Winter’s Day, 2015, New York. Investigator Victor Burgos reversed the conversation he was about to have in his mind. In the next few minutes, he was either going to recruit an ally in the anti-doping battle or have a hostile, disappointing encounter that would send him back into the draw. Chances were it would be the latter. The omerta of dopers matches the mafia. No one is talking. Few inform their peers.
He was meeting a distance runner who was blissfully unaware of what was coming. The man was outstanding by normal standards, his marathon personal best was in what could be considered world class. In Kenyan terms, however, he was average and will never become an Olympiacos superstar. He had also tested positive for 19-nortestosterone, a hardcore steroid.
The man appeared. Burgos approached him with a United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) business card in hand and a copy of the letter containing all the details of the positive test. Burgos was introduced and asked to read the athlete his rights, specifically regarding the opportunity to verify the positive finding by testing his B sample. (Laboratories always split an athlete’s urine sample, test half – the A sample – and leave half – the B sample – so that it can be used to confirm the first test with the athlete present and the consultants. Almost always produces the same effect.) Burgos chose his words carefully. “It’s not the end of the world,” Burgos remembers telling the athlete. “That doesn’t define who you are. If you made a mistake, we can talk about it.”
The way Burgos puts it, it offered a chance to reduce the severity of his punishment, a chance to provide “substantial assistance” to Usada to help catch other dopers. It is an anti-doping rule provision that is open to all, but is rarely used because most athletes remain in denial, insisting that they have done nothing wrong and that their positive test is a mistake. “He was shocked and dishonest at first,” Burgos said. “He said, ‘I don’t know how the substance got into my body, that’s a lie.’ “Why don’t we take a walk,” Burgos suggested. “Let’s have a coffee.”
As they walked, they talked. It was deliberately far removed from the classic good cop vs. bad cop interrogation scene, sitting behind a table in a dark room. Burgos is the lead researcher at Usada and sees the results of all positive tests in the United States. Something about it caught his attention. The bottom line, for one: 19-nortestosterone is a red flag for intentional doping.
Back then the athlete’s racing record was exciting, plying his trade on the US road racing circuit, a subgenre of the sport but lucrative, especially for a young African, because you might win $10,000 (£7,750) in prize money in a marathon or $5,000 in a marathon 10k Race. The races are held in mid-sized American cities, less high-profile locations than London, New York and Chicago, and the prize money is not the $55,000 offered for winning a major marathon. But rack up a few of those wins in a year and it’s a decent living. The athlete was unlucky. In many of these lower-level road races, there is no anti-doping. His misfortune was that Usada showed up at his event.
Burgos had weighed all this. An established Olympian with a reputation to lose is less likely to speak out. this guy, more so. The final piece of the puzzle was his New York address. Burgos lives in the city. So it wasn’t a big call to go to his apartment.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time athletes test positive, an organization will email them,” Burgos said. “We send a list of options in a very formal warning letter and that’s the end of it.” This email comes with a blizzard of acronyms and legalese. “Usada collected a sample, your A sample shows an Adverse Analytical Finding [AAF], which is a possible Anti-Doping Rule Violation [ADRV]…”
Burgos spoke with Usada’s general counsel and asked him to stop sending the email notification. “I want to notify him personally,” she told him. “I’ll go to his apartment, tell him face to face.”
After the initial confrontation, the athlete accepted the offer of coffee. “We walked around Manhattan and I was trying to soften the blow,” Burgos said. “I don’t want him to leave disappointed. People handle bad news in their own way and I don’t want to be the bearer of news that leads someone to harm themselves. All I know about him is what I’ve pulled from the internet.” They went to Starbucks. “OK. Let’s talk about it,” Burgos said. “Let’s talk about where you were before you came to the U.S. to compete in this event.”
Burgos knew that he had come from a camp in Kenya and that this athlete trained with a well-known team. (The camp has a strong anti-doping policy and has taken many steps to enforce it. Many athletes train there without using performance-enhancing drugs.) Burgos quantified the athlete’s responses. “How much of an investment am I going to make to allow him to be dishonest? He’s not going to dump his guts on me. I just met him. He has to understand who I am, am I trying to trick him?’
The young Kenyan was preparing for a new training camp with a team in the US, where athletes make use of long mountain trails and altitude, which benefits the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A lot of runners go there and don’t take performance enhancing drugs. However, some take advantage of the extensive networks of drug dealers operating there with the favored performance enhancers, EPO – the drug that increases oxygen-carrying red blood cells – and steroids.
What was on offer was a deal. Go undercover and provide the authorities with information about other dopers he was in contact with and was able to continue running. More than a week passed before they met again. By then, a formal cooperation agreement was on the table and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was now involved. Performance-enhancing drugs commonly used by distance athletes who do drugs potentially violate US federal law, so the athlete became an undercover informant for the DEA.
“There is a certain level of desperation”
He’s the stuff of Hollywood, Donnie Brasco with an anti-doping frame, though that shouldn’t detract from the seriousness. A working model became apparent to the researchers from the athlete’s experience. Young Kenyan athletes were encouraged in the US, participating in B-list road races where anti-doping was not expected. They were given the means to dope, and with their natural talent and pharmaceutical enhancement, they often won. Whether the athletes received all the prize money and how much was deducted for “expenses” was unclear.
We are trying to hold accountable those people who recruit these young athletes, promising them the world and doping
Victor Burgos
“There is a certain level of desperation among athletes who allow themselves to be drawn into this doping scheme because of the level of poverty, lack of education and promises to travel outside Kenya,” Burgos said. “These are the systemic reasons why this is happening. The ones we are trying to hold accountable are the ones who facilitate it, recruit these young athletes, promise them the world and the doping, some unwittingly, some not. This is the real layer we want to reveal.”
The athlete was actually placed back on the practice squad, without an initial sanction, as this would have raised suspicion, and was allowed to compete. (His performance in the races in which he had previously doped would later be voided when his reduced sanction was applied.) There was one condition: no doping.
“We were actively testing him during that time, so he wasn’t allowed to dope and he had to tell us immediately if he did,” Burgos said. “We had notified the World Anti-Doping Agency [Wada] and the international athletics federation and they all signed up.”
But now the drug testers had a human in them. “It was absolutely not something we could [go into lightly],” Burgos said. “I stayed plugged in and we checked in with him regularly to make sure he was okay mentally. And this particular training team wasn’t the only one. There was another training group that we spent a lot of time on.”
The benefit to testers is that training time is when doping is pervasive. “Deliberate dopers who test positive in competition generally have made a mistake or something went horribly wrong, like they took too much, too close to competition,” Burgos said. “Doping happens during training. It allows you to train harder and recover from that training and from injury.”
Many drugs have a specific and short window in which a test can detect them. This kind of intelligence means that anti-doping authorities can precisely target their tests and catch cheaters. However, it’s not just about testing. Anti-doping agencies do not need to have a positive test to request a ban. Testimony from whistleblowers, evidence from email chains, possession – offenses known as non-analytical violations – can also be used to disqualify an athlete.
