observers had been tasked by the World Anti-Doping Agency to review the Beijing Olympics drug-testing program.  The missing test results had been included in the team’s final report to WADA.

“Once the laboratory had apparently delivered all reports to the IO (independent observer) team, it transpired that around 300 test results were missing in comparison to the doping control forms,” the WADA report said.

“Regarding the ‘300 missing tests,’ it is our understanding that there has been a communication problem between the Beijing laboratory and the IO team on the results of a number of tests,” IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau said in an e-mail. “The results of these tests were communicated to the IOC by the end of August. All were negative. The results have now been transmitted to the IO team.”

Apparently, the team conferred with the IOC’s medical commission regarding said results’ status, but IOC was unable to finish processing of the lab results in time for the group’s completion of their final report last month.

The procedural lapse had put the credibility of the anti-doping program in the Beijing Olympics. Additionally, the team reported another significant loophole in IOC’s control doping process at the Beijing Olympics.  It was found out that 102 of the 205 participating countries failed to provide sports officials with whereabouts information regarding their athletes. Such information is needed to implement pre-Games and out-of-competition testing.

It was not all negative points for the IOC however. The WADA group gave their thumbs up to the increased number of overall tests (4,770), blood tests (969) and tests for EPO (817) and human growth hormone (471). The 2008 Olympics implemented the largest drug-testing program in the history of the Olympics.

Six athletes were thrown out for doping violations during the Olympics, and three other cases are still pending.

The most controversial case of doping at Beijing has been Fani Halkia, the Greek hurdler who won the gold at the at the women’s 400m hurdles at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. On August 16 at the Beijing Olympics, Halkia tested positive for the anabolic steroidss methytrienolone.

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