It's Clean Sport Week (May 11-17) and the head of the UK's Anti-Doping (UKAD) agency is busy doing precisely what every peer leader in every anti-doping agency around the world may and/or should be doing: warning her own national community of athletes, coaches, parents, governors and anyone else involved in performance sport of the serious health risks of a class of drugs that is being promoted as a 'safer' alternative to anabolic steroids.

Jane Rumble, the chief executive of UKAD, told British media outlets that a survey, commissioned by the agency, revealed a horrid trend: a third of young people aged between 16 and 25, young athletes and gym-goers, are having Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs) shoved down their market-open throats as the safe way to pump up.

Rumble and her agency's research have rumbled a ton of online misinformation promoting Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs (IPEDs). UKAD is particularly worried about one variety in the class: SARMs.

She told various media outlets:

"None of them have been approved for human consumption, and they are banned in sport, and yet there is information online promoting them to be safer alternatives to steroids.

"The idea was that they would support muscle growth and also bone structure, but what has happened is that clinical trials have revealed serious health risks associated with these products, hence none of them have been approved.

"To bring that to life for you, the kind of risks I'm talking about are loss of libido, but also heart inflammation, liver damage and failure. Those can be life-threatening."

The sale of SARMs for human consumption is illegal in the UK. Rumble listed the health risks that are not listed on the can:, among them liver damage; lower natural testosterone production; cardiovascular issues, such as heart inflammation and thrombosis.

Growth in use of SARMs is associated with fitness fanatics but there are suggestions that young athletes shy of the standard that would make them obvious picks for anti-doping testing in elite sport are also exposed to the risk of taking banned substances because of strong social-media misinformation.

Elite athletes do (and ought to) know better: all SARMs are on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List, and a positive test for that class of substance would result in a WADA Code infraction and penalty.

Some other facts about SARMs:

• They were developed in the 1990s and, as is the case with many of the choices of cheats and users of performance-enhancing substances, were designed as experimental treatments for sick people suffering from conditions such as osteoporosis and muscle-wasting syndromes.
• No SARM has ever been approved for medical use by any medical regulator, nor has the UK's Food Standards Authority approved the class of substance as a food ingredient or supplement for human consumption.

UKAD is urging anyone who sees the use of SARMs in a product marketed as food, a supplement or a product for human consumption to report the matter to their local trades-standard authority

The UKAD survey of more than 1,000 young people, aged 16 to 25, also highlighted a troubling trend of misinformation being spread by influencers.

Of 1,043 survey respondents aged 16-25, 29% told UKAD they saw ads for SARMs on social media at least once a week, while 5% said they saw ads every day. A third of the young people who said they had bought SARMs did so after seeing them promoted online. Forty-two per cent of those surveyed said they had seen 'superhuman' or 'shortcut results' content on social media at least once a week in the past 30 days.

Last year, Great Britain bobsleigher Arran Gulliver* was banned for two years after testing positive for the banned SARM ostarine.

This year a TikTok-er revealed in an episode of Channel 4's Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins that he almost died of liver failure after taking SARMs as a teenager. SOS chooses not to provide links to such content because they do not only include warnings about the dangers but frame the story as 'inspirational'.

Online searches for peptides (chains of amino acids that can occur naturally but are used in synthetic form by those who wish to embrace artificial assistance beyond natural capacity) have increased five-fold in the past year, according to data from Google Trends. It's part of the fitness and largely US-based 'looksmaxxing' vogue for promoting extreme forms of shape-shift modification to their appearance.

Says Rumble:

"Our advice to young people is don't trust everything you read on social media. Real success is built, not bought."

Rumble honed in on the marketplace targeted by sellers of SARMs:

"We're concerned about gym goers, we're concerned about sports fans. What we're doing is getting the messaging out about these serious health risks in order to understand the prevalence and the actual seriousness of the issue.

"Sixteen to 25-year-olds told us that they are being exposed to this content, promoting SARMs as safer than steroids, at least once a week. Four out of 10 said they saw this content at least once a week. It's also being sold as a shortcut effect, or [it has] superhuman effects. We're here to raise awareness to young people, but also to parents."

Diminished Through Enhancement

The UKAD warnings come two weeks out from the Enhanced Games, an event featuring a miniscule number of former elite athletes and WADA-Code signatories who have signed up for an experimental project that does not ban performance-enhancing substances and methods, does not include the independent and random anti-doping tests obligatory in sports committed to Olympic sport.

More on that below for registered readers....