“There have been times where I would specifically give my leg or my toe a couple of really good electric shocks. That would make my blood pressure jump up and I could do more weights and cycle harder – it is effective.”

Those are the words of Brad Zdanivsky, a 36-year-old Canadian quadriplegic climber who has experimented with something called “boosting” in the gym. But the practice isn’t just limited to the gym; disabled athletes have been doing it for years.

A scientist who will be monitoring athletes at the Paralympic Games has said a third of competitors with spinal injuries may be harming themselves just so that they can boost their performance.

“Boosting” is designed to increase blood pressure and enhance performance, and disabled athletes even go as far as breaking their toes with hammers just to get a spike in blood pressure.

The International Paralympics Committee (IPC) has banned boosting for obvious reasons, and it’s been banned since 1994, but it is also something that can be difficult to monitor.

Zdanivsky continues:

I tried several different ways of doing it. You can allow your bladder to fill, basically don’t go to the bathroom for a few hours and let that pain from your bladder do it.

Some people do that in sports by clipping off a catheter to let the bladder fill – that’s the easiest and the most common – and you can quickly get rid of that pain stimulus by letting the urine drain out.

I took it a notch further by using an electrical stimulus on my leg, my toe and even my testicles.

The risks are great, as Zdanivsky explains:

You are getting a blood pressure spike that could quite easily blow a vessel behind your eye or cause a stroke in your brain. It can actually stop your heart. It’s very unpleasant, but the results are hard to deny. The saying is that winners always want the ball, so it doesn’t matter if it’s unpleasant, it gets results.

After the Beijing Paralympics in 2008, a survey indicated that 17% of Paralympic athletes had been using some form of illegal stimulation to enhance their performances, and the actual percentage could be higher, according to Dr Andrei Krassioukov, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and an experienced researcher into spinal injuries.

Krassioukov says:

I will tell you right now as a physician people want to feel better, first of all – they feel better with their blood pressure higher. But a second thing driving it is the desire to win, to have a fair playing field with other Paralympic athletes who have higher blood pressure.

There is still a disadvantage between Paralympians who have normal blood pressure and those who don’t and this puts a significant number of athletes at a disadvantage. As a physician I totally understand why these Olympians are doing this, but as a scientist I am horrified with these events.

His suggestion for levelling the playing fields: changing the system of classification. For example, by changing the points system that aims to ensure that teams with a roughly equal level of overall disability compete against one another in wheelchair rugby and basketball.

Currently, the system takes no account of blood pressure and heart rate, and the IPC has no plans to add physiological characteristics into their classification systems – “Paralympic qualification for athletes with physical impairment is on the basis of a neuro-muscular-skeletal impairment rather than a physiological one.”

Boosting symptoms include sweating, skin blotchiness and goose bumps, and athletes may be subjected to blood pressure checks if they display such symptoms. If athletes are found to have a systolic blood pressure of 180mm of mercury or above, they will not be allowed to compete in “the particular competition in question”, but won’t receive a long-term ban.

The most common Boosting tactics include:

• Overfilling the bladder, by clamping a catheter
• Sitting on a drawing pin
• Use of tight leg straps
• Twisting and/or sitting on the scrotum
• Cracking or breaking a bone

As Zdanivsky pointed out, it will only take one tragic incident from a Boosting related accident to make this more public knowledge:

What’s going to happen one day is that someone is going to have a stroke right on the court and then they are going to have to talk about it.

Hopefully that doesn’t happen at the 2012 London Paralympics.

[Source: BBC]