Philip Hersh: Dara Torres hype hides doping questions

Having been at the Olympic track and field trials, I had only a limited sense of the impact Dara Torres was making on the United States at the swim trials.

It hit me last night, when my neighbor – a 52-year-old mother of two boys, 11 and 8 – said, “Dara Torres is my new hero.”

Then I did a little reading, and I realized some of the media (NBC, NBC Nightly News, NBC’s Today Show, NBCs Tonight Show – think that has anything to do with NBC being Olympic broadcaster?) has turned Torres, the 41-year-old mother of a 2-year-old girl, into a superhero.

The Avenger of Midlife Crises. Momma the Magnificent (Or, as a British kid might say, the Magnificent Mummy.) An Olympian for the Aged.

And then I wanted to tell my friend’s kids, “Babies, don’t let your momma grow up to be Dara.”

The hype over Torres as a swimmer conveniently overlooks doubts about how she is faster at sprint events in 2008 than she was in 1988.

The hype over her as a mother who has a sporting career overlooks at least a dozen other 2008 U.S. Olympians who have children and are continuing their athletic careers, some with minimal financial resources compared with what Torres has.

It isn’t Torres’ fault that she is being singled out for praise by an NBC publicity machine that clearly wants to avoid facing issue of doubt about her performances.

Before getting to that issue, let’s recognize soccer moms Kate Markgraf and Christie Rampone; softball moms Jennie Finch and Stacey Nuveman; basketball moms Lisa Leslie and Tina Thompson; judo mom Valerie Gotay; weightlifting mom Melanie Roach (raising three kids, one autistic); track and field moms Chaunte Howard, Tiffany Ross-Williams, Joanne Dow, Magdalena Lewy-Boulet and Aretha Thurmond (who finished sixth in the discus at a US. championships 17 days after delivering her son); tennis mom Lindsay Davenport; and volleyball mom Robyn Ah Mow-Santos.

(That is the latest list from the U.S. Olympic Committee.)

The other issue, of course, is whether Torres is using performance-enhancing drugs. She protests her innocence loudly, saying she can be tested now, an hour from now, next week, next year, in 10 years. She offers her participation in the new U.S. Anti-Doping Agency study, Project Believe, as evidence. And, yes, I know the paradox, that the system does not allow clean athletes to prove it and often does not catch dirty athletes who say they are clean.

So why don’t I give Dara the benefit of the doubt?

Marion Jones. Antonio Pettigrew. Both runners failed no tests and swore they were clean until the feds forced them to tell the truth. There are many more.

Several generations of East German wundermadchen swimmers doped to the gills and were never caught, according to documents that came to light after reunification.

Olympic champion swimmers Amy Van Dyken and Matt Biondi were linked to the Balco scandal. Even if neither has been publicly found to have doped, it damages the defense that U.S. swimming is clean as a whistle.

Fast-twitch muscle fibers die young.

I try to play devil’s advocate with myself on these situations. After doing a series of articles in 1993 that used statistical anomalies to suggest strongly that China’s performances in women’s swimming owed to doping, I weighed the opinion of Chinese officials who said such analysis owed to Western ignorance of Chinese culture. In 1994, Chinese swim stars began testing positive in droves.

While raising doubts about Irish swimmer Michelle Smith at the 1996 Olympics, where she won three gold medals at 26 after being an utterly unremarkable swimmer two years earlier, I also indicated there were few parameters about performances of older female swimmers, since only recently had there been financial support to keep them competing after college. Smith was found to be a doper in 1998.

There obviously are no parameters for 41-year-olds like Torres. And Jeannie Longo just won two French road cycling titles and qualified for her seventh Olympics at age 49. But the general level of women’s cycling has barely improved over the past two decades, compared with the improvement in women’s swimming.

And then there is the asthma issue and the banned drugs Torres admits to taking.

Torres told Eric Adelson of ESPN magazine she was diagnosed as an asthmatic about 18 months ago – coincidentally, about the time her second comeback began to pick up speed.

Torres told Alan Abrahamson of nbcolympics.com she takes Symbicort, an asthma medicine in which the active ingredient is formoterol, and Proventil, an asthma medicine in which the active ingredient is albuterol.

Athletes are allowed to use both banned substances, which increase lung capacity, in an inhaler as long as they ask for a therapeutic use exemption. (So many Olympic athletes applied for anti-asthma drug exemptions at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games it concerned anti-doping officials, who found 10% of those asking in 2004 had no asthma.)

But if the amount of albuterol in the system exceeds an established limit, 1,000 nanograms per milliliter, it is considered a potential doping violation. And what about athletes who know how to stay just below the limit, say at 990?

“The clinical effect will not be different at the two levels, but that is the way it is when limits are involved,” said Don Catlin, one of the world’s leading anti-doping experts.

Some would have you think Dara Torres has redefined the limits of a 41-year-old athlete and of athletic motherhood.

Mamma mia, hype is blind.

Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.