No Quick Fix in War on Sports Doping

With the Sydney Olympic Games less than a month away, field testers are knocking on thousands of doors worldwide, checking athletes for steroids and other substances that cheaters use to make themselves bigger, stronger and faster.

The campaign, orchestrated by a new watchdog group, is the most widespread pre-Olympic testing program in history and could ultimately involve half the Sydney-bound athletes.

Acting with unusual speed, the International Olympic Committee also gave preliminary approval this month to a more-sophisticated test that might be rushed into service for Sydney.

These developments provide a rare glimmer of hope in the war on performance-enhancing drugs--a battle that has dragged on for decades and cost millions of dollars while producing few victories.

But even with the surprise visits, skeptics claim, the IOC has a history of testing halfheartedly and, in some cases, covering up positive results to avoid embarrassment. And even with a new test on the way, researchers say, there remains a panoply of performance-enhancing substances that they cannot detect.

So, experts warn, the Sydney Games could be the dirtiest yet, leaving some to wonder if the Olympic movement is doing too little, too late.

“If this was a football game, the cheaters would be leading, 84-3,” said Charles Yesalis, a Penn State University professor who has studied drug use by athletes.

No issue cuts to the heart of the Olympics like doping. It runs counter to the ideal of fair play. Fairly or unfairly, it casts a cloud of suspicion over any highly successful athlete. With so many reports of doping, can television viewers really trust that the extraordinary performances they will see from Sydney are the result of hard work and athletic talent, not drugs?

Doping also threatens to further erode the credibility of the IOC, which has the ultimate responsibility for putting on clean Games and is struggling to emerge from last year’s Salt Lake City corruption scandal. And, some experts believe, untold numbers of athletes are risking their health by taking drugs in their quest for gold.

“You have to create a deterrence factor,” said Frank Shorter, an Olympic marathon champion who has become an anti-doping activist. “If you can create uncertainty among the cheaters, that would be wonderful.”

Weak Enforcement

Performance-enhancing drugs are reputed to have been part of the Games since ancient Greece, when athletes sought an edge by eating psychedelic mushrooms.

In the early 1900s, marathon runners swilled brandy and took strychnine. Later came caffeine and amphetamines. Then steroids.

Today, researchers say it is impossible to know how many cyclists, runners and swimmers are doping. Traditionally, tests have been performed only at competitions, so cheaters dope before and after. They take agents such as diuretics, which increase the production of urine, to mask the drugs in their systems.

Estimates of drug use among athletes range wildly, from 10% to 99%.

“Mind you, there are people who are very gifted and have morals and won’t take drugs,” said Don Catlin, head of a UCLA laboratory that analyzes samples for the IOC and other sports organizations.

“But the grim reality is, there are a heck of a lot of drugs out there,” Catlin said. “And they are very influential.”

The current menu is tricky to detect, and it reads like alphabet soup.

Cheaters bulk up on human growth hormone (hGH) and boost their stamina with erythropoietin (EPO), both modeled after naturally occurring substances. Though the IOC hopes to have an EPO test in Sydney, there will be no reliable way to check for hGH and other performance boosters such as insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

In the past, enforcement has fallen upon a patchwork of groups, including sports federations that test before and during national and international competitions. Some would test for certain drugs, some for others.

The flaws in the system were seldom more evident than last week--after 33-year-old Dara Torres won a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.

Torres, a three-time Olympian, had been out of competition for seven years. At the U.S. trials, which concluded last week in Indianapolis, she qualified for three individual events in Sydney as well as a relay.

FINA, the body that governs world swimming, has performed hundreds of out-of-competition tests this year. But Torres was not tested before the trials, even though her coach says she should have been to erase any suspicion that she is doping.

“If she’s not being tested, I don’t know who in the world is being tested,” said Richard Quick, who is also coach of the U.S. women’s team in Sydney. “She’s completely outside the box. She’s swimming faster than she ever has in her life.”

He added: “I’m very confident that she’s not cheating. I know she’s not. But why would anyone else believe that?”

The Games always have been a flash point for this issue. But fewer than 60 Olympians have been caught since testing began in 1968. The best-known case involved Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter stripped of his gold medal and world record in the 100-meter dash after testing positive for steroids at the 1988 Seoul Games.

More recently, Manfred Ewald, 74, the former head of East German sports, was convicted last month of criminal charges in the systematic doping of athletes during the 1970s. Many female swimmers have alleged that their lives were ruined--that steroids left them with excessive body hair, deeper voices and reproductive problems. Ewald received a suspended 22-month sentence.

