INTERVIEW - Common consensus needed to go forward - expert

Published>Thu, Apr 01 10 01:15 PM

Top sports organizations need to agree on a common solution for testing their athletes for performance-enhancing substances like human growth hormone (HGH), a veteran anti-doping authority told Reuters.

Dr. Don Catlin, chief executive of Anti-Doping Research Inc, said the National Football League, Major League Baseball, World Anti-Doping Agency, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and other agencies should meet and discuss where drug testing is headed.

Catlin, who began his career in anti-doping by founding the Olympic drug testing lab for the 1984 Los Angeles Games, is hoping to organize the summit.

"If we can get together the key people in the same room and speak frankly about the issues we all face we can agree on solutions and move things forward," Catlin said during a telephone interview.

"We came up with the idea (for a summit) after I kept seeing the articles with all this rancour and reasons why things weren't getting done. I think if we can put those things aside, we'll be able to make progress."

According to Catlin, any interested parties need to make an effort to cut through the roadblocks, financial challenges and bickering that he said has hampered the quest for a HGH test that can be administered by all sporting organizations.

Currently, a blood test is the only way to detect HGH. The Olympic sports use it and the Australian Football League said they will soon use it as well. North American professional sports leagues do not test for HGH.

Catlin, who gained fame for his work developing tests for previously undetectable steroids and forms of erythropoietin, or EPO, -- a blood booster -- said developing a test to be used to sanction athletes has two distinct stages.

The first step, he said, is establishing scientific proof that the athlete has taken a prohibited substance. The second step is validating that test so it is considered "bulletproof" by the legal community.

"It can't just be the courts who decide whether or not a test is valid," Catlin said. "The science has to be solid. You can't have any ambiguity or ways for lawyers to raise doubts."

FIRST POSITIVE TEST

Earlier this month British rugby league player Terry Newton became the first athlete to be sanctioned after giving the first positive test for HGH from a blood sample in any sport. Newton was suspended for two years.

The response to this breakthrough was mixed as the Olympic community lauded it as proof that HGH could be detected, while the NFL and MLB said blood tests could not be easily enforced.

Catlin is not unsympathetic to concerns that blood testing is less desirable than urine testing, but he said that does not mean professional leagues should not use blood testing now in an attempt to deter the use of HGH by athletes.

To find the common ground necessary to get to that point and to put together a plan that most, if not all, the sports groups can agree upon requires the key individuals in those organizations to get together and work out their differences.

"There are a lot of intelligent, creative people working in the field and to solve the difficult issues that we face today, we have to have them all pulling in the same direction," said Catlin.

"Maybe a meeting like this can help that happen. I don't know, but it's worth a try."

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