Doping

As I understood it they were pretending to be a sports person looking for help, so he thought they were a potential client.

It doesn't actually say that in either of The Times articles though. The one linked to upthread is the main article, below is the other.

So what they told him/who they claimed to be is a good question.

How I doped 150 sports stars

A doctor has boasted of helping elite cricketers, footballers and
other athletes to cheat. Britain’s anti-drug watchdog has known of his
activities for two years and let him carry on unchecked. Insight
reports

The bread was being served in the elegant hotel restaurant in central
London when Dr Mark Bonar began explaining his controversial views on
doping in sport to his two business companions.

In the doctor’s opinion, the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong had
been unfairly pilloried for taking performance- enhancing drugs
because all his competitors were “on the same gear”, too. Armstrong
was simply the best cheat.

It was time to accept that drugs were in sport, he argued, and that
athletes should be free to take anything they liked under the
supervision of medical specialists. In fact, Bonar explained, he had
already been doing so for years at his private clinics.

As an array of dishes arrived at the table, Bonar went on to reveal
how he had treated 150 elite sportsmen — including many household
names — with secret “programmes” of banned performance- enhancing
drugs.

His doping clients included Premier League footballers, international
cricketers, Tour de France cyclists, boxers, martial arts competitors,
tennis players and bodybuilders. “So I’ve worked with some
high-profile people,” he confided. “They tend to keep a very low
profile.”

His clients were referred by word of mouth, he said, and he did not
advertise his services because he could not risk coming under “media
scrutiny”. But it was too late. His dining companions were undercover
reporters from The Sunday Times.

The film footage of that encounter and other evidence collected during
this newspaper’s investigation provides the first evidence that a
British doctor has been profiting from the supply of dangerous class C
drugs to healthy athletes to help them cheat in sport.

His confessions about treating a network of stars across a range of
British sports opens up a whole new chapter in the doping scandal. It
also raises questions about the role of UK Anti-Doping (Ukad), the
body charged with catching the cheats, which was warned about the
doctor’s activities two years ago but did not contact Bonar or pass
the evidence on to the General Medical Council (GMC).

Yesterday, John Whittingdale, the culture, media and sport minister,
said he was “shocked and deeply concerned” by the revelations and had
ordered an independent investigation into why Ukad — which is funded
with £6m of taxpayer’s money — did not act sooner.

The trail that led our reporters to Bonar began with a call from a
whistleblower who had read this newspaper’s investigation into
cheating in athletics last summer. The whistleblower, who wishes to
remain unnamed, was no saint. He had attracted interest from Ukad’s
testers after achieving some of the best times of his life while
taking the banned substances testosterone, human growth hormone and
erythropoietin (EPO).

The drugs had all been prescribed by Bonar in a series of
consultations three years ago. At the time, Bonar, a dapper
38-year-old in Louboutin shoes, was working as an anti-ageing
specialist in Harley Street, central London, offering testosterone
replacement therapy to menopausal men.

In his first consultation, the whistleblower says he told the doctor
he was struggling with low energy in training and had read that
testosterone might help — even though it was banned. After a blood
test, the whistleblower says Bonar told him he had low testosterone
and gave him a double shot of the drug on his second visit.

The whistleblower claims Bonar then “corrupted” him by offering him
EPO and human growth hormone. “I knew taking these drugs was wrong but
I was curious. I wanted to know how much these drugs could improve
performance,” said the whistleblower.

However, Ukad’s testers knocked on his door in early 2014 and he was
given a two-year ban. In the hope of reducing the length of his
suspension, he offered the anti-doping body’s intelligence unit
evidence about Bonar’s doping service and doping by other athletes.

This newspaper has seen the recorded transcripts of three meetings
between the whistleblower and the intelligence unit in April and May
2014 which were initially overseen by Pat Myhill, who is now the
anti-doping body’s director of operations. The whistleblower told the
investigators that Bonar had given him performance-enhancing drugs and
said the doctor had talked openly about giving similar treatment to a
“world-class boxer”.

He went on to describe how he had also visited another London clinic
where one of British sport’s top doctors had advised him on drugs he
might take which mimicked the effects of testosterone but were not yet
banned in sport.

Five months elapsed and the whistleblower became increasingly
frustrated that the investigators did not appear to be acting on his
allegations. By then he had hired a legal team at a personal cost of
£60,000 to force the anti-doping body to take his evidence seriously.

In October 2014 he wrote to Ukad: “Regarding Dr Mark Boner [sic]: I
made it perfectly clear to Ukad that this doctor deals with other
athletes and Ukad should be doing everything in its power to discover
[his] client list and more. I was expecting Ukad to come back to me
for more information and your silence in this regards leads to
concerns.”

