Which Passport should I take to the Olympic games?

• Date: 01 July 2012
• Author: Findlay, Hilary

The 2012 London Olympic Games are going to see a whole new level of anti-doping activity. The centrepiece of this activity is what is known as the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP). It has been in the works for some time and has already been used extensively in the sports of cycling and athletics.

The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), the organization in Canada charged with delivering Canada's anti-doping program, is the first national anti-doping organization in the world to implement use of the ABP. (1)

The ABP is not a panacea for the detection of doping, but it does represent a paradigm shift: in drug-testing practices. The difference is this: previously, anti-doping efforts focused on testing for the presence of a prohibited substance in an athlete's system. In contrast, the ABP looks for indirect indicators of doping. In other words, with the ABP, a doping finding is based on circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence of use. This change also gives rise to a change in the potential defences to allegations of a doping infraction.

Anti-doping rules in sport identify two main categories of doping:

* the use of prohibited substances (such as steroids or amphetamines); and

* the use of prohibited methods, such as blood doping (this is the extraction and reinfusion of blood to the body) and use of erythropoietin (EPO). (2)

Both these methods have the effect of increasing the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen, and can boost performance in endurance sports.

It is this latter category of doping (that is, blood transfusions and EPO), that is the current focus of the ABP. Basically, here is how it works ...

Blood transfusions leave tell-tale signs in an athlete's body that the ABP can pick up. There are three main characters in play: reticulocytes (baby blood cells), hemoglobin (an oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells) and the ratio between these two variables, known as...