Blood Read online

  The Dubin inquiry uncovered the fact that other elite Canadian track and field athletes had also taken performance-­enhancing drugs. None, however, had climbed as sensationally high as Ben Johnson, and none had fallen so far from grace. The inquiry recommended more stringent procedures for testing in sport. In the more than twenty years since the inquiry’s report was published, Canadian and international efforts to expose and punish cheating in sport have expanded exponentially, with Canada taking a leading role.

  One of the similarities between the Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong stories is how widespread cheating was among their contemporaries. Altering the chemical properties of their bodies and blood was not the sole province of Johnson and Armstrong. Many of their peers did the same thing. According to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which hounded Lance Armstrong until it finally brought him down with the report that led to his being stripped of his multiple Tour de France victories, twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005 have been tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations, or hematocrit levels. In addition, of the forty-five Tour de France podium finishers from 1996 to 2010, thirty-six were by riders similarly tainted by doping.

  Doping was so widespread that those practising it felt that it wasn’t really cheating at all. In his book The Secret Race, which documents his own doping history and that of his fellow Armstrong team members, Tyler Hamilton writes: “I’ve always said you could have hooked us up to the best lie detectors on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed. Not because we were delusional — we knew we were breaking the rules — but because we didn’t think of it as cheating. It felt fair to break the rules, because we knew others were too.”

  In the same book, Hamilton describes the mystery of having his own blood withdrawn so that it could be re-transfused later. “With the other stuff,” he writes, referring to erythropoietin and testosterone, “you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection. But here you’re watching a big clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm dark red blood. You never forget it.”

  After Hamilton’s first blood withdrawal, for which he flew in Armstrong’s private plane from France to Spain so that they could conduct the clandestine procedure without detection, he, Armstrong, and another teammate went out immediately for a bike ride along the Spanish coast. At the time, Hamilton was in the best shape of his life. He had just beaten Armstrong to win the prestigious Dauphiné Libéré bike race, including a gruelling stage victory up the notoriously steep Mont Ventoux in France. But on this day in Spain, just minutes after having their blood withdrawn, Tyler Hamilton and his teammates could barely ascend “a tiny pimple” of a hill. “We joked about it,” Hamilton writes, “because that was all we could do. But it was unnerving. It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags.”

  Indeed. As we learned from the Olympic debacle of triathlete Paula Findlay, whose anemia sucked the vitality right out of her on what was supposed to be one of the biggest days of her life, there is much power in blood. Athletes don’t merely require killer quadriceps, reflexes like cats, and lungs like bellows. They also need great blood.

  To succeed at the elite international level, and possibly make millions of dollars in prize money, appearance fees, and sponsorships, elite international athletes must pay close attention to their blood. There are ways to alter the composition of your blood legally, which is to say, ways that do not contravene the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency, established in 1999 to promote the fight against doping in international sport.

  One way, of course, is to train very hard. This will teach your blood to transfer oxygen more efficiently to cells in the muscles. Another way, which offers at best minimal gain, is to sleep in a well-sealed tent with a reduced supply of oxygen. This also teaches you to cope with less oxygen, thus making better use of what you have. Another technique, which offers the possibility of greater advantages than the oxygen tent, is to get on a plane and fly to an altitude camp — perhaps in New Mexico or Kenya — and to spend several weeks training there. Both techniques involve driving up your red blood cell count.

  People who are in the business of measuring athletic progress in endurance sports will regularly encourage athletes to get their blood checked for hemoglobin mass (the actual amount of the red, oxygen-carrying cells in the blood) and hematocrit level. Exercise physiologist Trent Stellingwerff of Victoria, B.C., who specializes in advising athletes about optimal training techniques as well as legal physiological and dietary interventions, told me that his wife, Hilary Stellingwerff, tried to maximize the benefit of high altitude training by returning to sea level exactly fifteen days before her heat in the 1,500 metres at the 2012 London Olympic games. The extra blood cell count derived from training at altitude lasts only so long, he said, so they had to time the altitude work precisely. She made it through to the semifinal two days later, but missed qualifying for the final by just one spot.

  Another legal way to expand the blood’s capacity to work well under exercise is to train in heat. The stress of heat training leads the body to increase the amount of plasma in the blood. When you increase the plasma and total blood volume, you might be more successful at warding off dehydration and perform better in a race on a hot day.

  Altitude tents, training at altitude, and training in the heat offer the opportunity to bring marginal improvements to one’s red blood cells and plasma, Stellingwerff notes, but they do not offer nearly the advantage of a blood transfusion: “There is no comparison. The advantage of the transfusion is immediate and large (about a ten- to fifteen-percent increase), and you don’t have to spend months at altitude to get it.”

