Tucked behind a vacant structure off one of Venice Boulevard’s many side streets sits a nondescript, two-story building that encloses the hopes for a future of clean sport.
Here, the five-star general in competitive athletics’ war on performance-enhancing drugs performs his duties.
Meet Don Catlin, professor emeritus at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine’s Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology and the world’s foremost sports scientist.
Catlin’s primary home nowadays is at the non-profit Anti-Doping Research laboratory, which Catlin founded in 2005 as a self-described “part grassroots campaign, part collaborator and part think tank.”
The story begins, however, 25 years ago with a young professor getting the chance of a lifetime.
The beginning
When Los Angeles was awarded the 1984 Summer Olympics, one of the issues that the games’ governing bodies felt needed to be addressed was the detection and prevention of performance-enhancing drugs. Because there was no drug-testing facility operating in the United States at the time, Catlin believed that the widespread feeling among Europeans was that American athletes were doping simply because no one cared enough to stop them.
Seeking to change that, the International Olympic Committee’s Medical Commission in 1981 contacted Catlin, then a young UCLA professor, to oversee their new program.
“I was minding my own business one day when these emissaries from the committee came to see me,” Catlin said. “They had been studying UCLA and knew I had done some similar work in the military, so it was not completely illogical that they would find me.”
Despite being an avid sports fan, Catlin, then in his 10th year as a professor at UCLA after relocating from the East Coast, had very little knowledge about the prevalence of doping in athletics because at the time it was, as he described, “a non-entity: there was nothing, it was completely unknown.”
Catlin was persuaded enough by his department chairman to reject the Olympic Committee’s initial offer on the grounds that there was nothing to accomplish in the landscape of drug testing in sport.
However, the Committee was persistent and eventually threw in the caveat that was the clincher for Catlin and his colleagues.
“They told us that they really had to have me,” Catlin said. “”˜And by the way, we’re going to give a big grant to UCLA!’ Well, then we were off and running because that was a game-changer. Once or twice in your life you have a chance to alter your direction, and this was a major shift.”
The lab
For the next 25 years, Catlin ran the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the institution that was birthed from the Olympics’ grant.
As the only lab of its kind in the country, the Analytical Lab worked with the Olympics, NFL, MLB and NCAA on researching and developing drug-testing programs.
“We’re trying to play catch-up all the time,” Catlin said. “I get sources and tips from all over because I’m on the good side, and people like the good guys to know what’s going on. We’re listening and we’re watching, and we evaluate everything and decide whether to go for it or not.”
In his tenure at UCLA’s lab, Catlin oversaw and was responsible for anti-doping’s most significant breakthroughs, including the reporting of the use of darbepoetin alfa, a form of the drug EPO as a doping agent at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
That event, which led to numerous Olympians being banned from future competition, was successful because Catlin believed that the drug was coming and that it would be popular among athletes and so developed a test in preparation for the 2002 games.
Perhaps the biggest achievement of the UCLA lab was the discovery of the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone or “The Clear” as it has come to be known in light of the Barry Bonds allegations.
Because of its status as a “designer” steroid that could be synthesized and constructed from other drug materials, the discovery of THG was monumental for the anti-doping movement.
“For years I had suspected that there were designer steroids,” Catlin said. “But you don’t know their structure, you can’t draw them, you can’t tell what they are, you can’t buy them, so how are you going to find them? Well, we finally figured out how to do it, and when we did, we made major noise. We’d found the first designer steroid.”
The scientist
Despite his achievements and contributions to the anti-doping movement, Catlin was not well known, even at UCLA. It took a series of groundbreaking steroid discoveries at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative to bring his accomplishments into the public eye.
“The BALCO scandal really turned things around for me and my work,” Catlin said. “Suddenly, drugs in sports was the front-page topic on every newspaper, and suddenly I was a hero. I had not been looked favorably upon by somebody who did something “˜useful,’ which was difficult because I felt that this was a legitimate field of work and that if I just did my thing and waited to see how things would change someday, they would.”
These days Catlin and his co-workers at Anti-Doping Research are hard at work trying to develop a urine test for Human Growth Hormone, the newest threat to maintaining cleanliness among athletes.
While HGH can be detected via blood test, Catlin admitted that the vast majority of athletes staunchly refuse to submit blood samples.
“We’re trying to create more and more barriers for drug suppliers and drug users,” Catlin said. “It’s all about the money and the fact that there will always be cheaters, no matter where or how. The goal is to try and get to the point where Mr. and Mrs. Joe America can sit and watch a sporting event and be reasonably sure that it’s clean. We’re not there yet.”
The legacy
With the sporting era severely tarnished by scandals and cheats, the question remains as to how this generation of athletics will be remembered. Catlin said that the primary concern should not be with the current athletes who are doping but rather with amateur and up-and-coming athletes who will feel the pressure to improve their performance at any cost.
“The old-timers will phase out eventually,” he said. “You need to start looking at alternative programs and at the role of education. We have to pay attention to the kids. The kids have got to learn that they can’t do this, otherwise we’ve lost sport.”
That’s where Anti-Doping Research comes in, as both a research and development institution and an advisory voice in the community. Catlin is still hard at work on the front lines, and the next obstacles for him to face are the tests of time.
No more samples required.