PAULA RADCLIFFE wants all leading competitors to have “drugs passports” to help scientists to identify those people who are taking banned substances.

The world marathon champion and record-holder wants competitors’ “steroid profile” to be held in a central database, so their physical record can be quickly researched when they are being tested.

Radcliffe is supporting the idea of Professor David Cowan, Britain’s leading expert on drugs in sport, to have all competitors profiled in time for the 2012 London Olympic Games. Today, she will tell an IAAF symposium in Lausanne, Switzerland, of the desire of leading competitors to help the drugs authorities in their efforts to eradicate cheating.

Radcliffe, a constant campaigner against the misuse of drugs, will say that she wants the profiling scheme to be introduced from junior level, so that competitors can be monitored throughout their careers.

Cowan, the head of the laboratory at King’s College, London University, explains that, by establishing a steroid profile, it could alert laboratories to the possibility that an athlete is taking drugs, if the individual’s normal levels are ever disturbed.

“It’s a theme that I’m very keen on for London 2012,” he said. “I believe that it will be far more discriminating than the current approach for detecting those substances that are both being taken [illicitly] and also occur naturally in the body.”

These include testosterone, the male hormone, the illegal use of which led to the ban this year of Justlin Gatlin, the American sprinter, and recombinant-erythropoietin (r-EPO), the choice drug of many endurance athletes. It would also be helpful in possible gene doping.

The great advantage of having steroid profiling would be that the laboratories would be comparing an individual with his or herself, not with the established norm for all athletes.

For instance, the established “normal” testosterone-epitestosterone ratio is 1-1. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) considers that a doping offence could have occurred when the ratio is 4-1. However, it has been established that the normal ratio for an Asian athlete is 0.2-1. Therefore, it would be possible for an Asian competitor to benefit from illicitly taking testosterone up to 20 times his natural level before recording an adverse finding.

Wada would seem the appropriate body to store the data on the steroid profile of athletes.