1 Don't take the test. Not hard. Be elsewhere when the tester calls, claim to be pregnant and fearful of distorted results, do anything to buy yourself a few hours.
2 Get somebody else's urine into the bottle. Less fashionable now than in days of yore when cheats inserted catheters and condoms full of clean urine.
3 Shop around. You only get caught nowadays by buying cheap. Invest in insulin-type growth factor drugs (£3,500 a milligram) or their cruder relatives, human growth hormones (£1,000 a milligram).
4 Keep the pee-pee clean and tamper with your blood. Erythropoeitin is perfect for these purposes.
5 Just keep your body chemicals well monitored. Everybody has testosterone in their system. Authorities check for cheats by measuring the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone and NOT the level of testosterone. 1:1 is normal. A generous 6:1 is the limit of legality. Just top up with artificial epitestosterone products to keep those ratios intact. Women in particular have found this to be a useful way to go.
6 Testers are searching for the "marker" in steroid-type drugs. For under £1,000 a friendly pharmacist will remove this for you leaving an isoflavine free of nasty genetic fingerprints.
7 Diuretics. Used for weight loss, blood pressure problems and the dilution of urine samples. Ethacrynic acid, for instance, will make steroids virtually undetectable.
8 Blood doping. Give yourself a little boost by withdrawing a pint or so of blood and depositing it in the freezer. Wait a while until your body replenishes your stocks naturally. Pump the blood back in and increase your oxygen-carrying capacity nicely.
9 Blocking agents and masking agents. Well worth that added expense to ingest the sort of drugs which temporarily prevent the excretion of steroids from your kidneys to your urine or which will scramble what comes out. For instance, Probenecid, used in the prophylactic treatment of gout, will block detection, or the California-developed masking agent, Defend, will disguise your waste.
10 Buy a calendar. Still popular with the muscled classes. By establishing how long it takes the traces of a product to clear your system and by cross-checking with a perfectly innocent looking calendar you're laughing all the way to the rostrum. In the 1970s, Michael Oertel invented a nasal testosterone inhaler for East Germans which worked, according to one swimmer, "like a volcanic eruption" but stayed out of the urine.
11 Drop outside the ranking level for which random tests apply in your sport. If the top 50 are eligible for random tests there is no sense in not being 51st at the start of Olympic year.
Stay clean.
