loris bertolacci

AFL , Patrick White , Drugs and Tour De France .

I was listening to a debate on drugs in sport ( Tour De France mainly) on SEN today with Patrick White and it was frustrating. The whole area is so sad. My main concern really is the recreational use of steroids in local gymnasiums in Australia. People make money out of naive men who want a quick fix with muscles and don’t know what they are doing. Huge health risks await them later in life. That needs to be addressed with a massive educational program with kids.

I find the debate on drugs in sport so difficult. AFL players in a sense are not elite athletes. They are awesome all round athletes, but they are measured by wins and losses and statistics and coach appraisals. Not by having to squat 230lgs, for example, to improve their performance. What I mean is that usually AFL players do not directly link training statistics with performance. AFL players in general don’t come to you and say I want to run 9 mins for a 3km or squat 200kgs. ( Some do of course!). And this is because the link between improvement in training variables and performance is not as clear as many elite sports.

Elite athletes directly know that if they can increase a few measurable variables in their training they will improve. Also with AFL there are so many areas to improve and one plays a juggling act with it. Get too big and strong and endurance suffers, but run too much mileage and speed suffers and so on. So most players are good at everything without being special at anything. And the ability to repeat speed is at a premium and this is not a specific trait.

The debate about whether anabolic agents could assist recovery and rehabilitation is that, a debate. But the season is long and again nutrition and recovery methods win out in the long run.

There is no doubt that steroids were sneaking into the AFL in the 70’s and the 80’s. Too long ago and who cares but it was on the increase and thats that. So ASADA and the AFL has done a good job.

But from a philosophical perspective I always cringe when players get jabbed before a game with a “legal” painkiller. A drug is a drug. So once caffeine was made legal then it was ok to pump those NO DOZ in like lollies. But in the “old days” if caught with 6 short blacks you were tainted a criminal. I got dragged into the media because Darren Bewick took 2 NO DOZ before a game in 1998 when he had the flu and became sicker and I didn’t even give them to him. It was huge, and luckily the Alistair Lynch “scandal” was on at the same time.

This is the same situation that occurs in Society. Alcohol is legal and if you don’t drink and drive you can get totally drunk and thats ok. Weird.

My main worry with steroids is health. I support drug testing because I wanted to compete drug free but one is naive if people think sport in Australia is drug free and that one sport is cleaner than the other. After all there are so many ways people get around the system that really who knows half the time what is going on.

The media goes in hard when there is a sniff of drug cheats.One see pictures of people caught on drugs and they look like mug shots. I would go in harder when club officials are caught drink driving. But I am a cynic and that doesn’t sell papers.

Below is a transcript of a radio interview with Warwick Hadfield that I did a few years ago and the link to ABC.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s1138355.htm

Program Transcript ( June 2004).

Warwick Hadfield: The big issue this week is once again drugs in sport, but this time it’s in Australia.

Loris Bertolacci: From ’75 to ’82 both here and overseas, by a number of coaches and in a number of situations in capital cities in Australia, and round the world, I was encouraged to take drugs.

Warwick Hadfield: Were some of these coaches attached to the Australian Institute of Sport, or similar official positions at the time?

Loris Bertolacci: I think I will leave it at the fact that there were a number of coaches from ’75 to ’82 that I think as a general interest in that it came from me because they saw me as a potential talent to take drugs. I don’t want to say they were attached to any official – you can actually work that out for yourself.

Warwick Hadfield: That’s former hammer thrower and now leading Australian football fitness co-ordinator, Loris Bertolacci, a member of the first intake of athletes into the AIS back in 1981.

I put his allegations to the Australian Sports Commission. A spokesperson said that without the names of the coaches, those allegations had no credibility. The spokesperson added both the Commission and the AIS have and will investigate all credible allegations brought to them.

Bertolacci’s claims come to light as just 49 days before the Olympic Games, Australia finds itself embroiled in the biggest drugs scandal in its sporting history.

This week sprint cyclist Mark French received a life ban from the Australian Olympic Council, after being found guilty of possessing two banned drugs. He has appealed against that ban, saying he wants to clear his name.

The Federal government has also set up an inquiry into allegations five other cyclists were involved in using the banned drugs.

There is, however, no evidence on this occasion that AIS coaching staff are involved.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s Loris Bertolacci, now 50, made the decision to resist all the urgings and compete drug free.

Loris Bertolacci: There were two very firm reasons for me, that was the critical factor was one was health, I always was a strength power athlete and people that knew me that liked to go for a run didn’t really want to put on much weight and thought about the long-term. So it was health. There’s probably three reasons. The second one was I found it particularly boring that people with sometimes a lack of talent could improve so dramatically in the gym and on the track and that. And let me preface that by saying that there are some genetic talents that didn’t need drugs that did perform admirably, and that’s the unfortunate thing.