  Prosecutors have been known to manipulate, suppress, or ignore evidence in order to obtain criminal convictions in court. Defendants sometimes lie. People cheat in business, every day of the year. Writers invent phony stories and label them as non-fiction, in order to attract more attention and readers. Teenagers lie; students, professors, and even school administrators plagiarize; presidents surreptitiously record the conversations of their political adversaries; and politicians of every stripe fabricate stories to protect themselves. Deception permeates human society. Athletes — especially those of the elite variety, who are in a position to earn huge sums of money — are no different. Some will be honest, and others will not.

  Testing for performance-enhancing drugs and doping is improving every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency is now making use of a biological passport, which provides a sort of molecular and physiological blueprint of an athlete’s blood values over time, enabling experts to arrive at conclusions about whether any given athlete has cheated, regardless of whether they catch a banned substance in their blood or urine. Using ever more sophisticated technology, testers will continue to chase athletes, some of whom are indeed cheating but will manage to avoid detection. But the athletes and their coaches and medical advisors are sophisticated and strategic too. To date, they have been the ones to develop ingenious ways to cheat. Sometimes, the testers catch up faster than the cheaters anticipate.

  Here is one stunning example of magisterial deception. When Lance Armstrong had banned substances in his body and learned that a drug tester was setting up shop in his hotel lobby, one of his doctors slipped past the testers, retrieved a saline solution, stuffed it inside his jacket, and snuck it back into the hotel. In the privacy of Armstrong’s room, and before the tester was ready, the saline solution was hooked up to the cyclist and allowed to drip into his blood. This drove down the hematocrit in Armstrong’s blood — changing the percentage of red blood cells in relation to plasma — thus making the cheating impossible to detect when Armstrong was required later that same day to submit a test. For years, Armstrong used the argument that he had never tested positive — not completely true, by the way — to protest his innocence and deride those who didn’t beli
eve he was riding clean. But the only reason he didn’t get busted for testing positive was because he and his advisors managed — for a time, and only for a certain time — to stay one step ahead of the testers.

  In the end, Armstrong was dethroned by many bits of evidence that had little to do with the accuracy of laboratory tests. For example, fellow cyclists Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis, and George Hincapie testified under oath about the doping they had done and seen Armstrong do. They testified, as well, that he not only took drugs and doctored his blood but compelled cyclists racing for him — cycling is a team sport, with one leader supported by a cast of “domestiques” — to do the same. But Armstrong was also undone by the testing laboratories. Years after his final Tour de France victory, in 2004, testers were able to go back and review his old samples again, using more advanced technologies than had been available when the samples were taken. In this way, they found incontrovertible evidence that Armstrong had indeed used performance-enhancing drugs and banned processes. When the truth could not be suppressed, Armstrong came clean on television, in two back-to-back confessions to Oprah Winfrey.

  It is too soon to say what will become of Lance Armstrong. It had once been rumoured that he would enter politics, but it is hard at this time to imagine him persuading voters that he is a credible candidate for any public office. More interesting, to me, is the future of international sport. We have seen many ugly incidents in the recent history of sport: the Tour de France and its multiple drug scandals; the dethroning of Ben Johnson. It should be noted that we are not just talking about men. In the 1980s, there was such rampant cheating in sprints and field events in women’s track and field that many of the records set back then remain completely out of reach by today’s most successful women athletes. Contemporary female athletes are tested far more rigorously than were their counterparts three decades ago, and are able to get away with far less use of testosterone, steroids, and other aids.

  Will we one day give up, and agree that cheating is a fact of life? Will we simply allow the best-conditioned athletes to use the best cocktails of blood, drugs, and genetic alterations and see who ends up on top? I doubt it, and I hope not. We won’t allow our athletes to cheat with impunity any sooner than tax authorities allow offenders to lie on their tax returns, or voters allow liars to return to public office.

  Will we convince more athletes of the health risks associated with performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions? Some of the related dangers include liver damage, blood as thick as sludge, heart damage, and heart attacks. It is imperative to educate young athletes, especially, about the danger of playing with drugs to enhance their performance. We can’t let those efforts flag. But let’s be honest. Most people who cheat know what they are doing. And to hell with the consequences, especially if they win.

  As long as the benefits associated with success in sports are substantial, and the risk of getting caught appears minimal, I suspect that the ways some people pursue changes to their blood composition will be no different than the myriad other ways that some people try to weasel ahead in every other arena of life.

  BLOOD, IN ALL OF ITS IMMENSE COMPLEXITY, has become merely another field in which we can try to gain an advantage. If we can gain this advantage by playing within the rules of the day, we are considered to be of moral character. We are unlikely to lose our medals, be banned from competition, or be shamed publicly. Now that we know just how vital our oxygen-carrying hemoglobin is, and how necessary water is in our plasma, we will find it increasingly easy to boost the blood or manipulate a gene. Those who believe in fair play — not just as role modelling for children, but as an approach to living well at any age — will continue to feel hurt and betrayed by the deception that some will employ to nab an Olympic gold medal or pocket all of the money and fame that comes with winning the Tour de France. We will continue to be astounded by the ingenuity of those who behave as if the end justifies the means, and we will be comforted and encouraged by detectives of the blood, who will occasionally not just catch an individual scammer but bring down entire networks of deception. The audiences — in the Olympic stadium, or seated before their own televisions and at their computers — will cheer loudly and vociferously for the noble winner, but they will jeer, prod, and mount a ceaseless moral attack against any hero who is brought down for having manipulated his or her blood. Don’t believe me? Just ask Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong. They played with their blood. And they were found out. And they were ruined.

