Two of the track & field athletes caught for doping from this trained at Altis, home of Andre DeGrasse. One of the athletes, Cody Bidlow, also worked at Altis.
From the article:
Bidlow and Mossberg, the pole-vaulter, had worked and trained at Altis, an elite athletic training campus in Phoenix. Numerous Olympic athletes train there under the tutelage of coaches with global reputations.
I called the recruiting director at Altis, Andreas Behm, who also coaches the sprinters and hurdlers. Bidlow and Mossberg, he said, had simply “gone rogue.” The elite training center, he insisted, had no larger problem with doping.
Seeking to learn more about the latest tactics in sports doping, I went to Phoenix to meet with Cody Bidlow, a former professional sprinter and personal coach. A year ago, the United States Anti-Doping Agency discovered that Bidlow had ordered peptides from Moorcones’s website. He received a four-year suspension.
A lean and muscular fellow, Bidlow described for me how he came to use peptides. He had been a sprinter at Grand Canyon University in 2015 when he sustained a hamstring injury. He was no potential Olympian. He simply wanted to run a few more races, so he asked around at elite gyms for a quick doping fix.
“I had always been around people who used peptides and H.G.H.,” he said, although he declined to name names. “It sounded like peptides are super-effective.”
He wrote down the names of suppliers. He found a lot of fast talkers who excited no trust. (The head of Switzerland’s antidoping organization told me that his agency’s tests have shown that 80 percent of the peptides advertised on the web are adulterated or outright fakes.)
Then Bidlow learned of Thomas Mann’s site, which was refreshingly professional. And Mann’s peptides were real. “This wasn’t ‘bro science’; he is a pure brainiac,” Bidlow said. “He would post scientific studies breaking down how a peptide worked.”
We sat in a coffee shop as Bidlow gave me a tutorial on peptides. He described which worked, which were difficult to detect and which were not worth the trouble. He said coaches and athletes — particularly sprinters — were enamored of something called insulin-like growth factor-1, known as IGF-1. It promotes healing and builds muscle in a fashion similar to anabolic steroids. IGF-1 occurs naturally in the body, and antidoping tests struggle to distinguish the natural from the synthetic.