Science 1, Cheats 0

The information came to WADA in emails and investigations have yet to establish the identity of their author.

But the discovery and identification of the steroid owes much to the publicity surrounding tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, the designer drug at the heart of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal in the USA.

Olivier Rabin, the Science Director at WADA, said: ‘‘This is the second designer drug that we have discovered and we believe it was created purely for doping in sport. Without referring to an epidemic situation, this proves that THG was not a one-off. This new substance has been discovered so quickly because we learned some lessons from the THG story.’’

He said that tests of thousands of stored urine samples from a variety of sports had drawn a blank, suggesting that DMT had not yet been used by athletes in competition. ‘‘’In that case, we are potentially ahead of the dopers,’’ he added.

It seems that while the chemists developing DMT had been clever, they were not infallible. Christiane Ayotte, the head of the WADA-accredited lab in Montreal that carried out the analysis on DMT with scientists from Canadian customs, said: ‘‘We had a lot of fun working together and were very excited by this problem. We were very impressed at the level of sophistication of the chemical reaction that was used to produce this substance.’’

THG, she said, was a one-step modification of a known substance. ‘‘But in this case we know, because we exactly reproduced the way they made this product, that it is at a level of sophistication that we have not seen before.’’

Ayotte warned: ‘‘They used chemical reactives that are very dangerous, involving flammable and toxic substances.’’

Ayotte noted that the drug would probably have shown up in tests because it contained ‘‘a characteristic feature of methyltestosterone.’’ She added: ‘‘This was not clever. There is still work to be done on identifying the pharmacological properties of this drug, in terms of its effect on performance.’’

Excited though they were, the pair insisted that this small victory did not mean an end in the war against the cheats. Ayotte said: ‘‘The publicity surrounding THG meant that designer drugs became desirable so similar substances will be found. This is business as usual for the anti-doping laboratories.’’

(The Daily Telegraph)