Are the Brits still using grey area meds...

British Olympians were used as guinea pigs to test an experimental substance in a secret UK Sport project costing hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money in a bid to enhance their performance at London 2012, an MoS investigation has found.

The so-called ‘novel nutritional intervention’ was fed to medal hopefuls during competition despite only being available for use in ‘research’, and there being no guarantees it wouldn’t breach anti-doping rules or that it was free of side-effects.

UK Sport prepared waivers freeing themselves of any blame if anything went wrong and non-disclosure agreements banning athletes from talking about it. Tranches of documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday show that 91 elite-level sportspeople across eight Olympic sports were given the product — an energy-boosting drink branded DeltaG, then at the first stage of in-competition testing in humans.

The substance, a synthetic version of a naturally occurring body acid called ketones, was originally developed by scientists at Oxford University with $10million of funding from the American Department of Defence so US Special Forces could operate for longer behind enemy lines with fewer rations.

UK Sport, the government agency responsible for funding Olympic and Paralympic sport in Britain, produced a ‘participant information sheet’ to accompany the project application which read: ‘UK Sport does not guarantee, promise, assure or represent that use of ketone esters is absolutely World Anti-Doping Code compliant and therefore excludes all responsibility for use of the ketone ester.’

In other words, if an athlete failed a drugs test after taking the substances given to them by UK Sport — either because they were contaminated with banned substances, or WADA made the substance illegal — it would be the athlete’s fault, not UK Sport’s fault.

The Mail on Sunday’s investigation into boundary-pushing methods in elite British sport has obtained documentary evidence of the UK Sport 2012 scheme via multiple Freedom of Information requests (all of which have come back at least partially redacted) and via sources linked to the project. Additional sources across multiple sports say the 2012 scheme was piloted in British track and field athletes, cyclists and various endurance disciplines.

‘In the run-up to London 2012, there were all kinds of whispers about certain athletes getting an extra tonic in their daily supplements handout while others in the same training group didn’t,’ says one source from a sport among the highest achieving in medal terms for Team GB in London.

The coach of another prominent GB Olympian told this newspaper he heard rumours of a ‘wonder substance’ being touted in certain sports but that secrecy was so extreme he was unable to discover anything beyond rumour.

Jon Brown spoke out throughout his career against doping and competed at three Olympic Games for GB, twice finishing fourth in the marathon.

He has since coached for Athletics Canada, where he now lives, and is a highly-respected voice on ethics in sport and has a perspective from outside the bubble of British sport. ‘I’m not really surprised about it,’ he said.

‘Leading up to London there was an enormous amount of pressure to deliver medals with the amount of investment.

‘The whole existence of UK Sport probably depended on the results and the amount of medals Britain were going to win. If they had disappointed it would have been really hard to justify the amount of money that was going into sport.