Criticism of the IOC’s anti-doping program intensified two years ago when President Juan Antonio Samaranch told a Spanish newspaper that perhaps some drugs should be legalized. Though he backpedaled from that statement, Samaranch, who retires next year, told The Times, “The new president will try to solve the problem of doping.”

Although doping taints many sports, IOC members believe that the public holds them to a higher standard.

“In American football, they don’t care how these guys get to be 300 pounds . . . and they don’t seem to care that Mark McGwire loads up with andro [a muscle-building supplement] and all of a sudden hits 70 home runs,” said Dick Pound, an IOC vice president from Canada.

“They do care every time there’s a positive test in the Olympics,” Pound said. “The Olympics are different.”

The Doping Police

The doping issue boiled over with the investigation of Ewald and other East German officials and a 1998 scandal in the Tour de France.

After several cycling teams withdrew or were ousted from the tour for alleged use of EPO or other drugs, some governments--led by France--called upon the Olympic movement to lead a change. In February 1999, the IOC held a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, then helped create and finance the World Anti-Doping Agency.

WADA was designed to operate independently, overseeing the various groups that police sports. Organizers hope to pool research money and coordinate testing.

What makes WADA different from prior anti-doping efforts is that it represents a unified approach--bringing together the sports federations, the various national Olympic committees, the IOC, athletes and, perhaps most important, governments from around the world.

In addition, the program expands upon previous efforts--to focus on random, unannounced, out-of-competition testing, which experts say is the most likely way to deter cheating. “Unannounced is the key,” Pound said.

The routine is called “knock and pee.”

It begins when a field tester pays a visit to the track or pool or an athlete’s home. Next comes a trip to the bathroom. The athlete must undress from the waist down and, in full view of the tester, give a urine sample.

WADA plans to oversee testing of half the 10,500 athletes headed to Sydney.

“They come to your door totally unannounced,” Neil Walker, a 24-year-old swimming champion, said from his home in Austin, Texas. “If you’re not there, they leave a message saying you have 24 hours to contact them.”

At the national swimming championships in April, Walker gave a urine sample after his final race. The next evening at midnight, he arrived home from a long day of travel to find another tester waiting for him.

“The guy had been there since 9:30 p.m.,” he said. “It was a little annoying, but you get over it pretty quick.

“You just hope they’re doing the same thing to the people who are taking drugs,” he added.

Cheaters have been known to conceal “clean” samples--taping ampuls between their legs, hiding rubber bags in bodily orifices--so testers watch them urinate.

“Think about if someone followed you into the bathroom and watched,” said Amy Van Dyken, a top United States swimmer who considers the process embarrassing but necessary. “It’s something you don’t normally do in front of other people, especially a stranger.”

Positive tests almost always provoke a legal challenge, and many athletes have prevailed in their appeals.

Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey, who tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, recently had her ban lifted after arguing that a Swiss lab improperly handled her sample.

In appealing a ban for cocaine use, Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor had the punishment shortened this summer by an international track federation that cited his humanitarian work.

In one of the most unusual cases, two swimmers have appealed positive tests for nandrolone, saying they ate a traditional Brazilian dish prepared with meat from uncastrated pigs.

Olympic officials faced appeals at the 1996 Atlanta Games after they instituted a new test and allegedly caught athletes taking the stimulant bromantan.

Two Russian bronze medalists, a wrestler and a swimmer, took their cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an independent tribunal created for such situations. IOC officials say arbitrators found “insufficient scientific evidence” for punishment, in part because the test had not been proved reliable.

That scientific validation came four months later.

“Four months later,” said Jacques Rogge, an IOC member from Belgium. “For me, still it is a pain in the heart that we had to leave these athletes who had cheated without a penalty.”

Motives Questioned

Appeals often succeed because the current urinalysis is not sophisticated enough to withstand legal challenge, according to experts. But several researchers say that developing new tests--including blood tests--could cost $50 million to $100 million over the next decade.

When scientists and sports officials discuss the need for funding, many note that the Olympic movement generates nearly $1 billion a year in revenue.

“With Samaranch sitting in his five-star hotels . . . tell me they can’t come up with $100 million,” said Yesalis of Penn State. “It leads me to become highly suspicious of their motives.”

Skeptics say that cleaning up the Olympics might produce more of a mess than the IOC can stomach: It might involve banning big-name athletes who attract crowds and corporate sponsors. It might curtail, at least temporarily, record-breaking performances that make for good television.

