Last week, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute released a new study, and for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) the news isn’t good.
Geneticists there injected 55 men with testosterone and tested for the substance over a 15 day period.
It is worth pointing out that testosterone is both the most fundamental male hormone (female too, as it is testosterone that breaks down into estrogen so without it there would be no such thing as women) and the most widely abused steroid.
Last year, 43 percent of the athletes busted for performance-enhancing substance abuse were busted for testosterone.
Unfortunately, in this Swedish study, the scientists involved found that 59 percent of the men who lacked a gene known in polite company as UGT2B17 didn’t test positive for anything.
Jenny Schultze, one of the researchers involved, summed up the situation nicely: “if you don’t have the gene then you don’t secrete testosterone in your urine.”
And because urine tests are the only kind allowed by most major sports, this is bad news for WADA and their friends.
There are only two options here, though neither are being discussed at all.
The first, as I’ve mentioned in this blog previously, is to take year round baseline hormonal screens of everyone playing professional sports. This would be invasive as hell, but would allow scientists to know what “normal” hormonal levels were and be able to detect if something was wacky.
Sure, players could be juicing from the start, but they would have to keep on juicing their entire career to beat this system.
The second proposal is to forget all of this nonsense. To admit that professional sports are no longer about a level playing field and fair competition and are mostly exhibition and entertainment—two categories which have already benefited from steroids.
For example, coming off of the last baseball strike, our national pastime was a mostly moribund sport revived on the steroid-addled backs of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire’s fabled home run chase.
It’s doubtful that either of these options will be adopted. Both would require a hard look in the mirror and some long lacking honesty about the nature of our games. Two things which seemed to have disappeared from modern America.
