Track Drug Tests Turn Up Positives : USOC Doctor Says Some Athletes From U.S. Trials Caught

The chief medical officer of the United States Olympic Committee made the first public admission Tuesday that there were positive drug tests at the recent U.S. track and field trials at Indianapolis.

But Dr. Robert Voy, speaking at an Olympic media seminar at the Olympic Training Center, would not say how many U.S. athletes were caught using banned drugs or how that might affect the track and field team that the U.S. sends to Seoul for the Olympics next month.

“We do have positive tests now, and all the tests are not in yet,” Voy said. “I can assure that, if an athlete’s appeal is turned down--and that process will be completed before the Games--the athlete will not compete in Seoul.”

Berny Wagner, national coach/coordinator for The Athletics Congress, said that USOC officials did not report their findings to the national governing body for track and field.

Wagner said the only results TAC has received is from an International Amateur Athletics Federation laboratory in Montreal, saying that the samples from world-record preformers Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Florence Griffith-Joyner and Steve Lewis were negative. Wagner said all three also were being tested by the USOC laboratory at UCLA.

“It would be nice if the USOC would notify us before making it public,” Wagner said. “Evidently, they are not telling us anything.”

Since tests were taken at Indianapolis on a sampling of both qualifiers and non-qualifiers for the Olympic team, Voy was not specifically saying that the positive results would knock any qualifiers off the team. He said that the positive returns were in the area of 3% to 4% of those tested.

“We will always find this,” he said. “In fact, my expectation is that we will find that and maybe more from the trials. The only athletes who will try drugs before a meet like the trials, when they know full well that we are testing, are the gamblers, and gambling at something like the trials is bigger because there is more at stake.”

Once the second of two samples of an athlete’s urine has been labeled a confirmed positive, that athlete has 10 days to appeal before a USOC board, which can accept or reject the appeal. After that, it is up to a USOC executive committee to decide how an announcement, if any, will be made.

If the athlete has qualified for Seoul, his or her name may merely be left off the final list for the Olympics. If an athlete tested positive, but did not make the team, it is unlikely that any public announcement will be made.

“If it were up to me, I’d name names on all these things,” Voy said.

Voy, an outspoken critic of drug use in sport, also said:

--”Other countries, even Eastern Bloc countries, are concerned about drugs. . . . I suspect they are not as big drug users as we are. We know why they are better athletes--because they have better coaches and better trainers. We are a country not committed to excellence in sports.”

--”There are only two sports--we have been testing all our sports over the last four years--in which we have found absolutely no drug abuse: Women’s field hockey and figure skating.”

--”Blood doping works, and we currently have no test in which we can detect it. A recent article in an American Medical Assn. journal said that blood doping is so effective that it will improve endurance in a 10K race as much as 67 seconds. I wasn’t too happy with that article. It was like a free ad to athletes to tell them what to do.”

--”Currently, there is one very effective masking drug (a drug taken to conceal the traces of another illegal drug) being used. I won’t tell you what it is, but it does mask steroids a day or so after they are taken. I will say, though, that on all these drugs, we are only a month or so behind in figuring out ways to detect it.”

Olympic Notes

Robert Helmick, president of the USOC, said that the South Korean security for the Olympics will be excellent. “Once inside the Korean net, it is the tightest security net in the world.” . . . Helmick said that, although he understands it, he dislikes the idea of measuring a country’s success with the number of Olympic medals it wins. “Nations test their strength with things far more dangerous than javelins,” he said.

Dr. Robert Voy on the National Football League’s recent policy statement on steroids: “One of the reasons the NFL is finally looking at steroids is the number of injuries they eventually cause. That’s costly to them, business-wise.” . . . John Powers, sports reporter for the Boston Globe, speaking on newspaper preparation and approaches to Seoul coverage: “Nobody cares about the Olympic Games before the flame is lit, then nobody cares about anything else during the Games, and then, once the flame is doused, nobody cares again except Bud Greenspan.”