A first: European masters championships will test for EPO

Starting this Thursday, a town in Slovenia will host 3,700 masters athletes. They’ll compete in the 16th European Masters Athletics Championships. As usual, Germany dominates the field — with 655 men and women entered. Britain is second with 333. But the elephant on the track in Ljubljana will be an expanded drug-testing regimen. Besides the usual suspects (steroids and steroid-maskers), the Eurovets will test for EPO, aka Erythropoietin.

The EVAA site reports:

EVAA Council kindly informs all . . . participants of the 16th European Championships (EVACS) that for the first time in the history of EVAA, the organisers will conduct both ‘normal’ doping tests as well as EPO tests. An agreement with the University of Ljubljana makes these tests possible. Together with the Slovenian National Anti-Doping Organisation (NADO), a team of the university is responsible for all tests during the championships.

Well, how nice. And also pointless, self-defeating and potentially bankrupting for the masters movement.
This amounts to an arms race of dope-testing. It’s hugely expensive, and it’s now being applied to folks who might require EPO to live a disease-free life. (And don’t get me started on the bogus therapeutic-use exemption, or TUE, which WMA holds out for people who take doctor-prescribed medications for quality of life. They’d get nailed just the same.)
But the real hoot in this nanny culture is the fact that barely a fraction of entered athletes will ever be tested. That renders this announcement a mere publicity ploy — a sop to the dope-fighters (especially Germans) who are obsessed with the issue.
That’s for good cause, of course. They’re trying to live down their East German history of vast doping in the 1970s and 1980s. (See “Faust’s Gold“ for details.)
As usual, the reason for the announcement is to “scare away” dopers and look good to the anti-doping agencies and the press that eats up junk like this. Also as usual: The odds are the real dopers will get away with it and anyone who tests positive will be an innocent victim of the EPO witch hunt.
Thankfully, USATF Masters T&F has never bought into this nonsense. The urine tests, which cost about $300-per-athlete for steroids alone, are way outside our budget. And even if a token five tests were done at masters nationals, a targeted athlete could raise a genuine legal stink. How fair is it that less than 1 percent of athletes get tested?
Anyway, congrats to Ljubljana and the Eurovets for making masters the latest front in the EPO wars! We’ll all be safer for it, I’m sure.