Pee No Evil

"EPO is the problem," a frustrated Jim Courier told Newsweek back in 1999. “I have pretty strong suspicions that guys are using it on the tour. I see guys who are out there week in and week out without taking rests. EPO can help you when it's the fifth set and you've been playing for four-and-a-half hours.”

Anyone who's watching Wimbledon has to suspect that he was right: The players pound away at each other, trading 100-mph volleys for hours on end. In fact, it would be difficult to come up with a sport that would reward more different kinds of performance-enhancing drugs: steroids for power and recovery, stimulants for quickness and mental clarity, and EPO for base endurance, to keep you on top of the game in the fifth set. And the rewards for winning a major championship are huge--seven figures and up, counting endorsements. There are powerful incentives to cheat.

Yet as I explain in this Slate piece, the International Tennis Federation's drug testing program is a joke. Venus Williams and Rafael Nadal have both whined a lot this year--interestingly--about how much they're tested, but really, they're quite lucky. Major players can expect to be tested fewer than a half-dozen times each season--and almost never outside competition, which is when most doping takes place.

Even worse, there are almost no tests for EPO, despite a growing consensus that the blood-booster is ubiquitous across all sports, from cycling to NFL football, even to race-car driving. In fact, there may actually be less EPO use in cycling than in tennis, because of cycling's nonstop drug-testing program (which borders on invasive, but that's another conversation). I really hope that isn't the case, but the evidence and logic point that way. The door has been left open.

Yet when I put the question to tennis's anti-doping authorities, they suggested that Courier was somehow lying, ten years ago. And they insisted that EPO is not a problem -- because they've had no positive tests. It's hard to find something when you're not really looking for it.

Read the full article here.

UPDATE: For more info, and some pretty interesting muscle pics of players, check out http://tennishasasteroidproblem.blogspot.com/