Veteran player agent Peter Jess, who has long warned of illicit drug use among AFL players, says the league's next "big challenge" is dealing with micro-doping.
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As the AFL and Gold Coast Suns deal with the fallout of a cocaine scandal at the expansion club, Jess said he feared there were a small number of players using tiny amounts of performance-enhancing substances such as testosterone and human growth hormone, which were undetectable.
He raised the issue with the AFL's chief medical officer Peter Harcourt at the player agents' conference this week, and has since written to AFL football operations boss Mark Evans.
In his letter, Jess wrote: "At the conference I sought advice from Peter Harcourt as to what the AFL understood the implications for the sport were from micro-doping and what testing protocols were in place. Peter was uncertain as to if the practice had entered the AFL landscape and if they had the protocols to detect it.
"It is a major concern that the AFL's integrity department is not across the frightening new development in PEDs [performance-enhancing drugs]. This is, obviously, the AFL's next big challenge.
"The European experience is that blood passports are now redundant in the current format. Given the foregoing, what alternate tests are the AFL contemplating, if any?"
In his column in The Age in May, recently retired Carlton champion Chris Judd raised the issue of micro-doping when discussing the league's soon-to-be-revamped illicit drugs policy.
"In an odd way, catching a player using performance-enhancing drugs should be celebrated, as it safeguards the integrity of the game," Judd wrote.
"But catching accidental dopers should not be celebrated as much as catching rogue players who are deliberately doping to gain an edge over their rivals. It is widely accepted that there is not currently an accurate test for human growth hormone, or micro-doses of plant-based testosterone, through creams, patches and injections.
"Therefore, the next generation of drug cheats will be caught via surveillance of gyms, anti-ageing clinics and internet purchases, not by urine or blood tests."
Fairfax Media reported last year that the AFL Players Association had been made aware that a small number of players might have used arm patches – similar to nicotine patches – that contain testosterone, or have used creams with properties similar to HGH.
The practice was said to be far from routine and certainly underground.
Jess said because there were yet to be clear tests to determine whether athletes had micro-doped, it meant the much-heralded blood passport – used to keep check on any major chemical imbalances in an athlete – was almost useless.
"In the tests that have been conducted in Europe, it is now confirmed that the ... biological passport can, and is, being circumvented by the use of micro-doses of EPO, human growth hormone, blood transfusions and corticosteroids," he said.
"The micro-doping in the VO2 max [fitness] test, on average, improved the athlete's results by a massive 6.1 per cent. In the 3000-metre run, there was an average improvement of 2.8 per cent.
"These results were after a month of micro-doping and all athletes did not fall outside the biological passport parameters. In essence, it is now clear that a clean passport is not necessarily the passport of a clean athlete."
