USOC Medical Chairman Replaced : Dardik Led Investigation Into Blood-Doping Controversy

Dr. Irving Dardik has been replaced as chairman of the United States Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine Council, but Dardik and the USOC president disagree about the reason for his removal.

“I have something to tell,” Dardik said from his offices at Englewood, N.J. “This has a lot to do with drugs.”

But then Dardik declined to elaborate.

Contacted at his law firm at Des Moines, Iowa, USOC President Bob Helmick said: “This has nothing to do with blood doping. That was not an issue at all in the selection of a new chairman. Dr. Dardik had the position for eight years, and it’s not unusual to make a change after someone’s been in a job for that length of time.”

Dardik headed an investigatory panel that determined that eight members of the U.S. cycling team had been involved in blood doping during the Olympics last summer. Blood doping involves removing blood from an athlete’s body, or someone else’s, keeping it in cold storage, then injecting it into the athlete shortly before competition. The additional blood is supposed to boost the athlete’s oxygen level and therefore increase stamina.

Helmick said that the new chairman of the medicine council is Dr. Robert Leach. Leach, who headed the medical staff for the Americans at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, is a professor and chairman of the orthopedics department at Boston University and University Hospital.

Helmick said that Dardik would continue as a member of the medicine council.

While not confirming that, Dardik said: “I won’t back down on any issue regarding sports medicine. This change is the result of a new policy by the new executive director of the USOC (retired Air Force Lt. Gen. George Miller).

Miller could not be reached for comment.

There have been reports that Dardik had run afoul of the USOC because of his handling of the investigation into the blood doping, and because of a conflict of interest with a company that manufactures cycling equipment.

“There was no conflict of interest,” Helmick said. “That was not a consideration.”

At the USOC’s annual meeting at Colorado Springs, Colo., in February, Dardik said: “It (the blood doping) was not a very happy experience for all of us.”

He also said then that athletes took drugs because “they feel it gives them a shortcut to winning.”

Helmick said that Dardik “still has an important role to play. The USOC plans to take a strong, aggressive role in the area of sports medicine.”