Sports and drug testing

Sports and drug testing

Sports and drug testing

The world of athletics is one of the premier examples of how drug testing is used in the real world to prevent substance abuse and ensure good practice. Almost every international sports organisation - especially the Olympic Committee - and many national ones will require athletes to submit to either a urine test or a blood test to establish whether or not their sporting talent is entirely natural, or due to performance enhancing drugs.

Of course, not all drug use in sports is to enhance performance - otherwise known as "doping". As you might expect, professional athletes are as likely as anyone to indulge in recreational use of illicit substances.

However unlike everyone else, these athletes will face semi-regular drug screening. Even drugs which don't boost performance still arguably have an effect on it and a urine test showing substance abuse will likely cause problems for an athlete - though this kind of use is less controversial than doping in the athletic world and is of far less concern to organisers. Sponsors, managers, employers and fans may make up for this though.

Disregarding recreational drug use though, "doping" has been one of the major issues of concern in athletics and sports since the 1960s. This is particularly so in certain sports. The American National Football League (NFL), track and field sporting organisations such as the Olympics, and professional endurance sports such as mountain biking are all especially concerned with doping. All of these sports have been particularly affected by the revelations of the 1980s, where several prominent athletes confessed to regularly using anabolic steroids during training.

By and large, urine tests are the principle method of detection in the fight against doping in sports. This kind of test can detect the vast majority of performance enhancing drugs and is also much easier to gather samples for than blood testing.

However, both urine tests and blood tests can be done using many of the same methods. The most common of these is gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.

In the former, the sample of bodily fluid is vaporised with a gaseous solvent and placed in a testing machine. Different substances dissolve at different rates in the gas and more importantly, stay in a gaseous state for a unique period of time called the "retention time". This substance comes of the gas and is absorbed onto a liquid or solid placed in the machine, then analysed by a detector. This then reports the retention time of each sample, which is then compared against standard samples of drugs and urine/blood to identity and quantify the level of a substance in each test.

With mass spectrometry, samples are separated into their component particles using an electron beam, with the fragments sent down a long magnetic tube to a spectrometry detector. This detects the ions from each substance within the sample, each of which has a unique "fingerprint" based upon its mass-to-charge ratio. The system can then show which substances are in what quantities within the sample, and when compared against standard samples can again identify and quantify which drugs have been used by the athlete.

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