By Yoon Chul
DAEGU ― Cheating is bad; everyone knows that.
For athletes, doping is the same as cheating.
At the 13th IAAF World Championships in Daegu, the Athletics governing body collected blood samples from all participating athletes from Aug. 20-26 for an unprecedented anti-doping program.
As the IAAF collected samples, the athlete will find it much tougher to use banned drugs.
The blood testing program, controlled by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) with the Korea Anti-Doping Agency (KADA) is for individual profiling purposes within the framework of the Athlete Biological Passport.
The Athlete Biological Passport enables monitoring of an athlete’s biomarkers over time.
The analysis will be taken by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). The KIST is one of 35 recognized organizations in the world to take doping tests. It already proved its effectiveness during the 1988 Summer Games.
In the Seoul Olympics, Ben Johnson of Canada won in the men’s 100 meters but two days later the KIST reported that Johnson used a banned drug called stanozolol and Karl Lewis was awarded the gold medal.
Recently many athletes supported the IAAF’s doping program and Tyson Gay also advocated it in Daegu, Thursday.
For a clean world track and fields meet in Daegu, the doping test is not over.
“The IAAF will randomly pick 500 athletes during the competition for urine test and usually most of medalists will be included,” a KADA official told The Korea Times.
The athletes can’t take medicine even for a cold without permission from the KADA.
If an athlete really needs medicine, which includes banned ingredient, for other health reasons, the athlete must get permission from the WADA.
The KADA official also introduced the incident of Korean mid-distance runner Lee Jin-il.
While he trained at the National Training Center, available only to national team members, he caught a severe cold. The doctor working at the National Training Center gave him medicine which didn’t have banned substances. As this medicine didn’t work well Lee bought other medicine at a pharmacy.
The purchased drug included banned ingredients and Lee was picked in a random sample for drug testing.
When Lee’s inspection result came out positive, he was banned for almost four years from March in 1995.
“We tried everything in order to shorten his suspension. But it was in vain,” official said.
Before starting the world championships many athletes took doping tests and some of them including Steve Mullings of Jamaica ― the third fastest 100-meter sprinter of this season ― also tested positive and failed to head to Daegu.
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