Angry in the Great White North

That the message was sent speaks far more to the problem than the content of the message itself. China, the host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, was told in no uncertain terms not to cheat:

The head of the World Anti-Doping Agency is returning to China to repeat a message he delivered on a visit 10 months ago: do more tests and crack down on China-based suppliers of performance-enhancing drugs sold on the Internet.

Montreal's Dick Pound said he'll also call on China to "go the extra mile" to persuade the world that it isn't hiding top athletes from drug tests with the 2008 Beijing Olympics just a year away.

"If you come here (to the Olympics) with 1,000 athletes that nobody has ever seen before and you win all the medals, it is not going to be a successful Games — it's going to be a disaster," Pound said in a telephone call, previewing his message.

The bar is going to be set very low for China -- essentially zero-tolerance:

China is intent on staging grandiose Games to showcase its rising political and economic power. Pound said his message would remind high-ranking officials that one positive drug test for a Chinese athlete could turn the Olympics into public-relations disaster for the communist government.

The problem for China is the history of doping:

A series of drug-related offences and strangely dominant performances in the '90s involving Chinese athletes set off alarms internationally that are still ringing.

The memory of Ma's Army, the group of runners coached by the eccentric Ma Junren, lingers. They took the track world by storm in 1993, coming from nowhere to dominate with world titles and records, success attributed to potions of turtle blood Ma gave them.

Then there were the "Golden Flowers," a group of powerful Chinese women's swimmers with deep voices who won 12 of 16 gold medals at the 1994 world championships in Rome. Two tested positive for steroids a month later.

Their coach, Zhou Ming, who was banned for life, has been reportedly training a group of 50 swimmers in a remote part of China.

What it boils down to is Chinese credibility:

Pound, however, said areas of concern remain. He said he admonished his hosts for conducting only slightly more drug tests on their considerable pool of athletes than Australia, a much smaller nation; urged officials to work harder to halt Internet sales of steroids and human growth hormone that originates in China; and reminded them that "they have to have an independent anti-doping organization, insofar as anything in China can be independent from the government."

And that's the key, isn't it? The Chinese government and the Communist Party of China are one and the same -- typical for a communist country. So success of the athletes is as much about the inherent superiority of communism as it is about kicking a ball or swimming really fast. It is that myth of superiority that is the justification for a dictatorship.

A Chinese Olympic team that loses honourably is still a loser. That stigma attaches itself to the Communist Party and is a threat, albeit a small one, to their power. Nevertheless, no threat can be tolerated.

So the Chinese must dominate at the Olympics. The athletes know it. The coaches know it. The government knows it. And as Dick Pound alluded to, any drug testing organization set up by the Chinese government knows it too.

My prediction?

Not a single Chinese athlete at the Olympics will be punished for cheating.

But more than a few will be severely punished if they commit the crime of getting caught.

The punishment? Ironically, it is not likely to be as severe as the fate in store for some athletes being groomed for the 2008 Olympics.

Did I say groomed? I meant to say grown.

These athletes may not compete in past the Olympics. Show up, win the gold, and then disappear. What do you think happened to those "Golden Flower" swimmers? All gone.

Not retired.

Gone.

China’s Golden Flowers, such as Dai Guohong, were unheard of before becoming world champions and have not been heard of since. If they are suffering from health problems, as many believe, it is China’s silence and a system that rewards results at any cost that strengthens the resolve of Leonard and his supporters. As Pfeiffer acknowledges: “All the (Chinese) coaches are under immense pressure to deliver results. It means a lot financially for them to succeed.”

Why are they gone? Because of the unknown, and possibly lethal, consequences of genetic enhancement:

If China was the scourge of world swimming in the 1990s, with almost 40 doping suspensions, then the looming crisis, in which it stands accused of kidnapping talented children for a secret programme designed to genetically enhance their performances, threatens to elevate the nation to champion pariah. The plot is as horrifying as it is simple. One hundred of China’s most talented junior swimmers are gathered together for a test day in Beijing in late 2001 after the city won the right to stage the 2008 Games. Fifty are chosen to remain there with the national team under the “care and feeding” of national team coaches. They travel to international competition and are well-known to rivals and anti-doping agents.

The other 50 take a very different route: they leave Beijing in late 2001 and are not seen again until shortly before China welcomes the world in 2008, when those among the missing children who have survived and prospered reappear as the fastest shoal in the world, untested, both in international waters and by anti- doping agencies.

They have spent seven years in a distant province in the clutches of Zhou Ming, the former head coach of China who was banned for life after a number of his female swimmers, known as the Golden Flowers, were proved to have taken an anabolic steroid. While some of the children emerge fit to be champions, others have fallen victim to this genetic experiment in which they have been the guinea pigs.

Zhou, meanwhile, has planned his revenge with his mentor, an East German “sports criminal”, “architect of systematic doping” and latterly businesswoman selling the technology at the heart of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) success to Shanghai.

Far-fetched? Not so, says John Leonard, head of the American Swimming Coaches Association and author of a paper, “Fears and Facts: presence of East German doping criminal raises fears about China’s intentions”, intended to make the world sit up and ask questions. Contacts in China suggest that Zhou is training “talented youngsters in a remote area of China, unknown, perhaps, even to Chinese swimming authorities and coaches ” and uses “a variety of sophisticated doping methods and perhaps the brave new world of genetic enhancement”.

Some go further. One leading coach believes the world has already unwittingly witnessed genetically enhanced swimmers. He points to teenage Chinese boys who raced from beyond the top 200 in the world to among the top 30 over 1500m in 2002 before fading a year later and “disappearing” last year. “We believe one of those, at least, has had mitochondria (the energy-producing part of cells) genetically enhanced but is now very sick.”

China’s response to these claims? Silence. To be expected, Leonard suggests, at a time when Beijing, while professing to having cleaned up its act, “has also made it clear it intends to dominate certain sports, swimming among them” in 2008. That and the appearance in China of sports scientist Professor Helga Pfeiffer, 71, one of the architects of East Germany’s “unified performance analysis system”, prompted Leonard to go public with his fears despite the danger posed to contacts within China, who have been feeding him information since 2002.

Sounds far-fetched?

Endurance exercise training promotes mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle and enhances muscle oxidative capacity, but the signaling mechanisms involved are poorly understood. To investigate this adaptive process, we generated transgenic mice that selectively express in skeletal muscle a constitutively active form of calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV (CaMKIV*). Skeletal muscles from these mice showed augmented mitochondrial DNA replication and mitochondrial biogenesis, up-regulation of mitochondrial enzymes involved in fatty acid metabolism and electron transport, and reduced susceptibility to fatigue during repetitive contractions. CaMK induced expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1 (PGC-1), a master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis in vivo, and activated the PGC-1 gene promoter in cultured myocytes. Thus, a calcium-regulated signaling pathway controls mitochondrial biogenesis in mammalian cells.

Transgenic mice featuring augmented mitochondrial DNA replication and mitochondrial biogenesis exhibiting reduced susceptibility to fatigue during repetitive contractions.

Sounds like a formula for Olympic gold!

But how do you test for altered mitochondria? The one good thing that might come out of this, should this nightmare scenario of genetically-enhanced transgenic demi-humans dominating the Olympic Games come true is that not only would China be finished in world sports, it might also spell an end to the Olympics themselves.

Fine by me.