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Cycling legend Lance Armstrong has hired a renowned doping scientist to prove his athletic greatness wasn't the result of performance-enhancing drugs, but the medical doctor who will be testing him says "there are no guarantees" that the results will be rock solid.

Don Catlin, who will be testing Armstrong's blood and urine as the cyclist trains for the Tour de France and other races next year, made the observation to the New York Daily News. "I think it's going to be as airtight as I can possibly make it," Catlin told the News in a story posted online today. "Anybody who tries to beat it will be a fool."

Catlin may be a master at picking up hard-to-detect drugs — it was he who discovered the formula for the synthetic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) at the center of the BALCO doping ring and a test to spot it — but doping is a constantly evolving science, with new drugs and supplements being tried all the time. Viagra, a legal drug for erectile dysfunction, is one of the latest athletic enhancers, raising the question of what positive test results for that pill might mean to the sports world.

Back in 2004 — a year after the BALCO scandal blew up — Catlin told Scientific American that he was already worrying about the next designer drug. Professional athletes in baseball, football, track and field and other sports have been linked to getting THG injections from BALCO, the San Francisco-area supplier of the drug.

"The fact that we finally characterized one is certainly no reason to celebrate," Catlin told the magazine then. "I'm much more worried about the next THG out there that we haven't found yet."

Catlin's lab, Anti-Doping Research, is now trying to find a urine test that can accurately pick up human growth hormone (hGH) — "a long-sought-after goal that Dr. Catlin believes is within reach," according to the company's Web site. Testing for another popular doping drug, the artificial hormone recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), hasn’t been perfected, either. Danish researchers reported this year that different labs get inconsistent results, and the test sometimes turns up false-positive results. Check out our list of some of the more popular drugs used by athletes.

(Image of Lance Armstrong at Grand Prix Midi Libre 2002/Wenn du Benutzer Hase)

3 Comments

1. 1. theswordsman 05:28 PM 9/25/08

   The difficulty in identifying the presence of individual substances is the reason that cycling has established their biological passport system. It's meant to identify changes in the athlete that would be the result of doping. The idea that Lance is going to dope as part of his training is ridiculous. He joined the biological passport system, and is subject to all of the same random testing by various agencies as other riders. Plus he's gone to Astana, who has paid a lot of money for a highly regarded internal doping system that has caused them to release a rider for abnormal values even though he didn't test positive for anything. And now, in addition to that Lance has arranged for even more random testing of any variety by Don Catlin, another expert in the field. The results will be posted online. And you'd better believe that, partially thanks to the comeback, the 2009 Tour will have state of the art testing. On a side note - when was the last time that you heard Greg LeMond or Dick Pound saying anything positive about anyone?

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2. 2. DrDu123 03:22 PM 9/26/08

   This is akin to hiring a defense lawyer while professing innocence. What kind of moron will believe his "expert". Cycling teams have been running this ploy for some time to no effect. He got popped 6 times on EPO, and was just lucky they didn't have any B samples.

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3. 3. lombardia 05:08 AM 11/19/08

   Without incontrevertable evidence it seems to come down to "the people who want to believe" and the people who "don't". If anything, Lance has proved that he is a ruthless, competitive and domineering individual. Is it any wonder that he is handling the out of competition alegations with the same tactical brilliance that he displayed on the road? Whether that also makes him the most gifted doper of his generation is yet to be proven. It's been pointed out though; If you were deperate to 'prove your innocence' it would make perfect tactical sense to jump in at the point that doping controls had reduced the effectiveness of rEPO (etc) and the race had become more winable without resorting to performance enhancing drugs.

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