Warwick Hadfield: What do you mean by that’s unfortunate?

Loris Bertolacci: Well it’s unfortunate for those people because some people that are genetically talented, and we see them in footy obviously Wayne Carey and these people here, they actually are far better. There’s only probably ten great players or five great players in the AFL, and they’re talented, they’re genetically talented, they’ve got skills, so therefore they perform above the level of the others. The same in track and field, weightlifting, whatever, you do get the odd ‘freak’ or people with genetic endowments that does perform at a very, very high level, and then unfortunately they get tainted with drug use, and certainly I wasn’t a genetic talent, I was just a very, very strong guy, naturally. The other thing was that I had an intense desire, and people that know me would understand this, to train as hard as I possibly could for ten years and beat the guys on steroids, basically by just being stronger and harder than them, because I just didn’t like the scene, really.

Warwick Hadfield: Does it frustrate you though that many of those people who did take the steroids are now regarded as – well, their records still stand 20, 30 years down the track?

Loris Bertolacci: Well first of all it was my own fault for retiring at 26 for personal reasons. I could have actually thrown a lot further, so I’m not going to blame it totally on steroids. But I did back myself into a corner a little bit and whilst I could have improved, there were some people that wouldn’t have been as good as me, I’m convinced about that, that now probably rank higher than me in certain areas, and there’s certain people that didn’t take steroids that performed a lot better than me too. So I’m not naïve.

Warwick Hadfield: All these years down the track though, some of these people who you knew to take steroids are not in the same good health that you’re quite obviously in right now.

Loris Bertolacci: Yes, look, I’ve met a lot of people in the past from gyms in sport and everything like that. I found it’s had an impact on their health. That is a huge factor in this whole area, and it’s a bit like people that take X this year at 30, they’re finding they’ve got symptoms of Alzheimer’s, or people that drank themselves into oblivion through their 20s and are in health now. I’ve seen people that I work with in gyms, clients that were in gyms 15, 20 years ago, bouncers that really rue the fact that they did this now and have high blood pressure and problems with thyroids etc. etc., and even some further health problems. I think that’s a major impact later on in life when the thrill of the chase has gone.

Warwick Hadfield: So why, there’s been testing for years now, it’s very, very high profile, all the side effects are well known as well. Why do you think even now, all these years on, people like what’s happened at the AIS, the cycling, in the last few weeks; why do you think people are still taking these incredible risks with banned drugs?

Loris Bertolacci: A number of reasons. I think, I certainly thought about it, I can understand the psyche because you do want to get into the top 10, top 50, top 20 in the world, you do want to go to the Olympics, you do want to wear the national tracksuit, you do want to achieve something, it’s a lot different competing in a windswept velodrome in, well it used to be Brunswick didn’t it? against going overseas and to an international thing. So the lure of the international circuit. There is money, and certainly instead of actually having to work in a mundane job, a lot of these guys can sustain their life for ten years. And it’s just that intangible that people are after, they just become very desperate, and they close their minds to the risks. And it’s probably a folly of youth too, in some regards, and an irresponsibility of people that are attached to them, i.e. I’m saying coaches quite possibly here, who you’ve got to lack respect for them if they condone this, because we have a huge responsibility to our athletes here.

Warwick Hadfield: What about the sports though which have been clearly identified as where drugs are abused: cycling, it’s emerged, the power sports, weightlifting and hammer throwing and so on. Will a time come when parents might have to say Well if my child pursues that sport, they’re going to have to make this tough decision about drugs, and parents may need to take responsibility for pulling their children out of those sports.

Loris Bertolacci: Certainly you have to worry if you’ve got a child that’s veering towards those sports and has an intense, fanatical desire to improve. You do have to worry about their future involvement.

Warwick Hadfield: The story from the AIS in South Australia is of a shooting-up room. Is that something that you’ve seen in your experience in sport in the past? A room where people go to inject themselves rather than have it done by doctors with illegal drugs?

Loris Bertolacci: I think unfortunately yes, certainly here and overseas, time and time again before national titles or in different places etc. and even overseas, and with professional assistance without, and unfortunately now just as we see people can go on the internet I suppose and work out how to construct a bomb, I think that the flow of information in society now, from every aspect is massive, and the ability to get what you want is very easy. So I think it’s a bit naïve of people to think I would assume that things have actually tightened up.

Warwick Hadfield: Former hammer thrower, Loris Bertolacci.

This is The Sports Factor on Radio National. I’m Warwick Hadfield, and this week, the scandal that could destroy Australia’s reputation as a world leader in the fight against drugs in sport.

The two banned drugs found by cleaners in Mark French’s room at the AIS cycling annex in Adelaide were testicomp, also known as glucocorticosteroid, and Equigen.

Testicomp is an anti-inflammatory and only attracts a minor penalty if used by sports people.

