London’s Olympic Village in June 2008 was but a skeleton outline, marked by scant concrete pilings. Yet, by the time the opening ceremonies kick off in the summer of 2012, state-of-the-art educational facilities, health care clinics, day care centers and health clubs will be dotted across nearly 25 acres of new parks and open courtyards.

These extensive redesign efforts will benefit the city long after the Olympics are over. The athletes’ residences will be converted into 2,800 new homes after the games, with about 50 percent of them designated as affordable housing.

The tri-generation plant, which produces 33 percent fewer emissions than the grid, will continue to supply the village with electricity, heat and water. And the statuesque monument of grand architectural proportion, the Olympic Park Wastewater Pumping Station, will remain, gilded in soft purple tones, crowning the ultramodern sewer system that runs just underground.

But a new idea, proposed by University of Lancaster researchers Athanasios Katsoyiannis and Kevin Jones, suggests that that the new sewer and wastewater pumping station, nice as they may be, may hold a grand opportunity. Instead of simply shuttling waste, they could also be used to blow the whistle on those athletes tainting their feats with performance-enhancing drugs, aka PEDs.

In a new viewpoint paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, Katsoyiannis and Jones cite rigorous examples where researchershave monitored illicit drug use by chemically analyzing wastewater, accurately and reproducibly. Building off this knowledge — and realizing that athletes are getting consistently better at cheating the system when it comes time for drug testing prior to competition — the research team believes that Olympic officials might be better served by passively monitoring the wastewater that flows from the toilets in the Olympic Village.

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