And so Harlow, location of Britain's first pedestrian precinct, has a new claim to fame: it will be the front-line of London 2012's war on drug-cheats.

UK Sports Minister Hugh Robertson last week went on a well-publicised tour of the 4,400 sq m anti-doping laboratory that will test samples from "up to one in two" athletes competing at the British capital's third Summer Olympics.

Unfortunately, the accompanying media release leaves me more than ever concerned that we are picking up the wrong end of the syringe on doping.

And as the prime witness in my support, I shall be calling one of the leading authorities on the subject of drugs in sport: David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

The aforementioned media release seems very taken with the volume of samples to be handled by the Harlow facility.


It is not a long media release – maybe a couple of sides of A4, yet I think it manages to tell us five times altogether that more samples will be analysed than at any previous Games. (The actual number of samples is either "over 6,250" or "up to 6,250", depending which bit of the media release you read.)

But how will this frenzy of super-fast, super-sensitive testing actually help in the fight against doping?

You might think this was super-obvious: surely the higher the volume of tests, the greater the chance of unmasking drug-cheats?

Well, yes, if your field of vision is restricted solely to London 2012, that might be true.


For the big picture, though, I would steer readers once more to Howman's keynote speech at December's Partnership for Clean Competition conference in New York, which sets out simply and clearly the limitations of in-competition testing.

According to Howman: "We all should know by now that the fight against doping in sport has reached the stage where science alone will not eradicate cheating or often even detect it...The clever cheating athlete...is becoming better at cheating, more sophisticated and funded extensively.

"That athlete might now be confidently of the view that he or she will avoid detection under the historical approach."

Howman goes on: "There continues to be the 'dumb' doper who is regularly caught through standard testing protocols, with a large number still risking in-competition testing.

"This doper effectively catches him or herself.

"On the other hand, there is an increasing sophistication of cheating at the high end of sport...

"From micro dosing to manipulation, the clever doper, aided, abetted and considerably financed by clever entourage members, continues to evade detection through the analytical process.

"And we continue to be haunted by the impunity with which, for example, many treat human growth hormone."


In other words, no matter how many in-competition tests you conduct, there are some cheats you just won't catch. (There is, by the way, nothing unusual about this situation: history shows that this has been the case for as long as there has been an anti-doping movement.)

Now, I am not saying that this constitutes an argument for abolishing in-competition tests.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge defended them to me only last week as part of "an array of different methods" for fighting doping.

To my mind, probably the best argument for retaining them is the chance that samples might be used retroactively, once scientific methods have improved, to catch out cheats who thought they had got away with it.

I can also understand why Olympic chiefs might want samples from medallists to be tested, even if the tests can't actually guarantee that cheating has not taken place.

However, in-competition testing, whether at the Olympics or elsewhere, needs also, I think, to be seen in the context of the finite funds that are available for the fight against doping.

If in-competition testing is, as Howman seems to imply, a relatively inefficient way of catching the most sophisticated drugs cheats, isn't it common sense to divert funding away from such tests towards more efficient methods – such as investigations involving law enforcement and other governmental authorities and an intensification of genuine no-notice, out-of-season, out-of-competition sample-taking and analysis worldwide?

I actually think it's more than a matter of common sense for those genuinely committed to getting the highest possible proportion of cheats excluded from competition, and here's why.

If in-competition testing is, indeed, a relatively inefficient way of catching cheats, then statistics compiled on the basis of in-competition tests are very likely to understate the true prevalence of doping.

Such statistics might delude sports fans into thinking that cheating was less widespread than it possibly is.

They might also provide ammunition for anyone wishing to argue that the amount of funding earmarked for anti-doping purposes should be cut.

The percentage of adverse analytical findings is only x, these people might argue; therefore other priorities are more pressing.


Cost is another issue on which it is worth listening to Howman (while bearing in mind, of course, that the director general of WADA is hardly likely to argue for a cut in anti-doping funding).

"The sport industry," he told his audience, "is estimated now to be an $800 billion (£515 billion/€621 billion) a year business.

"Spending $300 million (£193 million/€233 million) to protect the integrity of such a business does not seem to be an awful amount of money.

"In fact, one could easily mount an argument that sport is not spending enough to defeat the biggest scourge it currently confronts.

"Regrettably cost is being [used] as an excuse by those responsible for anti-doping programmes not to undertake the best possible approach.

"For example, not all samples are analysed for EPO (erythropoietin).

"With only 36 positive cases for EPO being found in 2010, from 258,000 samples surely indicates that."

The aggravation caused to honest athletes by the onerous test-related requirements imposed on them in recent decades places an obligation on everybody to wage the fight against doping proportionately and intelligently.

This means utilising limited resources in the ways most likely to weed out the bad guys.

Foisting increasing volumes of in-competition tests on athletes seems to me, in the light of the points raised by Howman, a depressingly un-intelligent way of setting about this.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here.