Olympic drug-fighting failures make Enhanced Games 'not so radical' says former anti-doping advocate

An expert on the ground floor of some of anti-doping’s most broad-reaching advances says the recently proposed idea of the Enhanced Games — an Olympic-style sports competition with reduced doping oversight — makes sense given the recurring drug-fighting failures of the current Olympic system.

Michael Ashenden, a fierce critic of Lance Armstrong who played key roles in the creation of a test for the blood-boosting drug Erythropoietin (EPO) and the athlete blood passport system that is one of anti-doping’s best tools, wrote a paper called “Not So Fast,” which he allowed The Associated Press to report on before he published it online Tuesday.

In the paper, he described his initial reaction to the Enhanced Games as negative.

“But one by one, my visceral objections ... fell away,” he wrote. “I realized that not following the (World Anti-Doping Agency) rules was not so radical after all.”

Ashenden, who served on WADA panels in the 2000s but left the anti-doping scene about eight years ago and now works as a commercial attorney in his homeland of Australia, said he does not know Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza or anyone else associated with the idea.

Last year, D’Souza introduced the concept of the Enhanced Games to challenge systems at the Olympics that, according to the organization’s website, “aren’t as ‘drug-free’ as many would claim them to be.”

He’s offering six-figure base salaries for “top-tier” athletes willing to compete and a $1 million bonus for the first sprinter to break the 100-meter world record or swimmer who breaks the record in the 50-meter freestyle. (Without anti-doping measures in place, neither record would likely be ratified by the governing bodies of those sports.)

In an interview with AP, D’Souza compared the current trajectory of drug use in the Olympics to their now-outdated fealty to pure amateurism at the Games.

“Today, we don’t even view amateurism as an issue,” he said. “And it’s because professional athletes are just a lot better than amateur athletes. I think the same is going to be true of enhanced athletes. Enhanced athletes will be better than natural athletes. So, when I see headline after headline, year after year, scandal after scandal, it’s an indictment on a system that’s no longer fit for purpose.”

Ashenden told AP he wrote the paper because “on one level, I don’t think the Olympic movement’s objections to the Enhanced Games stand up to scrutiny, and I wanted to introduce balance into that conversation.”

“But on a deeper level, if the only difference between Enhanced Games and the Olympic movement is drug testing, then that would put a spotlight on how effective the testing really is,” he said.

Answer, according to his paper: not very.

He points out that between 2000 through 2012 — the last Olympics in which the 10-year window for post-Games testing has closed — 118 medals (more than 3% of those awarded) were captured by athletes found to have tested positive.

From the 2012 London Olympics alone — after the biological passport system was fully in place — he said 31 medals were withdrawn and 46 (around 4.8%) reallocated.

That all came before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi that triggered the extensive Russian doping scandal.

And it does not include the current controversy involving the handling of a batch of positives from Chinese swimmers — some of whom will be in Paris — who were allowed to compete when state authorities ruled their samples had been contaminated.

“There is no moral high ground here,” Ashenden writes of the Olympics’ long-standing quest to promote fair play as part of its core mission.

The idea of the Enhanced Games has been met with scorn at the International Olympic Committee, which said it “does not merit any comment.”

“If you want to destroy any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport, this would be a good way to do it,” an IOC spokesman said. “Worse than that, no parent would ever wish to see their child competing in such a damaging format in which performance-enhancing drugs are a central part of the concept.”

Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, has been growingly critical of WADA in the wake of the scandals in Russia and, now, China.

“We are all for disrupting ineffective systems to better protect athletes, and the current global anti-doping program cannot remain as the status quo is failing athletes,” Tygart said. “But throwing in the towel is not the answer.”

Ashenden takes issue with one of anti-doping’s central arguments, questioning exactly how dangerous many of the banned substances are if used under guidance of a doctor.

“Overall, 9 out of 10 positives are for steroids, diuretics, stimulants, hormones and cannabis,” he writes. “These are substances that can be taken safely under medical supervision.”

He weighs in on the role drugs play in the athletes-as-role-models debate; the distinction between banned and illegal drugs and how sports organizations test for them; and what he says is the unpredictable way that banned substances work on different people.

He also draws a fine line between doping and cheating, arguing that in a league with no banned list, nobody can say someone using drugs is cheating.

“What bothered me most was when people were finishing on the podium and pushing other people off who were not taking drugs,” he explained in the interview. “So, for me, it was about the cheating, not the drugs.”

Ashenden views the mass commercialization of the Olympics as the undoing of what was once a bedrock principle for the Games: sports for the sake of striving for the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger.” These days, he argues, sports and the Olympics are a vehicle to generate income, only a fraction of which goes to the athletes themselves.

“Although it may be a bitter pill for the Olympic Movement, it was foreseeable that the commercialization of sport under their stewardship would create an environment that seeded a corporate disruptor,” he writes.

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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games