"There is no safe dose"

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The Lance Armstrong case shows how professionally and comprehensively professional sport is manipulated. Nevertheless, doping should never be allowed, says the Heidelberg anti-doping fighter Prof. Werner Franke in a interview

Prof. Werner Franke

Professor Franke, when the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) published more than 1,000 pages of evidence and evidence of doping offenses in Lance Armstrong's cycling teams a few months ago, it generated far less public attention than Oprah Winfrey's partial doping confession. Why?

It was a television show, a large, staged show that had a lot of tam-tam done in advance. To see Armstrong sitting there as a person who has to admit that he lied for years - something that fascinates people more than 1000 pages of files. But that was all calculated, a minimal confession under the supervision of his lawyers. They all crouched in the background during the conversation. Elsewhere, Armstrong had long been in jail for lying in court.

USADA chief Travis Tygart describes Armstrong's doping system as the most sophisticated and professional the sport has ever seen. Was it really so different there than in other teams, maybe other sports as well?

Certainly not from a pharmacological point of view. The same substances and methods are used elsewhere. But the organization already shows a tremendous criminal energy - one has never seen it in such perfection. Just imagine: In the middle of the night a courier with blood bags and doping drugs in his luggage drives from the secret depot in northern Spain across a small border crossing in the Pyrenees in order to bypass the strict daily border controls of the French. And if they got noticed anyway, Armstrong's people settled the matter with the International Cycling Federation. Travis Tygart even claims that the head of the Lausanne doping control laboratory, Dr. Saugy, the team is said to have informed about which substances could be detected in the doping samples. If that's true, if the inspectors really do common cause with the doping top athletes, then the whole anti-doping fight is just cabaret.

Can you understand that with so much fraud and leveraged control systems there are people who demand that doping be cleared so that at least all athletes have the same opportunities again?

Such demands are madness! Physiologically alone, the idea of ​​being able to create equal opportunities with the approval of doping is total nonsense. With such ideas, students of medicine or biology would fail my intermediate diploma. Every athlete reacts differently to such means. Some go through the roof in terms of performance like a rocket after a three-week doping cure, with others the stuff hardly works.

This also applies to the side effects.

Of course - and not only that. Even individual athletes do not always react the same way to doping drugs. Incidentally, there is no safe dose for these substances. What goes well for months can suddenly be fatal. Very healthy young athletes go to sleep in the evening and hang dead out of bed the next morning with half their bodies - like, for example, a young French top cyclist on a tour of Germany a few years ago. Terrible! With Epo or autologous blood transfusions, you have doped your blood so thickly that it clumps in the blood vessels. Strokes, heart attacks, there are already "umpteen examples!"

This is exactly the argument that approval advocates like to use: If doping were allowed, athletes would at least no longer have to manipulate on their own. Doping could take place under medical supervision.

People have no idea about the legal situation in civilized states. And certainly not from the ethical obligation of medical professionals. Anyone who, as a doctor, does something that does not serve to diagnose or treat, violates the Hippocratic oath, the principle of "Primum est nil nocere" ("First of all, do no harm", the editor's note) of Paracelsus. And not only that: He is also a criminal offense. As early as 2000, in the course of the proceedings against GDR doctors, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that the dispensing or administration of drugs for doping purposes for no medical reason is at least an aid to bodily harm, if not direct bodily harm.

Sport is rated positively in society primarily because it plays an important role in the socialization and healthy development of young people. Can that still be maintained if doping were allowed?

No, if the manipulation of one's own performance became a principle, all positive aspects of competitive sport would be lost. We should no longer send our sons and daughters to such a sport. And the state should no longer support sport with public funds, because each of us, as taxpayers, would be complicit in the consequences.

Professor Franke, thank you very much for talking to us.

The interview was conducted by Jens Richter.

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