Doping at your doorstep: The next Olympic drug crisis could be coming through the mail

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) – The next Olympic doping scandal could be delivered right to your doorstep.

A trove of so-called research chemicals known as peptides, many of them banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and some not approved for human use in the United States, are available with the simple click of a button through online retailers. One seller is Amazon. Another is Alibaba, a sponsor of the International Olympic Committee.

The easy availability of the drugs combined with their hard-to-detect nature is precisely the toxic combination doping regulators and Olympic officials are trying to avoid. With the Milan Cortina Games just two months away, they are hoping to break a string of scandals involving the Russians and Chinese that have disrupted the Games, both summer and winter, since 2014.

Though online pharmaceuticals and supplements have for years been portrayed as a risk by anti-doping authorities, the influx of certain hard-to-detect peptides – chains of protein-building amino acids marketeed to help with anything from anti-aging to workout recovery to weight and memory loss – presents a more difficult challenge.

“These substances have proliferated,” said Oliver Catlin, president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, whose late father, Don, was among the godfathers of antidoping research.

Most of these peptides are so-called “research chemicals” that are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are also banned by the WADA code, either under its “S2” category that encompasses peptides or under its “SO” classification, a catch-all category for “non-approved substances.”

The few substances specifically listed under the “S0” category – such as the hot-selling BPC 157 – are placed there because the pharmalogical make-up of the substances don’t fit neatly into another category on the banned list.

One tricky part of the “S0” category is that it includes unapproved substances that aren’t specifically listed because, for instance, there is no way to test for that drug and regulators don’t want to reveal that to users.

Catlin’s research found hundreds of the banned or illegal peptides available on the online market and an ever-shifting menu of items, with some of them removed after The Associated Press started asking questions.

“It’s not like it happened overnight,” Catlin said. “The mainstream use of peptides has exploded in the last five years.”

Dan Burke, a former FDA official who now heads intelligence and investigations at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said the new-age peptides are hard to corral online because the American law prohibiting their sale dates to 1938 “and it just isn’t working and doesn’t work to this day.”

“The bad guys know it, and that’s why the stuff proliferates,” Burke said.

Though some peptides – insulin and the newly popular weight-loss dynamo GLP-1 are among the best examples – are time-tested, perfectly legal (with a prescription) and effective, other substances in the category are not legally marketable, either as supplements or prescription or over-the-counter drugs.

A number of them, including BPC-157, could be found on multiple online sites, including Amazon and Alibaba. The latter is a major IOC sponsor “committed to helping the IOC transform the Olympic Games for the digital era.”

Asked by AP about this connection, an IOC spokesperson said Alibaba “confirmed to us that it consistently monitors its marketplaces and that it does not have prohibited substances for sale from the WADA 2025 list.” Approached by AP, a representative for Alibaba.com asked for links to “problematic” drugs sold by its marketplace and, after the AP sent two of them, said they had removed those items.

The company said it bars all prohibited substances in accordance to the WADA banned list.

“Although some of these substances may not be legally restricted in ordinary consumer contexts, we have proactively adopted stricter standards to define operational boundaries and our compliance efforts go beyond passive adherence and minimum legal requirements,” the company said in a statement.

Amazon told AP it requires all products offered on its marketplace to comply with applicable laws and regulations, and is in the process of removing products that violate its policies. A few days after being contacted by AP, the website removed some of the drugs the AP had asked about, but a number of listings remained and some new ones popped up.

The current peptides boom comes some 25 years after the late Victor Conte became a household name in sports by developing and selling “the clear” and “the cream.”

Those were the names for so-called designer steroids that led to the infamous scandal that emerged from Conte’s Bay Area Lab Co-operative (BALCO) and engulfed baseball and track.

Like some peptides, designer steroids were impossible to detect at the time but they were not easy to obtain. It took years to uncover their existence, let alone to analyze their efficacy or sanction the athletes who used them.

Fast forward 25 years and this new model of performance enhancers are, in some cases, just as difficult to detect but as easy to purchase as clicking a few buttons on a computer.

WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald said the availability of PEDs on websites isn’t under its jurisdiction, but that WADA began teaming with national anti-doping and law enforcement agencies two years ago to tackle the illegal manufacture, sale and supply of performance enhancers of all sorts.

“The illegal manufacture and trafficking of PEDs is not just a problem for sport – it is a societal issue that requires a multi-faceted approach,” he said.

Whether the proliferation of the drugs could be the trigger point of the next Olympic scandal could take years to uncover.

Like some of the blood-boosting drugs they purport to mimic, most peptides disappear from the blood quickly, which makes them hard to detect. The IOC stores blood samples for up to 10 years to account for possible improvements in detection long after the event ends.

USADA and other anti-doping organizations have spent years warning athletes about the potential legal and eligibility risks of using unapproved substances – whether via prescription drugs or unvetted supplements – while also articulating the health risks for elite athletes and others looking to gain a small advantage in the gym.

“From a consumer-buyer-beware standpoint, anytime you consume or inject something where you don’t know what you’re taking, there’s the possibility of adverse health effects, and that’s concerning,” said Matt Fedoruk, USADA’s chief science officer.