The "Anatomy" of a Performance-Enhancing Drug Test in Sports

The components of a performance-enhancing drug (PED) test in sports include sample selection, collection, establishing sample integrity, sample pretreatment, analyte detection, data evaluation, reporting results, and action taken based on the result. Undergraduate curricula generally focus on the detection and evaluation steps of an analytical procedure, but the other steps often determine the quality of the final result. Following the whole analytical process in a PED test can provide a wealth of useful pedagogical examples for the undergraduate analytical curriculum, including practical illustrations of chemical equilibria and a deeper appreciation of analytical protocol. Moreover, actions taken based on the analytical results in PED testing are usually public knowledge because they involve prominent athletes. As a consequence, students get to see that the analytical result is often one of several possible inputs that produce an ultimate decision, which places the analytical result in a "real-world" context.