Till the Olympics, Mr. Bol by no means earned greater than $20,000 a yr from working, paying for all associated prices himself, Mr. Rinaldi stated. “It’s not glamorous.” Few may afford efficiency medicine, notably as a part of a structured program of doping, he added. “It’s not one thing that’s possible in our sport, notably right here in Australia.”

The drug Mr. Bol is accused of getting used is near-identical to a molecule discovered naturally within the physique that stimulates the manufacturing of purple blood cells. The take a look at for it yields columns of black streaks of various thicknesses and densities.

Antidoping businesses sometimes analyze the outcomes from these exams utilizing the human eye, a worryingly fallible technique, stated Erik Boye, a Norwegian scientist. Together with fellow professors of biochemistry and molecular biology in Oslo, he has lengthy been calling for a change in how these exams are carried out.

“There are scientific strategies whereby you possibly can measure precisely the density within the profile that you simply’re analyzing,” he stated. “You may have a machine do it. After which the reply is clear.”

Within the early 2010s, Dr. Boye and his colleagues sought to rally help throughout the scientific neighborhood for such machine evaluation. At first, they attracted signatories from vital colleagues, together with Werner Franke, who uncovered particulars of East Germany’s state-sponsored athlete doping program, and Peter Agre, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003.

However these efforts had been scorned by antidoping businesses, who stated that they had been extremely skilled in analyzing the exams and wouldn’t change their strategies.

Finally, Dr. Boye stated, the battle started to really feel unwinnable. “It’s simply so unfair,” he stated. “You assume that antidoping is a worthy, wonderful enterprise, however it’s not, sadly.”