Preparing for the Olympics has always been a harrowing logistical feat. But the lead-up to this summer’s Olympics in Rio is starting to look more grueling than a 3,000 meter steeplechase: The event has been plagued by public health concerns about Zika, delayed construction, and forcible evictions from the favelas near the Olympic sites, all exacerbated by Brazil's deeper economic woes.
And now, the Games don’t even have an anti-doping lab. Last Friday, the World Anti-Doping Agency announced that it was suspending the accreditation of Rio’s Brazilian Doping Control Laboratory.
Right now, WADA is staying mum about how exactly the lab failed. But the suspension means flying all ongoing analyses to a different lab while the Rio lab tries to un-suspend itself. And given that the Olympics start in less than six weeks, that really doesn’t bode well for Rio.
That's because testing is already an undertaking when the lab is in the same country as the games. “Everyone goes on minimal sleep,” says Don Catlin, the founder of the US’s first WADA-accredited lab at UCLA. “It’s very intense.”
Generally, it goes like this: Every day, after every event, cases of samples arrive at the designated lab—packages of tightly-sealed clear bottles of urine and blood from the athletes. The lab analyzes them for drugs in the 10 classes of banned substances, including anabolic steroids, growth factors, and meldonium.
If a vial of pee turns up positive, lab technicians will test a second vial from the same athlete with a more targeted method—gas or liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The authorities also get involved: The lab notifies the International Olympic Committee, and the athlete visits the lab to watch the follow-up analysis (sometimes with a lawyer in tow).
The IOC expects labs to turn samples into results within 48 hours, and usually within a day. “Time sensitive samples—that’s the biggest logistical challenge,” says Doug Rollins, a former director of the Olympic anti-doping lab in Salt Lake City. The IOC needs to make sure the winners didn’t win with some extra chemical oomph---before they award the medals. So lab techs work through the night running bodily fluids in the machines; often, the samples get to the lab at two or three in the morning.
Now, try running all of that through a lab halfway around the world. If Rio’s lab doesn’t get its act together in time, it might have to fly the samples (and the possibly doped-up athletes) to a WADA-accredited lab in a different country.
That’s actually happened more than once. In 2012, the UEFA soccer championships in Poland and Ukraine used a single lab in Warsaw. The morning after each match, samples went out on the first available flight, stored in temperature-logged coolers at 4 to 12 degrees Celsius. FIFA did something similar during the 2014 World Cup, during another lull in the Rio lab’s accreditation. (Suspension isn’t new for this particular lab—it was banned from doing a particular type of analysis in 2012, and had its accreditation revoked entirely the year after that.) A lab in Lausanne, Switzerland managed to test all the samples, but getting them there took about 38 hours.
If the Olympics organizers go this route, the size of the lab matters just as much as its proximity. A lab in say, Cuba, might not have the capacity to test all of the Olympics' samples. That UEFA tournament had 367 players to test; the 2014 World Cup had around 700. This Olympics will have more than 10,000.
So another option is for another WADA-accredited lab to set up a temporary space in Rio. That’s also been done before—Montreal’s lab set up an outpost in Vancouver in 2010, and Catlin created a mini-UCLA lab in 2002 at Salt Lake City, bringing over more than 30 staffers and half his equipment. But that isn't easy. “As soon as you have to start taking equipment like mass spectrometers,” Catlin says, “you’ve got big problems.”
Plus, the labs have staff to worry about. A properly-trained technician is hard to find—they need to be able to perform complex lab protocols over and over again. That’s why part of the $60 million Rio poured into its lab expansion went towards training 96 lab technicians. (When Roger Brauninger, a biosafety manager at the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation, audits labs for WADA, he says part of the process is interviewing all the technicians to make sure they know what they’re doing.)
At this point, it’s unclear how many of these options are on the table. The Olympics are just over a month away. WADA has given the Rio lab 21 days to appeal the decision. And the lab claims it’ll be up and analyzing samples again in July, after WADA makes a technical visit.
Still, Rollins says, if that doesn't happen, it’s possible that they have a contingency plan, or that they’ll pull off doing the testing somewhere else. Let's just hope the lab leaves the stumbling to the athletes.
