What’s It Like to Be Drug-Tested? We Asked Three Olympic Runners.
Late-night visitors armed with syringes and vials. Apps that track your location. Phone calls from mysterious numbers.
Ever wonder what drug testing entails for Olympic track and field athletes? Consider the experiences of three runners — Ciara Mageean of Ireland, Emily Mackay of the United States and Olli Hoare of Australia — who are among those who have grown accustomed to one of the kookier parts of their shared profession.
“Nobody,” Mageean said, “will have poured urine into bottles on your own kitchen table as much as athletes.”
At this stage of her career, Mageean is intimately familiar with the various drug-testing protocols and the many minor inconveniences that they create.
For example, athletes must provide their “whereabouts” via a smartphone app to authorities like the World Anti-Doping Agency or, for Americans, the United States Anti-Doping Agency so that they can be tested without advance notice in an out-of-competition setting. That includes a one-hour window each day in which they must provide their exact locations in case a stranger needs to turn up to draw blood or (more uncomfortably) stand there while they urinate into a container.
“I’m so used to someone watching me pee in a cup,” she said. “They physically have to see it leave your body. My friends find that hilarious.”
Mageean, 32, who competes for Ireland but lives and trains in Manchester, England, has grown used to unannounced guests appearing at her home before dawn, which she considers a necessary nuisance. The reigning European champion in the women’s 1,500 meters, she said she could not comprehend why some athletes were curt with the testers. “They’re doing us a service to keep our sport clean,” she said. “And they’re nice people.”
Mageean used to think that testers showed up on purpose when she was visiting her parents in Northern Ireland because her mother would cook them breakfast. There was also the early morning when they arrived on the stoop of her boyfriend’s home. The problem? It was the day of a family funeral.
“I do think that if I had written, ‘I have a funeral today,’ they might not have come,” Mageean said.
Emily Mackay, United States
Elite athletes fear the day a drug tester shows up but the athletes are not where they said they would be. That can count as a missed test. With three of those in a 12-month period, they face a suspension.
In late May, a few weeks before the U.S. Olympic trials, Mackay arrived in Oregon for a meet and immediately received a distressing phone call from a training partner who had remained behind at their team’s high-altitude camp in Flagstaff, Ariz. “I hope your trip went well, but I feel like I have to tell you this,” the other runner told her. “U.S.A.D.A. showed up after you left.”
To the best of her knowledge, Mackay, 26, had updated all of the information in her U.S.A.D.A. app, she said, and the tester had not sought her out in Flagstaff during her one-hour “whereabouts” window. In other words, Mackay had not done anything wrong. Yet because she was a relative newcomer to the drug-testing pool, she was, in her words, “freaking out.”
“I’m crying in my hotel room,” she said, adding, “I just felt so guilty and horrible. I felt like I messed up big-time.”
She was not penalized for any wrongdoing in the end, but the experience shook her enough that after she had returned home to the Boston area a couple of weeks later, and a tester called to inform her that she was at her apartment, Mackay was ecstatic.
“Yes! I’m here! I’ll be home in 15 minutes!” Mackay recalled telling her.
Her hyper-awareness of testers has not affected her performances; she is the third-fastest American woman ever. But she still worries about her phone.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Now, I’m answering all the spam calls that I don’t want to be answering because I’m scared it might be U.S.A.D.A.: ‘Oh, I have to take this.’ And it’s almost always a telemarketer.”
Olli Hoare, Australia
Hoare, 27, has made friends with people who are unacquainted with the peculiarities of his job, and they sometimes have pointed questions: Are you on probation? Do you have a substance-abuse problem?
No, Hoare tells them. He just runs for a living.
“I’ve had girlfriends in the past who have been woken up by drug testers, and they’re freaking out,” Hoare said. “And I try to explain to them that this is just a normal thing. And while they’re getting ready for work, I’m over there with a needle in my arm having my blood drawn and peeing into a cup.”
Hoare, a former N.C.A.A. champion at the University of Wisconsin who lives and trains in Boulder, Colo., acknowledged that he had to get used to the process. No one, not even some of the testers, would admit that any of this is normal.
Hoare recalled having his blood taken by a woman who must have been new, he said, because she seemed a bit nervous. “She didn’t get enough blood,” Hoare said, “so she had to find another vein, and I passed out.”
At other times, testers materialized at his apartment late at night when he was playing video games with friends. “And this guy and this lady are just sitting at the table waiting for me to pee,” Hoare said. “It’s a weird situation for some people, but it’s so necessary.”
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