I certainly don't think that. I'm a PhD analytical chemist who has done research in pharmaceutical development.
With all due respect to Hamilton, he knows sod all about the pharmaceutical industry. He knows a lot about a tiny, peripherally related area, but expanding that to the industry would be wrong.
I'm sorry, in terms of creating new drugs I'm calling BS. How much money do you think there is in sport? Because it costs approximately £800M to bring a new drug to market. That's one drug. No drugs are designed for athletes.
in terms of evading the testers there seems to be a couple of choices. Firstly, If you want to set up a lab to determine detectable levels of particular drugs in your system you'll need about £500,000 for instrumentation, for example an Exactive Mass Spectrometer, which I believe was the main instrument used during London 2012. Those ones are now in Ian Wilson and Jeremy Nicholsons lab at Imperial College London. You then need about £200,000 a year to staff the lab and hire experts and about £50,000 to run it. You could farm it out, but ethics requirements will state any athlete involved in testing doping products, and there are some in studies although obviously not top level guys, must not compete, so you'd struggle to find a lab willing to risk it. Enough guys using the same lab can fund it, but they will invariably get found out.
You could go the pharmacokinetics route which is much less expensive but is less accurate so more risky and they already do this anyway.
otherwise you just dope and miss 2 OOC tests then stop, but again, I'm sure they do this anyway.
I'm sure they are coming up with new methods, but short of making sure the levels are undetectable there seems to be little more that they can do that isn't done already such as surfactant on hands, catheterise yourself for urine replacement or using masking agents and hope you get lucky.
EPO was so good because it was endogenous so it was extremely difficult to determine doping levels. Most drugs are not like this, but some are.
take the example of the recent GW compound. There is already a method in place to detect it because these methods are developed in the pre-clinical trial phase using spiked plasma. I know, I've done it for a few studies on already licensed drugs.
I'm probably in a unique position on this forum in that I have met, professionally, two members of European WADA boards, most notably the one time head of the laboratory standards board. The gap is shortening. There will always be a gap and people will always slip through but new methods are making it much harder to get away with.
It's not just Kittel, but other names have slipped my mind. Can't argue this point though as it's both our opinions without any solid evidence on either side. You say I'm being naive, I say you're unfairly tarring the new generation with the same brush.
the last point though, offering them the means to dope successfully isn't a fair point. If you guarantee it people who may not consider it previously might now, it's a loaded argument.
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