Steroid scientist dogs athletes, is key BALCO witness, By: Paul Elias and David Kravets
January 27, 2007
LOS ANGELES – Chemist Don Catlin has taken down hundreds of cheating athletes since he started testing their urine for drugs during the 1984 Olympics here.
Catlin has long been a key combatant in the ever-escalating pharmacological arms race to identify the chemical signature of each new performance-enhancing drug before its use becomes widespread. Doing so has become as difficult as cracking the Nazis' Enigma Code from World War II, but that hasn't deterred Catlin, founder of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory at UCLA.
His discovery of THG, a mysterious new steroid specifically designed to evade detection, made him Witness No. 1 in the biggest sports doping probe in the country's history. That ongoing federal investigation – dubbed BALCO after the now-infamous Northern California drug ring at the center of the probe – has tainted the reputations of big-name athletes, from baseball sluggers Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi to track star Marion Jones, though none of them has been charged.
“Dr. Catlin's expertise in performance-enhancing substances and drugs has been an integral component in the BALCO investigation and prosecution,” says U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, who heads the inquiry. “He is a world renowned expert in the field of doping in sports.”
Bottles of urine still arrive by the truckload at the UCLA lab, which tests more than 40,000 samples a year supplied by U.S. Olympic hopefuls, minor league baseball players, professional football players and even a few hundred soldiers caught up in Department of Defense drug investigations. Inside the nondescript building in a rundown neighborhood on Los Angeles' west side, scientists in white lab coats use powerful computers to break down chemical components of each sample.
“In the urine, there are tip-offs that something's going on,” says Catlin, who has hundreds of steroid signatures in his testing database but is nevertheless still racing to keep up with the cheaters by developing ever-more sophisticated tests.
Victor Conte, who founded the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, and served four months in prison last year for distributing steroids, says Catlin is fighting a losing battle.
“Dr. Catlin knows full well that doping in sport is a cat-and-mouse game, and that the mice continue to be ahead of the cats,” says Conte, whose lab distributed THG to elite athletes. “There are several performance-enhancing drugs that athletes are using which remain undetectable.”
Even the mild-mannered Catlin concedes his side is usually a step behind cheating athletes, who often have the means to buy the newest and hardest-to-identify drugs.
“You have to test for a couple of thousand steroids to stay ahead of the game,” says Catlin, who is 68. “If we don't know what to test look for, we aren't going to find it.”
But he doesn't concede defeat.
“We have a bunch of secret weapons,” he says, declining to elaborate. “There is a game to this – why give anything away?”
After they raided Conte's lab in 2003, federal agents turned to the tall scientist to interpret the long chemical names such as “erythropoietin” – used for blood doping – that they found on drug labels. Catlin was the first witness called before the San Francisco grand jury convened later that year to investigate BALCO, leading to the disclosure of Giambi's steroid use and the cloud of suspicion that continues to plague Bonds as he chases baseball's career home run record.
Bonds told the grand jury he never knowingly use steroids and that he thought his trainer had given him flaxseed oil and arthritic balm, rather than the BALCO steroids known as “The Clear” and “The Cream.” The trainer, Greg Anderson, later served three months for steroid distribution and authorities are now examining whether Bonds lied to the grand jury about what he knew.
Catlin also helped expose the world's two fastest men, Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin; sprinters Michelle Collins and Kelli White; and NFL players Bill Romanowski, Barret Robbins and Dana Stubblefield, among many others.
But his biggest contribution to the unmasking of drug use by top athletes may be the discovery of THG, the “designer” drug invented by rogue chemist Patrick Arnold, who's now serving a three-month sentence in federal prison for steroids distribution.
Terry Madden, chief executive officer of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which tests Olympic and other elite amateur athletes for doping violations, called it “the defining moment in the fight against doping in sports.
“It opened up everyone's eyes to the fact that there could be a concerted effort by many people to dope,” he says.
Catlin was drafted into the Army in 1968, three years after graduating from the University of Rochester's medical school. He was assigned to a hospital in Vietnam, but right before shipping out his orders changed. Instead, he remained in the U.S. to develop tests for heroin and other drugs that are still in use by the military today.
He got his start in sports when he was hired to run a drug-testing program for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. He's since identified hundreds of cheats – including the former elite cyclist Tammy Thomas, who was found in 2002 to have taken norbolethone, an obscure and previously undetectable steroid.
But it wasn't until BALCO that Catlin realized the extent and the sophistication of the abuse.
“We woke up after BALCO and suddenly it was very clear,” he says. “There are a lot of bad guys with a lot of tools.”
Now, thanks in part to the publicity from BALCO, the UCLA lab is busier than ever.
On Wednesday, the National Football League gave Catlin and other researchers a $500,000 grant to develop a urine test for human growth hormone, thought to be widely abused by elite athletes.
Last year, Major League Baseball also gave Catlin $500,000 toward the development of an HGH screen. It was the first MLB grant addressing performance-enhancing drug use among its players.
“He is so prominent in the field,” says MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred, “that it is almost imperative that this institution has some relation with Don.”
