Steroids in Sports

Its not that difficult for a chemist with appropriate lab equipment to tweak any kind of steroid and change some of its components.

When you do so you can, by design, remove those components that show up in drug tests and then you have THG - tetrahydrogenestrinone.

THG is a new designer steroid that recently became detected in the USA.

THG is a synthetic version of the male hormone testosterone,and when a urine sample is tested the analyzing equipment is trained to search for certain remnants, or 'metabolites ', of what is left of the steroid in the athlete 's system.

Once it discovers this metabolite, it registers as a spike on the read-out.

A designer steroid has this telltale metabolite removed to avoid detection.

No matter how advanced the detecting equipment, it cannot test for something that it has not been programmed to test for.

With a metabolite removed,the drug may not be as effective as the original,but that is the chance the cheat takes - better to take something that will work to a certain extent than to take nothing at all.

THG, administered under the tongue,is a derivative of the now defunct steroid mibolerone.

Mibolerone was used extensively by powerlifters to increase aggression and strength before a competition and would enter the system within seconds, and its designer descendant now appears to be one of the drugs of choice of world-class sportspeople.

This latest scandal may just be one too far for athletics,which is widely perceived as a sport that involves cheating on a global scale.

Some of the athletes who are said to have been aided by Balco - the laboratory in California where THG is believed to have been manufactured .

There is already talk of gene- splicing techniques being employed by sportsmen and there are muscle-building viruses used on lab rats that stimulate muscle growth exponentially.

This will undoubtedly find its way into the cheats ' arsenal via their chemists. EPO, the drug that took over from blood doping,may now be detectable, but who needs it when there are designer drugs that attach oxygen to the blood in the form of plasma-carriers, giving the recipient almost superhuman endurance?

The detection and imminent listing and banning of THG will not stop chemists tweaking anabolic steroids.

At KalpaPharm we take the view that competing sports men and woman who take any kind of steroids are cheats. We don't lose any sleep over it but its a fact !

You can do it in bodybuilding competitions - in fact its expected - but not in athletics.

If you are an Olympic competitor then taking steroids means you are a cheat.

You simply have an unfair advantage.

The sad thing is that everytime the subject of steroids is raised in such a controversial light it reflects badly upon steroids themselves.

Such misuse of steroids fosters an "insidious" ethos or reputation about these compounds as journalists use all kinds of emotional rhetoric ( well the sports commentators do anyway ! ) and , usually, talk total rubbish about the substances in their own right.

It is another blow for the man in the street who just wants some cosmetic value and who is not an athlete in competitions.

The thing is: when you throw mud it tends not only to stick but to splatter everywhere.

Bad news about steroids in sports is just bad news about steroids in general!

So, if you are a competing athlete DON'T DO IT ! You just give us body builders a bad name.