USOC Considers Bringing Athletes Drug Education in Mobile Labs

“Drug testing will not work alone, it can’t,” in stemming the use of drugs by America’s Olympic athletes, according to Irving Dardik, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine Council.

And so, Dardik told a USOC sports ethics panel here Thursday night, his council will propose this weekend that the USOC organize a system of 24 mobile laboratories to educate athletes throughout the country in the proper uses of sports science and medicine and to discourage drug use.

Dardik disclosed that the first of the $750,000 laboratories has already been donated by a commercial firm in the East and will begin operations soon out of Philadelphia in the three-state area of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. It will be headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The lab will be . . . an interface between scientists in the universities of that entire region and the coaches and athletes in training camps and competitions in the field,” Dardik said. “We’ll be doing research, we’ll be doing testing, we’ll be learning as much as anyone can possibly learn about what’s going on in the field and bringing science to the athletes, the right kind of science, and teaching the coaches how you can use science.”

The new executive director of the USOC, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. George Miller, said later that promises of several other laboratories have been made by various firms to the USOC, but that the USOC board will have to decide how much of the program it wants to endorse and support.

Dardik, a New Jersey cardiologist who has emerged as an aggressive leader of the USOC’s efforts against drug use, and led the organization’s recent investigation into the blood doping of eight U.S. Olympic cyclists, said:

“You can’t just go to the athletes and keep on saying to them, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ We have to also provide them with some positive reinforcement. The two of them together will work. Either of them alone won’t.”

Dardik said that the drug threat appears to be growing.

“There are problems with drugs that we may not even be aware of right now,” he said. “New drugs are surfacing all the time. Hormones, such as growth hormones, they’re grotesque and you can’t even determine whether an athlete’s taken growth hormones. It’s a very, very serious problem.”

Dardik said he has become convinced that scientists as much as coaches and the athletes themselves may be responsible for the current drug problem by allowing out-of-context reports of their achievements to spread without challenge.

“It seems to me that the reason why athletes take drugs is that they want to win,” he told the ethics panel. “They feel it gives them a shortcut to winning.

“Well, is that unusual in our society? In fact, if we look at fitness and read the magazines, we’re always faced with headlines saying, ‘a new miracle vitamin,’ ‘a new magic breakthrough in the technology of exercise machines,’ and they kind of program, brainwash the people in the country that science is there for . . . making some veritable breakthroughs.”

Dardik said that his inquiry into the blood-doping episode indicated such a psychology was at work.

“We saw athletes there who trained for years and then finally the last minute they were presented with an idea of, ‘Hey, if you also did this blood doping, that could make the difference in winning,’ ” he said. “It was not a very happy experience for all of us.”

“So it seems to me that as we look at the drug problem, we should equally look at how we present sports medicine to the athletes.”

This, he indicated, should include information on such matters as biomechanics, nutrition and psychological aspects of training and competing.

“Athletes thereby will become much more knowledgeable themselves and able to use their own judgment on what to do,” he said.

As the USOC’s annual meeting got under way here, meanwhile, there were several warnings that cutbacks in financing and requirements in many states for physical education programs in the public schools were threatening youth fitness in the country.

C. Carson Conrad, former chief deputy in the California department of education for health, physical education, recreation and athletics, said physical education in California has fallen into “the sorriest state of things that can happen.”

School boards are cutting back physical education requirements, many coaches are quitting, “and no one is even talking about” the loss of physical fitness among youth that will result, he said.