Equigen, a growth hormone for horses is, like all growth hormones, banned by the International Cycling Union and the World Anti-doping Agency.

Dr Sue White is a member of the Australian Sports Medicine Drug Advisory Council. She explains why a product meant for horses might have suddenly become attractive to athletes.

Sue White: The actual fact that it is an equine growth hormone means that it doesn’t have the same restrictions as human growth hormones to access. To get human growth hormone in Australia and certainly overseas, there’s lots of restrictions on it placed through the government, placed through the prescribing organisations. Those conditions don’t exist in the veterinary world, because this drug is not a banned drug from their perspective, and so you would be able to access it through fairly standard means and I also believe that it is not particularly expensive.

Warwick Hadfield: So what else do we know about Equigen?

Sue White: Well the things that we do know are basically that it’s a veterinary drug used in horses and it’s specifically a horse growth hormone, and we certainly haven’t been aware in the past of anyone trying to use it on humans.

Warwick Hadfield: What would it do, what are the things that it does for horses that might benefit humans who are competing?

Sue White: Certainly the things that it would do for horses, they would get improved muscle mass, potentially decreased body fat, there’s certainly been no specific discussion on whether it is ergogenic, which means it actually increases the power output or the aerobic capacity, but certainly the body composition seems to be the primary effect. But the interesting thing in this case is that we know that growth hormone is quite species specific, so we know that certainly growth hormone in pigs is specific for pigs and it is more than likely that growth hormone for horses is specific for horses. So in fact these athletes may have been using this medication without any effect at all, except possibly negative effects.

Warwick Hadfield: One of the reasons we don’t know that is that there are ethical reasons for not actually testing this drug on humans, so the athletes are able to test it on themselves, but the testers, the people who are trying to catch the athletes out, haven’t in the past been able to go out and see just what it might do.

Sue White: There’s lots of problems with researching drugs in sport. One of them is some of the ethics, even with the drugs that are prescribed for humans, using those on people that don’t have the actual medical indications for that drug, it becomes even more of an ethical issue if you would like to try and test humans with products that are designed for animals, and I can’t imagine any Ethics Committee agreeing to allow that to happen because of the potential side effects.

Warwick Hadfield: Are there at this stage any known side effects of humans using this drug?

Sue White: Well because we don’t know of humans using it in the past, no, we don’t know. There’s certainly been debates about the use of animal products or drugs for animals in humans in the past, and some of the thoughts have been things like the production of abnormal antibodies, possibly if it does have an effect in humans, then it could have similar side effects to human growth hormone, which is a condition called gigantism, where you get increased bony structure in the face, increased hand size and certainly problems with some of the internal organs.

Warwick Hadfield: One of the reasons that athletes tend to use the growth hormone that’s made for humans is that it aids recovery. Does this horse hormone do the same thing?

Sue White: Well we still don’t know if it does that in humans. In horses, it’s mainly prescribed for ageing horses, so certainly improving recovery would be one of those things, but there’s no indication at this stage that it would be doing that in humans.

Warwick Hadfield: What are the broader issues here in terms of Australian sport? We’ve valued ourselves as being pretty clean in this area. Is this going to do damage to Australia’s international reputation in the fight against drugs?

Sue White: I think any time any of our athletes are involved or appear to be involved in an issue such as this, I do think it damages our reputation, and as we’ve always said, it’s unfortunate that we hope that it’s a small group of athletes, but it does tend to reflect upon all of our athletes.

Warwick Hadfield: Is it sports-specific? Are there some sports where drugs are more notoriously used than others?

Sue White: There’s no doubt that there are certain sports that have more benefit from using drugs, and they tend to be power and strength sports, and endurance sports. So many of the track events, many of the field events, swimming, cycling, but things such as synchronised swimming or diving that are perhaps more subjective in their judging, not just a pure number at the end, but possibly involve some more specific skills, are less likely to benefit from drug taking.

Warwick Hadfield: THG, human grown hormone, was supposed to be the drugs for Athens. Now that it’s been discovered it’s being used could you see this test being formulated for this and this one popping up a bit more in Athens?

Sue White: I’m not really sure with that, and one of the reasons is that I remain concerned about its efficacy in humans. The fact that this drug can be quite species-specific, I wonder whether athletes that are choosing to use drugs may choose to use the ones that have been tried and tested in the past, and work.

Warwick Hadfield: So we might just have some pretty silly people dabbling with things about which they know very, very little?

Sue White: It is distinctly possible.

Warwick Hadfield: And potentially endangering their own lives?

Sue White: Absolutely.

Warwick Hadfield: Dr Sue White.

WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, is promising a test for all growth hormones, human or otherwise, for the Athens Olympics. But it may not be that effective. Growth hormones, apparently, work their way out of a person’s system after just a couple of days.

July 30, 2007 - Posted by Loris Bertolacci | AFL, General