Gray Area of Testing Is Decried : Drug screening: U.S. nearly was disqualified at Seoul after Augmon came up positive for testosterone.

Two years ago in Seoul, Korea, the Olympics suffered through its biggest drug scandal when Ben Johnson of Canada lost his gold medal after testing positive for an anabolic steroid.

Rumors were rife in the Olympic village that other big-time athletes also tested positive, but none of those rumors were verified.

Still, word of another potential scandal quietly reached the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission in Seoul.

It involved Stacey Augmon.

Augmon, a guard for the U.S. basketball team, was found to have a level of testosterone slightly above the IOC limit, The Times has learned. A positive result could have disqualified the U.S. team.

U.S. Olympic Committee doctors convinced the commission that Augmon was not using drugs to improve his performance. Instead, they argued, he is a rare individual who naturally produces a high level of testosterone, the male sex hormone.

His test result was dismissed without becoming public because only confirmed positives are announced. Augmon continued to play, and the U.S. won a bronze medal.

Augmon’s case has not died quietly, however.

It casts lingering doubt on the validity of testing for naturally produced hormones and the IOC’s process by which tests are implemented.

Members of the IOC medical commission recently acknowledged that the test used for testosterone in the last two Olympics needs modifications so that no athlete will be falsely accused of chemically enhancing his or her performance.

Testosterone and its synthetic derivatives, anabolic steroids, increase protein synthesis, and can increase lean muscle mass with training.

IOC doctors said they are trying to improve the testing methods to ensure fairness and accuracy.

Their problem is compounded because there is no test differentiating the body’s testosterone from testosterone that is added. It all has the same chemical makeup. A screening test that can identify a forbidden anabolic steroid is unable to detect added testosterone.

Three other U.S. athletes have encountered situations similar to Augmon’s:

--Corey Millen, now playing for the New York Rangers, served an 18-month suspension ordered by the International Hockey Federation after testing positive in 1986.

Baaron Pittinger, president of USA Hockey, said the Americans soon will appeal the suspension to clear Millen’s name.

“Corey has maintained this is a natural level,” Pittinger said. “We intend to pursue the matter because we (now) believe Corey’s contentions have merit.”

--Augie Wolf, a shotputter, and Billy Olson, a pole vaulter, successfully defended themselves after testing positive at the 1989 U.S. indoor national championships.

Each was able to cast a reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of his test in an appeal before The Athletics Congress’ review panels. The positive results were overturned.

Manfred Donike, a professor at an institute of biochemistry in Cologne, Germany, developed the process that is used to determine abnormal testosterone levels.

Instead of a screening test, the IOC and other amateur sports organizations adopted a ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, a biologically inactive steroid found in the testes and ovaries.

The test derived from a compendium of Donike’s articles published by the German Assn. of Sport Doctors. Donike wrote that a normal ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone was one to one.

On Donike’s recommendation, IOC officials adopted a standard of six to one. Any urine specimen found to have a ratio of higher than six testosterone to one epitestosterone was considered positive.

What Donike and other IOC medical officials failed to realize at the time, however, is that some people naturally produce higher levels.

Donald Catlin, who operates the IOC-accredited drug-testing laboratory at UCLA, said he has seen ratios as high as nine to one.

Catlin, representing the U.S. Olympic Committee, defended Augmon before the IOC medical commission at Seoul. Catlin previously tested Augmon during U.S. tryouts and found a result similar to the one at Seoul.

Catlin concluded that Augmon naturally produced a high level of testosterone, and took his argument before IOC officials. The medical commission agreed.

Augmon declined to be interviewed.

Gordon Cutler, an endocrinologist with the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md., said that those who have abnormally high levels are not necessarily bigger or stronger. Thus, it is difficult to consider physical characteristics in the equation.

“Testosterone is not the most potent element in the human body,” Cutler said.

After discovering other such cases in the last two years, Catlin said it is no longer possible to conclude that those above the six-to-one level have cheated.

Recent challenges and further scientific data have prompted the IOC’s drug-testing officials to reconsider their procedures.

They acknowledge that there are enough variances in their test results to warrant further investigation before labeling a specimen positive.

The IOC medical commission will discuss the testosterone issue when it meets in February at Albertville, France.

On the agenda will be a discussion of steroid profiling as a way to further examine potential testosterone positives, Donike said.

In his recently published book, “Drugs, Sport and Politics,” Dr. Robert Voy wrote that profiling establishes an athlete’s hormonal pattern on a urinalysis screen. The profile supposedly remains constant unless the hormonal balance is tampered with.

Catlin said researchers have been studying profiling for about four years, but are not ready to implement the test.

Even with profiling, IOC doctors said, they expect to retain the six-to-one ratio because it works for most athletes.

Whether the IOC believes a test is useful does not concern Voy as much as how the organization adopts its testing system.

Voy, formerly the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said that his biggest complaint is the use of testing that has not been sufficiently reviewed.

“These laboratory experts are going to have to be stopped in their tracks until they get the necessary research to justify what they are doing,” he said.

Wolf, who works for a Northern California drug-testing company, used that argument in his defense against the positive testosterone tests in 1989.

Wolf wrote in an appeal that Donike’s work had never been published in a refereed journal of record, the accepted accreditation within the scientific community.

He also presented a clinical chemistry report published by Swedish researchers that outlined the effects of ethanol on the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. Drinking, the researchers concluded, could slightly elevate testosterone levels.

“I think they need to find a test, one that can be enforced without prejudice,” Wolf said recently. “As it is now, the test they have is not defensible. If you are informed enough and do the research, you’re probably going to find out you can take (someone else’s) testosterone and still get away with it.

“The drug testing has been neither fair nor rational. The athletes who have been suspended have been the unlucky, the uninformed and unprotected.”

Some say they also have been the ones from countries that do not have the technology to successfully defend themselves.

Voy, although not identifying Augmon, wrote about the case in his book: “ . . . So he got off the hook--not because he was proven innocent or because the IOC test could not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but because of two very important other factors: He was an American, and the American officials didn’t want his team disqualified. You see, often it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re guilty as much as who you are and where you’re from.”

Alexander de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission, said that political manipulation played no part in overturning Augmon’s result. He said scientific data supported the conclusion that Augmon was a rare individual who had an abnormal ratio.

Still, these questionable cases cast doubt on the IOC’s ability to accurately test for natural hormones.