BSCG Newsletter – February 2022

Feb 07, 2022

Banned Substances Control Group

Greetings to all of our valued clients and colleagues around the world. BSCG is excited about the start of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games and we hope you are too. Two Olympics in one year,last year during these stressful COVID times. The founders of BSCG have had the amazing opportunity to attend 26 Olympic Games in total and we consider ourselves part of the extended Olympic Family. Don H. Catlin, M.D. our Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer was one of the longest tenured members of the IOC Medical

Commission serving for more than 20 years and attending 14 Olympic Games, 11 of those with Oliver Catlin, BSCG President, by his side. Ryan Connolly, our Co-Founder and Counsel, was instrumental in establishing and fulfilling the testing contract for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympic Games setting up a temporary lab and martialing a team of staff alongside Dr. Catlin. Together we were proud to create BSCG in 2004.

As the XXIV Olympic Winter Games open in Beijing we thought it would be a good time to share more of the origin story of BSCG.

The Start of Anti-Doping in the United States

Don H. Catlin, M.D., a professor in molecular pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles, took a stand. In 1982, he founded the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the first lab in the United States to test for performance-enhancing drugs in sports. It was created to handle the testing at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and was the third Olympic drug testing lab in the world (there are 29 WADA accredited laboratories providing testing for the Olympic Family today). Under Dr. Catlin’s direction, the UCLA lab went on to become one of the world’s most respected testing facilities for performance enhancing drugs.

The UCLA Analytical Laboratory he built performed drug testing for three Olympic Games (1984 Los Angeles, 1996 Atlanta, 2002 Salt Lake), the 1994 World Cup, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Football League (NFL), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the U.S. Military, Major League Baseball's minor leagues, and more. At the time of Dr. Catlin’s retirement in 2007 the lab had grown to become the world's largest testing facility of performance-enhancing drugs, processing more than 50,000 samples per year.

A True Innovator

Dr. Catlin was an intellectual Olympian who took up the global battle against performance enhancing drugs in sports. He changed the world by creating new testing techniques and in the process authored more than 100 articles in scientific publications. His incredible thirst for innovation saw him create a testing methodology that differentiates natural from artificial testosterone known as the Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR) method. The test remains the gold standard today and has been expanded to cover other endogenous steroids.

He also martialed the unveiling of the test to detect the blood booster medicine, darbepoietin in Salt Lake, busting two medalists in the process, and put the world on notice about designer steroids by cracking the code for THG, the steroid at the heart of the BALCO doping scandal that was fueling Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and others. Dr. Catlin’s contributions to the world of sport have been so great that the Chicago Tribune in 2002 named him Sportsman of the Year. There’s no telling how many lives he’s benefited by creating testing techniques that have discouraged sports people from cheating.

Demonstrating the Need for Banned Substance Certification

Dr. Catlin truly revolutionized the science around sport drug testing and helped to level the playing field for athletes. Not only has he championed the idea of fairness in sport to put the athletes first—but he has also helped safeguard athletes from banned substances across a range of supplement products. Dr. Catlin was the first to highlight the risk that supplement contamination could lead to positive drug tests with his seminal paper in 2000 in JAMA on ‘Trace Contamination of Over-the-Counter Androstenedione and Positive Urine Test Results for a Nandrolone Metabolite.’ This paper solidified the need for dietary supplement certification for banned substances in sport and BSCG was proud to help start that industry four years later.

Bringing the Olympic Standard in Drug Testing to Dietary Supplements

Dr. Catlin recognized that athletes who take legally sold dietary supplements are also at risk of positive drug tests from inadvertent contamination of products, or worse yet intentional spiking with doping agents. He had learned in heart-wrenching hearings over positive drug-test results how some athletes were caught unwittingly ingesting banned and dangerous substances in dietary supplements. With the creation of BSCG he brought the Olympic standard intesting to the supplement industry. In 2004 the proactive efforts began when Dr. Catlin, along with his son Oliver Catlin and attorney Ryan Connolly, founded BSCG and in the process helped created a new industry focused on testing and certifying dietary supplement products to be free of banned substances in sport. Today BSCG has expanded the range of services to offer label claim testing through the Certified Quality program, customized protection for the CBD and hemp industry with the Certified CBD program, and offers on-site GMP audits through Certified GMP. We are also able to serve custom testing needs like those required now for weight loss and men’s health products on Amazon. In 2005, the Catlins founded Anti-Doping Research (ADR), a nonprofit organization/NGO dedicated to research and testing development. ADR’s Support Clean Sport initiative brings clean sport to the streets with lead billing for the Support Clean Sport/BSCG/Guttenplan Coaching cycling team.

BSCG - Delivering Industry Leading Protection

BSCG’s industry-leading testing menu now includes more than 290 compounds banned in sport, together covering more than 94% of WADA’s adverse analytical findings in the last decade, more than any other provider in the dietary supplement certification industry. As the longtime president and co-founder of BSCG, Oliver Catlin has embraced his father’s legacy and become a thought leader in the field of sports nutrition and supplements.

At BSCG, Oliver has led the way in developing the BSCG brand and expanding its sports-testing menu by adding more than 200 prescription and over-the-counter drugs to its testing menu that no other provider covers bringing a broader level of consumer protection to the certification industry. Today the BSCG industry leading testing menu covers nearly 500 substances in total, almost double what other third-party certification groups offer.

Contact us:

1-800-920-6605 * info@bscg.org * www.bscg.org