A ski runner was suspected of doping. And he was a medical phenomenon

For Finns, Eero Mäntyranta is an icon. The cross-country skier has won Olympic medals seven times and was a world champion medalist five times. He was second to none. No wonder many people suspected him of doping. To what did he owe his outstanding achievements? What was he doing to beat his rivals on the head? Was he a “superhuman”? Only years later it turned out that the explanation of this medical mystery lies … in genes. The extraordinary story of Eero Mäntyranty is described by Euan Angus Ashley in the book “Genes. Medical secrets and an amazing story about their explanation ».

1. Mäntyranta made his Olympic debut when he was 22 years old. From the beginning, he achieved great results
2. There were rumors that the athlete’s excellent results were due to the use of blood doping. It was said that it gave him greater endurance and efficiency
3. Years later, it turned out that Mäntyranta actually had an elevated hematocrit, but this was the result of … a genetic mutation
4. Respond before it’s too late. Get to know your Health Index!
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Excerpt from the book «Geny. Medical secrets and an amazing story about their explanation »we publish thanks to the courtesy of the FILIA Publishing House.

There was no doubt that Eero Mäntyranta was one of the best Olympians to ever make it to the podium. He grew up in poverty in rural Lapland – a region known for reindeer and snow in the cold northwest corner of Finland. He started skis for the first time at the age of three. For him, cross-country skiing was closer to a year-round method of transport, and not to a recreational sport. The only easy way to primary school was across the lake, and the journey (mostly in the dark in the winter months) took up to an hour.

It is in this forcing his circulatory system to support his lean, muscular body as it wanders on warped wooden skids through the frozen lake that the origins of a story so extraordinary that the numerous Olympic medals he was to win were just the tip of the iceberg.

Mäntyranta started winning cross-country races at a young age, first local, then regional and finally national. His Olympic debut was in Squaw Valley, USA in 1960, when he was 22. He then won gold in the 4 x 10 kilometer relay. In 1964 he was in top shape and dominated the competition in Innsbruck, Austria, to the point where he was nicknamed Mister Seefeld, after the Alpine town where the cross-country skiing competitions took place. It wasn’t hard to see why: Mäntyranta won the 40-kilometer race over XNUMX seconds ahead of the rest of the participantswhich was an unusually long margin of time. During his 12-year career, he won seven Olympic medals, three of which were gold. His achievements were recognized by the Finnish Ministry of Education, which commissioned the construction of a museum dedicated to Mäntyrant’s sporting prowess, near his home in the small town of Pello.

Even so, Mäntyrant’s career was overshadowed by rumors of blood doping. It is a form of performance and fitness enhancement used by athletes to cheat on performance. Blood doping requires the removal of a liter or two of your own blood several months before a sporting event. The oxygen-carrying red blood cells are removed and the plasma is pumped back into the bloodstream. The body senses a decrease in red blood cells and starts producing new blood cells.

1. See also: Tablets, injections and … poppy seed cake. How do athletes “coke”?

In the meantime, the removed ones are stored until the competition and given to the competitor just before, providing an additional boost in performance due to the presence of extra blood cells that can provide additional oxygen to the tissues.

The same idea is behind the legal technique of increasing performance, namely high altitude training (and possibly some of the amazing achievements of female athletes shortly after having a baby, when they still have more red blood cells in their bloodstream after pregnancy). At high altitude, the lower oxygen content stimulates the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells in response to a hormone signal secreted by the kidneys, the so-called Erythropoietin, usually abbreviated as EPO.

Nowadays, some athletes – one of which is the well-known cyclist Lance Armstrong – inject themselves with an artificial form of EPO to increase the production of red blood cells in the body. Sports authorities have a big problem with blood doping because you are injecting your own blood and there is no artificial agent like anabolics or EPO to detect. So, in order to detect blood doping, a simple test is carried out to see what percentage of blood is red blood cells.

This number, called the hematocrit, can be obtained relatively easily: all you need to do is centrifuge the blood in a centrifuge to separate the three components – red and white blood cells and plasma. Normally erythrocytes occupy about 35-45 percent. whole blood volume. Altitude training can raise this value to almost 50%. Blood doping is suspected in athletes if the hematocrit is above 50%. More than 55 is rather unusual. In Mäntyrant, the hematocrit was 60–70%.

No wonder it sparked rumors of doping. Even his insistence that he had always had such a high hematocrit since he was a teenager did not convince many people. However, when it became known that several other members of the Mäntyranty family also had high red blood cell counts, they began to attract the attention of Finnish hematologists and geneticists. One of them in particular, Albert de la Chapelle, became famous for identifying the genes underlying many family conditions using the mapping method I described in earlier chapters.

Once, de la Chapelle visited the Mäntyranty family home, where he managed to bring together 40 family members. As he later told David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, at one point in the evening he was talking to three old ladies while sitting on the couch and discussing their health, when he suddenly realized that only one of them who she had some health problems, didn’t really have the mutation. It turned out that this unusual variant is associated with a long life (many of Mäntyrant’s relatives were very old and still in great health) and extraordinary athletic performance. What is this mutation?

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De la Chapelle eventually studied 97 members of the Mäntyranty family over five generations. 29 of them were affected by the “problem”. Many of them did not even know that something was happening to them. Then de la Chapelle and his team went on to investigate the cause. Before getting into genetics, they tested Mäntyrant’s EPO levels, expecting it to be quite high. To their surprise, the erythropoietin level was quite low (the normal range is 8–43, and Mäntyranta was 8,6). They also looked at a bone marrow sample and found it to be overactive in the production of red blood cells when stimulated with erythropoietin. In fact, Mäntyranty’s bone marrow was active without even adding EPO to the dish. What was going on here? Mäntyranty’s bone marrow was found to be extremely sensitive to EPO. Even the smallest amount obtained from the body during the biopsy was enough for the marrow to continue producing red blood cells in the dish.

So they turned to genetics. They measured all markers scattered across the genome of each family member and found one specific region shared by all “affected” individuals. As it turned out, this marker was located near the gene encoding the EPO receptor – a protein that reacts to its presence and helps to transmit to the bone marrow a directive to increase the production of red blood cells. In affected family members, the mutant receptor acted like an accelerator pedal in a car that got stuck in the down position, constantly stimulating the bone marrow to produce red blood cells. It turned out that in the men of the Mäntyranty family, the hematocrit was 60%.

Twenty years after Mäntyrant’s withdrawal from high-performance cross-country skiing, this genetic discovery was finally enough to free him of all suspicions. Now in his XNUMXs, Mäntyranta was grateful that the matter was finally cleared. And although he himself has always claimed that his training and psychological predispositions (both are clearly sine qua non conditions) were the secret of his successes, there is no doubt that his strange superhuman mutation was a major factor in his medal-winning performance. Other members of his clan are additional proof of the advantage this mutation brings. We had Pertti Teurajärvi, Mäntyrant’s nephew and double Olympic cross-country skiing champion, and Mäntyrant’s niece was the national champion.

One study found that increasing the percentage of red blood cells by 50 percent. after administering EPO to athletes, it increased their maximum efficiency by 10%. – a large margin, considering that the results of elite athletes are only milliseconds away. More dramatically, the time to exhaustion has risen to 50%. Perhaps this is the perfect edge for an elite cross-country skier to separate himself from the best in the world by over 40 seconds?

What other superhumans lived undetected around us?

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