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The first major problem that the IOC faces when posing these enhanced drug tests is that many of these drugs can be "cycled", where the athlete stops taking doses long enough ahead of time so that the drug will not show up in urine samples. Most athletes are aware of the time needed to stay "clean", or off the drugs, so that they will test negative, and many common drugs are untraceable in the system after only days or weeks. One of the more popular drugs of late, Human Growth Hormone, or somatotropin, "is rapidly metabolized by the liver and has a half-life in the blood of approximately 17 to 45 minutes. Because of this expeditious breakdown, detecting GH in a drug screen is close to impossible" (Street, 1998). .
Another problem is the testing procedure itself. Samples are tested for a list of known substances, and since new drugs have to be used and discovered in tests before the IOC is aware of them and can include them on the list, those athletes who have access to the newest products have the advantage of using drugs not yet on the banned list. In addition, most of these drugs leave certain traces in urine samples, and it is often these traces and not the actual drugs that show up in positive tests. .
As each drug is chemically unique, each signature left behind is also unique, and therefore a common practice is the creation of "designer drugs", or chemically altered drugs. By slightly altering the chemical composition of a drug it can be tailored to an athlete's specific needs, and the new drug will have the added bonus of an unknown signature and be therefore untraceable (Tipton, 1997). Quite often, placing a substance on the banned list will actually stimulate interest among athletes and lead to increased use of that drug. The logic being that if a drug is placed on the list, it must provide some sort of advantage, or the IOC would not bother attempting to control it. Although intended to deter drug use in the athletes, the IOC's catalog of 200 banned substances has come to serve as a shopping list for many Olympic athletes (Bamberger and Yaeger, 1997).
