Credit: The World Anti-Doping Agency
On a quiet street in Poland, a group of camouflaged police officers have gathered. They carry machine guns, apart from the man at the front, who is driving a handheld battering ram into an unmarked door.
The lock quickly snaps and the police pour inside. They have entered a laboratory, akin to the underground facility in Breaking Bad where the rogue schoolteacher Walter White cooked up his crystal meth. Yet the powders they are seizing are not recreational drugs, but performance-enhancing ones.
The raid captured on our video was the result of a two-year collaboration between the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) and Europol – the European equivalent of Interpol – and it represents a new front in the war against PEDs.
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| Wada and Polish police raid an organised crime lab making PEDs in Poland |
When we think of dopers procuring illicit steroids like boldenone, nandrolone or stanozolol, we usually imagine them sourcing the drugs from a dodgy doctor with a backstreet office: a one-man cottage industry.
Increasingly, though, such substances are being produced in high volume by organised crime gangs: the same sort of clans that might also be involved in gun-running, people-smuggling or money-laundering.
“These groups are very quick in adapting to gaps in the system,” said Günter Younger, a German former policeman who used to be Interpol’s head of drugs, and is now Wada’s director of intelligence and information (I&I).
“What they want is big profit, low sentence and low chance of detection. Which is why PEDs fit perfectly into their portfolio. The profit is the same as dealing in cocaine, or sometimes even bigger. Law enforcement usually is not very interested in doping, so it’s easier to stay out of trouble. And even if you do get caught, you’re likely to get away with a slap on the wrist.”
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| Günter Younger, using his expertise as Interpol’s former head of drugs, has transformed Wada into a force to be reckoned with - Reuters/Denis Balibouse |
As so often in the field of anti-doping, the robbers got off to a flier, leaving the cops flat-footed on the start line. Wada’s research suggests that dozens of steroid labs have sprung up across Europe over the past decade, with Poland, Slovenia and Serbia among the preferred locations. As Younger puts it: “If you have a warehouse with several tons [of PEDs], you look for a country that has a lower legal framework to follow up on this.”
Paradoxically, though, success can be counter-productive in the world of organised crime. The more money the gangs derive from an activity, the more it attracts attention. In this instance, the wheel of detection has started to turn.
Over the past two years, Wada has collaborated with European law enforcement teams to raid 35 labs and confiscate 40 tons of PEDs – a figure which equates to around 800 million individual doses. Warsaw has been at the centre of several operations, as it seems to be a laboratory hotspot, but significant seizures have also been made in Portugal, Greece, Germany and North Macedonia. Thus far, Great Britain has only been tangentially involved.
Wada’s European project was only the first step in a three-phase plan which will move on to Asia and Oceania in 2026, with the final stage planned for Africa and the Americas after that.
The whole process is being steered by Younger: a tall and imposing 58-year-old with a shaved cueball head, whose police career covered a variety of fields from drugs to counterfeit currencies, cyber crime and terrorism. In 2016, he accepted a move from the Bavarian police force to Wada, having previously collaborated with them on the Lance Armstrong case among other scandals. But in his early days in his new office, he found himself hamstrung by his lack of executive power.
“One of my first cases that I had here involved the IBU, the International Biathlon Union, where we got an informant telling us that the former president had been corrupted by the Russians. It was then that I realised that, as a sport organisation, I can only do voluntary interviews. If I speak to you, and you say ‘I’m not comfortable anymore’, I can’t stop you from leaving.
“So my next idea was to reach out to law enforcement from Austria and from Norway, because Mr [Anders] Besseberg [the former IBU president who has since earned a prison sentence for accepting gifts such as watches, hunting trips and the services of prostitutes] is Norwegian. We met at Interpol and this is where my idea of collaboration started from.”
Since Younger’s arrival, Wada’s I&I department has expanded to reach its present figure of 15 employees, around half of whom have backgrounds in law enforcement. For context, Wada’s entire staff approaches 190 people, who are mostly devoted to the testing side of the operation. The organisation’s budget also skews heavily in that direction, with recent surveys suggesting that more than £200m was spent on global testing in 2019, the most up-to-date figures available.
But I&I could be the next potential growth area for the anti-doping industry. While testing is a useful deterrent, it also has its limitations, with fewer than one per cent of samples coming back positive – a ratio which fails to approach most experts’ estimates of actual wrongdoing. The system mostly picks up the less sophisticated cheats, or those who have genuinely fallen foul of accidental contamination – and it is almost impossible to tell one group from the other.
The really big scandals usually emerge via a tip-off, a raid, or an intervention from law enforcement, as we see in the cases of Armstrong, Balco, or the massive Sochi doping operation that was exposed by Russian dissident Grigory Rodchenkov.
Large-scale PED raids can be inefficient in a different way. If you take down a lab, and you gain access to their client list, you might hope to find professional athletes on the spreadsheet. However, Wada has yet to reveal how many anti-doping rule violations have resulted from the 11,500 names it gathered through its European raids. Perhaps it is too early: the process often takes years to finalise. Or maybe we are talking about a different sort of client: weekend warriors searching for an extra edge.
“Personally, I’m not so interested in who the athlete is,” Younger replied, when questioned on this point. “I’m interested in the coach and the doctor who gets the money out of the athletes’ health. Sometimes we learn that – as in Russia – when you want to be in the national team, you have to do what the coach says. If you don’t, then you’re out. So, for me, the bigger criminals are those that exploit the athletes’ health. Also, we find that today’s amateurs are tomorrow’s elite.”
Whether Wada’s operations are picking up Olympic prospects or not, there are other benefits to the process. For one thing, these chemicals are invariably injurious to health. For another, the trade in PEDs is funding some of the most anti-social criminal groups in Europe. And the volume of product being sold is startling.
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| The trade in PEDs is funding some of the most anti-social criminal groups in Europe |
“It’s so easy for organised crime to sell PEDs,” said Younger, “because they can use the clearnet [a technical term for the freely available part of the internet]. You don’t even need to go to the dark web, which is what you have to do to buy a weapon or normal, recreational drugs. Go online and search for PEDs and you’ll see how many websites you get. Because of the size of the industry, we can shut down a guy producing a ton every month, and the market doesn’t even notice.”
In all probability, the 40 tons of PEDs collected by Wada to date represent no more than the tip of the doping iceberg. But as Younger and his team turn their attention to Asia – thus coming into contact with countries like China and India which produce vast quantities of steroids for the medical market – there is a sense of growing momentum behind their work.
“In 2016 especially, we had meetings where law enforcement said, ‘Wada, who is that?’” Younger explained. “Now they’re coming to us. They say, ‘Can you work with us on this case?’ Or ‘Can you identify whether this is a steroid lab?’ We are building a reputation, and we have so many operations going on that we can only focus on the high-level ones. If you have the right people around the table, you can achieve quite a lot.”
- Simon Briggs