  There are drug testers and there are those who decide to strip former winners of their medals. But there is also the court of public opinion. In that court, if you alter your blood to win on the track, or on your bike, you have made a pact with the devil. To win a medal and a few million dollars, you allowed your morality — your very blood — to become impure. The devil will dance with you, and when your time is up, he will dance on your grave. But what about the friends, the lovers, the children, the former elementary school teachers, and all the unnamed armchair athletes who cheered for you as you transcended the challenges of cancer or poverty to inspire us with the magic of your strength and your resistance to pain? Their judgements will last forever, and in their eyes, there is only one observation. Once you were pure, and then you were not.

  The world of sport serves as the perfect mirror. We look into it and we see our deepest values either respected or trashed. Blood, to us, is sacred. We offered it to the gods for thousands of years. In blood, we see the brightness and the movement of humanity. We open up a hole in our arms and give it away to extend the life of someone we will never meet. There is hardly a substance we hold more dear, or consider more valuable, than our blood. This is how much blood matters: even non-believers treat it as sacred. We want our sacrificial gestures, our gifts, our artists, our scientists, and our athletes to respect blood. In a world where we fret that nobody seems to care about anything, blood still counts. And we want it clean. As clean as spring water.

  THREE

  COMES BY IT HONESTLY:

  BLOOD AND BELONGING

  IN 1979 — JUST A YEAR OR TWO before stories about HIV and AIDS began to appear in the media — I travelled as a volunteer with Crossroads International to spend the summer working in Niger. The country has a population of about sixteen million people. It is the largest country in West Africa, consisting mostly of the Sahara Desert and including a small, more densely populated, arable strip in the south of the country. Niger often enjoys the dubious distinction of being named one of the poorest countries in the world. It was my first trip to sub-­Saharan Africa. I was twenty-two years old. I thought I had embarked on the adventure of a lifetime, but did not expect that the journey would be an introspective one.

  I was travelling with six other Crossroads volunteers — all white francophones from Québec. I liked and trusted them, and some of them have remained good friends for more than three decades. However, as soon as the plane landed in Niamey, Niger’s capital city, and I stepped down onto the tarmac, I felt not just an oven of heat but also an explosion of unanticipated emotion. My very molecules, it seemed, screamed with desire to connect with the people of Niger. I longed for their acceptance, and for their recognition of my own ancestral history. Through my father’s family, my ancestry dates back to the abduction of millions of Africans who were shackled and shipped against their will to be enslaved in the United States. I had grown up in a mixed-race family in a white suburb. By the time I was twenty-two, I had been searching for years to cement my own growing sense of black identity, and this was my first opportunity to travel meaningfully in Africa.

  In the Americas, if your black ancestry dates back to Africa prior to the transatlantic slave trade, you can’t return to connect with your distant relatives in the same way that a Polish-Canadian might go to Kraków, or an American or British citizen of Chinese descent to Shanghai. You have a general idea of who your people are, but this is made abstract by the diversity of the continent. Af
rica is the second-biggest continent in the world. It has fifty-four countries and one billion people speaking countless languages, celebrating many cultures and religions, and embracing a range of lifestyles. Africa is so big and complex that it is no more meaningful or helpful to generalize about it than it is to generalize about the entire planet. So if you happen to be a black Canadian, American, or Jamaican whose people came to the Americas via slavery, chances are next to zero that you will track down the exact villages of your distant African ancestors.

  Alex Haley became one of the world’s most famous writers for appearing to overcome these barriers in his novel Roots. First published in 1976, Roots purported to trace Haley’s African-American family history all the way back to a man named Kunte Kinte, who had been abducted from the Gambia and sold into slavery in the United States. Roots sold millions of copies, was adapted for a major television miniseries, and encouraged a tidal wave of zeal among African-Americans and others who felt inspired to track down their genealogies.

  Later, Haley paid to settle a lawsuit having to do with plagiarizing the work of another novelist, and he was roundly criticized for having used an unreliable griot, whose role is to memorize and recite many generations’ worth of family and village history. It is possible that the griot was bribed to drum up a convenient story about Haley’s family connection to Africa. In fact, Haley was so criticized on these fronts that, although his novel stands out as one of the most famous twentieth-century African-American literary texts, it remains excluded from the prestigious Norton Anthology of African American Literature.