At the 1998 Tour de France, for example, French officials caught an employee of the Festina cycling team with a carload of performance-enhancing drugs, including epo. Secret weapon Cycling isn't the only sport sullied by allegations of epo use. At the Australian Open tennis championships a year ago, the player Jim Courier told reporters that he suspects epo use is rampant in the game. I can't play 35 weeks a year and God knows how many matches and keep going. But they are.
Courier says epo makes such superhuman performance possible.
Athletes in cross-country skiing, football and track and field athletics are also rumoured to use the drug. With epo rumoured to make athletes run up to 20 per cent faster, the drug's allure is hard for many to resist, he says. The problem may grow even more widespread if athletes can insert a gene that makes their bodies produce extra doses of the hormone. The technology may be just around the corner, as several academic groups and a handful of biotech companies hammer out ways to use epo gene therapy to treat anaemia. The gene-therapy techniques under development use viruses to carry the epo gene into cells.