Unhealthy competition

This year's Tour de France ended with no big surprises: US cyclist Lance Armstrong won the race for the fifth time, again defeating his greatest competitor, German Jan Ullrich. And it was a surprisingly ‘clean’ contest, as only one athlete was found to be using the performance‐enhancing drug erythropoietin (EPO). This is clearly an improvement on the infamous 1998 race when the whole Italian Festina team were disqualified after their coach was found with more than 400 doping products, including EPO. Indeed, the Tour seems to have become cleaner since then: in 2001, Spanish cyclist Txema del Olmo was the only athlete who tested positive for EPO and who was subsequently banned from the tour. But the Tour de France is not the only international sports contest tainted by doping. US sprinter Ben Johnson, who rewrote the record books during the 1998 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, ran to victory with the help of a cocktail of steroids and was later stripped of his medals. The greatest case of misuse, however, came to light after the reunification of Germany in 1990, when investigators found that East German athletes had been systematically doped for several years, which explained their many records and gold medals. Some critics maintain that, without drugs, today's athletes would not be any better than their predecessors in the 1960s, before doping became a widespread problem in competitive sports. Indeed, watching the Olympic games or the Tour de France nowadays, the speed and endurance of the competitors is incredible. Many athletes certainly achieve this by relentless training, but there are always some who turn to biotechnology and medical research for help. The development of more sophisticated tests to weed out these cheats has often not been able to keep pace with the development of new products that …