His solicitor received an email response from Ukad’s lawyer, Stacey
Shevill, which suggested the anti-doping body had, indeed, been
sitting on its hands. She wrote: “If [the whistleblower] wished to
provide evidence against the doctor, he would need to do this by way
of a written statement setting out everything he knows and attaching
all documentary evidence (including, for example, prescriptions).”

So the whistleblower drafted his own witness statement and handed over
his prescriptions from Bonar. But it still was not enough. In January
2015, he received an email from Graham Arthur, Ukad’s legal director,
saying his information had been investigated and this had “not led to
the discovery of [an] anti-doping rule violation or other grounds for
action to be taken against Dr Bonar.”

Earlier Ukad had informed the whistleblower that it would pass the
evidence on to the GMC if it had no jurisdiction over the doctor. In
the end, it did not.

The whistleblower was flabbergasted: “The proof of Bonar’s actions was
concrete and credible, and yet they weren’t interested. I felt as if
Ukad had let down the public and potentially placed other athletes’
lives at risk by allowing this to continue.”

There was a simple way to check out the whistleblower’s story: send in
another athlete to the doctor’s clinic undercover. The German
broadcaster ARD/WDR — which has been collaborating with this newspaper
on doping stories — put our reporters in touch with a young aspiring
Olympic runner who was willing help.

The runner’s first appointment was last October. By now Bonar had
moved his practice to the gleaming consulting rooms of the upmarket
Omniya clinic and pharmacy in Knightsbridge, close to Harrods.

The runner told Bonar he was an athlete struggling to recover from
training and the doctor instantly suggested he might have hormone
deficiencies. “So, I mean, my approach is very simple,” he said. “I do
some blood tests to have a look at your hormones. So looking obviously
at testosterone, human growth hormone.”

Testosterone and growth hormone are banned in sport because they are
used to build strength in a way that gives athletes a competitive
advantage over their rivals. There could have been many other causes
of the runner’s mild symptoms, but testosterone and growth hormone
were the doctor’s stock in trade.

He charges £150 for a 20-minute consultation but also claims he takes
a cut of any profits on the drugs he prescribes or any diagnostic
treatment he recommends.

And his drug programme is expensive. A course of growth hormone, for
example, can cost as much as £1,600 a month and he also charges £600 a
time for the regular blood tests needed to monitor the effect of the
drugs.

The first appointment was only seven minutes in when Bonar broached
the issue of drug testing.

“Obviously some of these treatments I use are banned on a professional
circuit. So you have to be mindful of that. Having said that, I have
worked with lots of professional athletes who do use these treatments.
But it’s how you do it . . . maybe micro-dose, off-cycle, off-season
and things like that.”

The runner was, of course, super-fit and healthy as his blood tests
were to show when he returned for his second appointment two weeks
later. But Bonar had spotted something.

“Your haematocrit [red blood cell count] is, if I’m being honest, a
little lowish side. That can obviously affect performance — things
like endurance. The way that you would boost that, potentially, is to
use something like EPO, which you may have heard of.”

EPO is a drug intended for seriously ill people either undergoing
chemotherapy or suffering from kidney failure. It is banned in sport
but has been used secretly by cyclists and athletes because it can
improve performance by 10% or more — the difference between first and
last in a big race.

It is a drug with dangerous side effects because, as Bonar told the
runner, “your blood becomes thick and it can clot . . . which is
obviously risky”. He suggested the runner could buy his own testing
machine from Amazon to monitor the thickness of his blood at home.

The runner’s blood levels were in fact within the normal range and
there was no clinical reason to prescribe EPO. His hormone levels were
fine, too, but Bonar wanted to give him an injection of testosterone
at his surgery that day.

As the runner was working undercover and had no desire to cheat, he
told Bonar he wanted to postpone the treatment until a later date.
However, he left the surgery with prescriptions for two banned
performance enhancing drugs: Genotropin (human growth hormone) and
DHEA (a steroid hormone).

He was given the thyroid medication Levothyroxine which is currently
being scrutinised by the anti-doping authorities and may soon be
outlawed. “The reason I had him on that was to try and cut him a
little bit,” Bonar was later to explain. “Cut” is a word he used
frequently to describe stripping already lean sportsmen or women of
excess body fat.

The Sunday Times later showed the runner’s blood test from the
appointment to Ashley Grossman, professor of endocrinology at Oxford
University. His assessment of Bonar’s prescriptions was withering. He
said the runner’s thyroid levels were, if anything, slightly high and
did not require boosting, a testosterone shot was “completely
inappropriate” and there was no medical reason to prescribe the growth
hormone.

The professor warned that all the drugs had side effects. He said the
growth hormone could cause high blood pressure and diabetes, and even
weaken the heart muscles long-term; the thyroid drug