Practitioners use medications on a large scale, some of which are banned

It has to be said this way: trail runners are not superhumans! In order to cope with the endless races with exhilarating altitude differences that they impose on themselves, to improve performance and to reduce inflammation, pain and/or fatigue, they rely heavily on substances approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency ( WADA) are approved or not.

This is the conclusion of the scientific study “Prevalence of medication use in ultra-endurance athletes”, which examined medication use among enthusiasts of these extreme mass events and, at the beginning of 2019, carried out the first-ever hidden collection of individual urine samples in competition at four of the events of the 2017 edition of the world-famous Ultra -Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB), created twenty years ago in Chamonix (Haute-Savoie) and bringing together thousands of participants every year.

This emerges from the results published this Thursday, January 18th, by the American scientific journal Medicine and science in sport and exercise49.8% of the 412 individual urine samples examined, i.e. almost every second, contained at least one active pharmaceutical ingredient. And 16.3% of them – i.e. one in six – contained one or more substances that were on the product list banned by WADA at the time and were therefore subject to sanctions in the event of a doping control.

Respect for anonymity

All samples were taken secretly, but respecting the anonymity of the participants, at the start of the Orsières-Champex-Chamonix race (55 km and 3,500 m altitude) and the Courmayeur-Champex-Chamonix race (101 km and 6,100 m altitude), on the Traces of the Dukes of Savoy (119 km and 7,250 meters altitude) and the UTMB (170 km and 10,000 meters altitude).

Read the report: Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc: From exhaustion to intoxication, “this is ultra, it’s a roller coaster ride”

Coordinated by the National Ski and Mountaineering School (ENSA) in collaboration with the organizers of the UTMB, the University of Grenoble Alpes, the French anti-doping laboratory in Orsay (Essonne) and its Italian counterpart in Rome B. the Universities of Lyon 1, Rome and Lausanne (Switzerland) as well as the hospitals Chambéry, Geneva (Switzerland) and Aosta (Italy), this study was carried out with the tacit consent of the competitors.

Your registration form actually obliges you to do so “Acceptance of urine, blood, hair and/or saliva samples and related analyzes requested by the organization’s medical commission,” and to agree to the anonymized use of this data “for research purposes”.