Anti-negative-doping testing: A new perspective in anti-doping research?

摘要

The goalkeeper of an Italian first division soccer team has recently been accused of spiking his team-mates' beverages with psychoactive drugs (i.e., benzodiazepines), to influence the results of several games and place his bets for losing the matches. This circumstance became evident when five team-mates suffered from various degrees of sickness, and the subsequent laboratory testing revealed the presence of Lormetazepam in their urine (La Gazzetta dello Sport 2011). This scandal, which is suspected to involve several soccer players in Italy, is neither likely to be the first episode of this kind of "negative-doping" nor is it likely to be the last. Basically, doping in sports has two primary objectives: the traditional "doping to win", which is aimed to enhance physiological performance, or the less usual "doping to lose". The latter circumstance has been widely practiced in horse-racing since ancient times (e.g., in early Greek mythology, there is a reference to Medea