Spitting in the Soup by Mark Johnson

Author:Mark Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VeloPress

POINTING OUT THAT warnings against the dangers of EPO are founded on a fiction about a glut of cyclist deaths is not an argument for its removal from WADA’s list of banned substances. As Michele Ferrari observed, EPO is dangerous when abused. In 2007, the FDA underscored EPO’s riskiness when it issued a black box warning for the product, which came about in part because Amgen learned that EPO could accelerate cancer tumor growth. However, this warning was intended for the seriously ill and came 17 years after sports journalists and anti-doping scientists had started screaming that the sky was falling without a single body to prove it.

By focusing on the fear surrounding doping in sports, medical experts channeled significant resources toward a health problem that was almost totally insignificant when compared to other causes of death that are intrinsic to sport such as tackling in football or head injuries in cycling. The sport’s administrators at the UCI began the march toward drug prohibition in 1965, yet cyclists died from head injuries for another 38 years until the UCI took steps to slow the carnage by making helmets mandatory for racing in 2003. Emotion, not logic, controlled the sport’s response to the risks threatening its athletes.

Writing in the science journal Nature, in 2008, researchers Björn Knollmann and Dan Roden reported that sudden cardiac death kills between 500,000 and 1 million Americans and Europeans every year—10 to 20 percent of all deaths in the western world.43 A study of sudden cardiac deaths in Maastricht, Netherlands, between 1991 and 1994 found that of the 2,030 deaths that occurred outside hospitals during that time period, 375 were sudden. In one Dutch city of nearly 200,000 bike-riding people, sudden death killed 94 residents every year. At exactly the same time, European newspapers were blaming EPO for the sudden death of 18 cyclists worldwide. For 53 percent of the women and 44 percent of the men who died in Maastricht, their sudden cardiac arrest was the first indication of a heart problem. That is, like the pro cyclists who died “from EPO,” the 94 sudden deaths in Maastricht came out of the blue. And yet, because the citizens of this Dutch city were not pro cyclists, the apparent glut of sudden deaths was not attributed to EPO, but rather to genetics.

Another study published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation in 2006 provided a meta-analysis of 47 scientific papers on sudden death in athletes under 35. The articles covered 1,101 cases of sudden cardiac death in athletes. (Sudden cardiac death is defined as a death within one hour of onset of symptoms, and in a person with no previously identified cardiac condition.) The report concluded that 60 percent of the affected athletes had genetically inherited heart issues or early onset atherosclerotic heart disease. Intense physical workouts triggered the catastrophic heart incidents. With evidence fingering genetics plus extreme exercise as the killer, the researchers exculpated the drug demon: “Doping is often considered to be the main cause of sudden death by the media and lay people,” they noted.

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