George Aluo, with agency reports
World sports governing body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) says there will be no hiding place for cheating athletes at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
This much was disclosed last week by IOC President, Thomas Bach.
Bach, who spoke at the opening session of the fifth World Conference on Doping in Sport organised by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in Lausanne, Switzerland, told the experts that gene testing could be introduced in time for next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo.
He stressed that it could be accompanied by dried blood spot testing (DBS), another significant new weapon in the war against drug cheats.
“With research on genetic sequencing progressing well, this new approach could be a ground-breaking method to detect blood doping, weeks or even months after it took place,” Bach told an audience of 1,600 delegates from the Olympic Movement, national anti-doping organisations and government agencies.
“If approved by WADA, such new gene testing could be used already at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.
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“These new methods will again strengthen deterrence. We want the cheats to never feel safe, anytime or anywhere.”
The new gene test, believed to be in the final stages of development, has been pioneered by by Yannis Pitsiladis, a professor of sports science and genetics at the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom, who has been developing it since 2006.
It is designed to identify the abuse of certain performance-enhancing drugs more accurately than existing methods.
It has been hailed as the most significant advance in drug-testing since the athlete biological passport was formally introduced in 2002.
Genetic sequencing will be used to detect all forms of doping, it is hoped, but research is currently focused on blood-doping.
The method involves identifying changes to the body’s genetic signature as a result of the two forms of blood doping: a transfusion or the use of a banned product that increases the production of red-blood cells, including erythropoietin (EPO), the most widely abused drug used to boost blood.
Research by Pitsiladis, a member of the IOC Medical and Scientific Commission, has shown that there are approximately 21,000 genes in the body, and several hundred turn on when an athlete has taken EPO or undergone a blood transfusion.
It has been discovered that this change in the athlete’s genetic signature will remain detectable for weeks – maybe even months – after the doping took place.
