Don Catlin has made a career of developing techniques that strike out athleteswho use illicit performance-enhancing drugs. The big sports doping scandals are hard to miss when they hit the headlines: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and designer steroids; Floyd Landis and testosterone; Lance Armstrong accused of taking erythropoietin (EPO). But who helped to develop the tests that uncover such cheating? Don Catlin of the Anti-Doping Research Institute (ADR) has been a key figure in the fight against sports doping. From 1982 to early this year, he was the director of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Olympic Analytical Laboratory. During his tenure, that lab was instrumental in identifying the designer drugs that the supplement company Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) was distributing to elite athletes. He and his colleagues developed the test that caught Floyd Landis's use of synthetic testosterone in the 2006 Tour de France. And it was Catlin who predicted the abuse of EPO, which boosts production of red blood cells, in sports.
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