The International Olympic Committee bans the use of performance enhancing drugs in the classes: anabolic steroids, stimulants, narcotic analgesics, beta blockers, diuretics, blood products, and peptide hormones. Some of these substances enhance performance by as much as five percent - a huge amount relative to the difference between first and second place in affected sports.

The ban is enforced by urine testing which has become increasingly complex and expensive. The analytical strategy is to rapidly screen all samples with comprehensive assays (usually gas chromatography) and confirm potential findings using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS).

The two most challenging problems that remain to be solved are:

• developing unambiguous methods to detect the growing list of peptides, and
• improving detection of the use of endogenous steroids such as testosterone and dihydrotestosterone.

Two promising new approaches to the detecting testoscerone administration are longitudinal monitoring of the urine steroid profile, and monitoring carbon isotope ratios.