On a quiet street in Poland, a group of camouflaged police officers have gathered. They carry machine guns, apart from the man at the front, who is driving a handheld battering ram into an unmarked door.
The lock quickly snaps and the police pour inside. They have entered a laboratory, akin to the underground facility in Breaking Bad where the rogue schoolteacher Walter White cooked up his crystal meth. Yet the powders they are seizing are not recreational drugs, but performance- enhancing ones.
When we think of dopers procuring illicit steroids like boldenone, nandrolone or stanozolol, we usually imagine them sourcing the drugs from a dodgy doctor with a backstreet office: a one-man cottage industry.
Increasingly, though, such substances are being produced in high volume by organised crime gangs: the same sort of clans that might also be involved in gun-running, people-smuggling or money-laundering.
“These groups are very quick in adapting to gaps in the system,” said G”unter Younger, a German former policeman who used to be Interpol’s head of drugs, and is now Wada’s director of intelligence and information (I&I).
“What they want is big profit, low sentence and low chance of detection. Which is why PEDs fit perfectly into their portfolio. The profit is the same as dealing in cocaine, or sometimes even bigger. Law enforcement usually is not very interested in doping, so it’s easier to stay out of trouble. And even if you do get caught, you’re likely to get away with a slap on the wrist.”
As so often in the field of anti-doping, the robbers got off to a flier, leaving the cops flat-footed on the start line. Wada’s research suggests that dozens of steroid labs have sprung up across Europe over the past decade, with Poland, Slovenia and Serbia among the preferred locations. As Younger puts it: “If you have a warehouse with several tons [of PEDs], you look for a country that has a lower legal framework to follow up on this.”
Paradoxically, though, success can be counter-productive in the world of organised crime. The more money the gangs derive from an activity, the more it attracts attention. In this instance, the wheel of detection has started to turn.
Over the past two years, Wada has collaborated with European law enforcement teams to raid 35 labs and confiscate 40 tons of PEDs – a figure which equates to around 800 million individual doses. Warsaw has been at the centre of several operations, as it seems to be a laboratory hotspot, but significant seizures have also been made in Portugal, Greece, Germany and North Macedonia. Thus far, Great Britain has only been tangentially involved.
Wada’s European project was only the first step in a three-phase plan which will move on to Asia and Oceania in 2026, with the final stage planned for Africa and the Americas after that.
Wada’s I&I department has expanded to reach its present figure of 15 employees, around half of whom have backgrounds in law enforcement. For context, Wada’s entire staff approaches 190 people, who are mostly devoted to the testing side of the operation. The organisation’s budget also skews heavily in that direction, with recent surveys suggesting that more than lb200m was spent on global testing in 2019, the most up-to- date figures available.
But I&I could be the next potential growth area for the anti-doping industry. While testing is a useful deterrent, it also has its limitations, with fewer than one per cent of samples coming back positive – a ratio which fails to approach most experts’ estimates of actual wrongdoing. The system mostly picks up the less sophisticated cheats, or those who have genuinely fallen foul of accidental contamination – and it is almost impossible to tell one group from the other.
The really big scandals usually emerge via a tip-off, a raid, or an intervention from law enforcement, as we see in the cases of Armstrong, Balco, or the massive Sochi doping operation that was exposed by Russian dissident Grigory Rodchenkov.
Large-scale PED raids can be inefficient in a different way. If you take down a lab, and you gain access to their client list, you might hope to find professional athletes on the spreadsheet. However, Wada has yet to reveal how many anti-doping rule violations have resulted from the 11,500 names it gathered through its European raids. Perhaps it is too early: the process often takes years to finalise. Or maybe we are talking about a different sort of client: weekend warriors searching for an extra edge.
Whether Wada’s operations are picking up Olympic prospects or not, there are other benefits to the process. For one thing, these chemicals are invariably injurious to health. For another, the trade in PEDs is funding some of the most anti-social criminal groups in Europe. And the volume of product being sold is startling.
In all probability, the 40 tons of PEDs collected by Wada to date represent no more than the tip of the doping iceberg.