“This is about marketing,” said Morris Chrobotek, a Toronto agent who once represented Ben Johnson. “There’s no excitement to watching seven guys run a 10.30 in the 100 meters. No, everyone wants to see them run under 10 seconds.”

The IOC has been accused of covering up test results to avoid embarrassment and possible financial repercussions.

Nine positive results from the 1984 Los Angeles Games were left in a hotel room and, according to the IOC, mistakenly shredded. Four years ago in Atlanta, an unknown number of results were discarded. The IOC later cited concerns about the veracity of the testing.

A retired Olympic official says there is an unspoken policy to keep the Games running smoothly.

“They say, ‘Let’s have two or three positives . . . just enough to show we’re doing something but not enough to cause disaster,’ ” said Arnold Beckett, a British researcher who spent 25 years on the IOC’s medical commission.

The IOC not only denies this accusation but says also that it has championed the fight against doping.

“We were the first organization fighting doping,” Samaranch said. “In 1968 we began this fight. We won many battles, but we did not win the war.”

Olympic officials take particular offense at criticism from the United States where, they allege, many professional athletes use performance-enhancing drugs.

IOC leaders say they are in a tough spot: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

When the IOC helped create WADA, critics said the committee had been forced into action by outside pressure.

When the IOC pledged $25 million to the new agency, critics called it influence money.

The howls grew louder when Pound, a top IOC official, was named its first leader. He also negotiates television contracts for the IOC.

“That is probably the worst case of having the fox guard the henhouse,” said John Leonard, executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Assn.

It makes perfect sense to Pound that he is taking the lead in the war on drugs: “What I sell [to broadcasters] is exactly what I’m trying to deliver . . . doping-free sports and the Olympic ethic.”

New Drugs, New Tests

For many years, the IOC’s point man for doping control has been Prince Alexandre de Merode of Belgium, who also has been criticized as weak and ineffective for so long that earlier this year he offered to step down.

De Merode has complained that cheaters present an ever-moving target: They are always on the lookout for new pharmaceuticals that could help them run faster or jump higher.

EPO, for instance, has been in vogue since the late 1980s, after it was developed to help people with blood disorders by stimulating bone marrow to generate more red cells. Cheaters quickly surmised that extra cells would carry extra oxygen, boosting endurance.

From 1987 to 1991, the drug was circumstantially linked to the deaths of 18 European cyclists. Researchers suspect that their hearts failed after their blood was thickened to the consistency of molasses. But experts say EPO remained popular among athletes, in part because there was no reliable test for it.

Now the IOC believes that it has such a test.

The procedure, approved Aug. 1 by the IOC’s medical commission, was hailed as a significant first step from the track and field capitals of Europe to U.S. training camps in Colorado.

“This is a chance for [the IOC] to convince the cynics that they see doping as something more than a public relations problem,” said Shorter, the 1972 gold medalist in the marathon.

The IOC is expected next week to grant final approval for the test, which relies on urine and blood analysis.

But even this development has potential shortcomings.

Both tests must be positive before any action can be taken. The blood test can detect EPO weeks after use, but the urine test is effective only if administered within three days. Theoretically, a cheater could have used the substance four days earlier and not be punished.

The plan has another limitation: It calls for testing fewer than 10% of the competitors in Sydney for EPO.

Skeptics also complain that the IOC has not announced any plans to freeze blood samples, which could be preserved until even better tests become available.

As far out as that may seem today, some scientists think otherwise. They consider freezing an innovative step that could leave the threat of discovery hanging over every athlete who cheats.

The time has come for extreme measures, they say, because the doping problem may be trickling down from the elite level to boys and girls.

Johnny Gray, a four-time Olympian at 800 meters and 1992 bronze medalist, recalls that he and another runner were approached by a youngster at the Los Angeles Invitational indoor meet last winter.

“When I was young, I would always go up to guys and ask, ‘What kind of workouts do you do?’ ” Gray said. “But this kid actually walked up and asked us what kind of supplements we were taking.

“We were like, man, what is this sport coming to?”

The Unthinkable

As widespread as doping may be, experts warn that it could get worse. New drugs. Synthetic blood. “By 2010, we’ll do it with a virus or bacteria that carries a gene modifier,” Yesalis said.

This forecast makes “knock and pee” tests--which cannot detect all current drugs--seem hopeless.

For years, Shorter counted himself as a pessimist. Despite all his successes--the gold medal, the American jogging boom he helped spark in the 1970s--he remains angry and suspicious that he lost races to doped opponents. He figured that sports were a lost cause.

But he was drawn back into the fray last winter when he was recruited as chairman of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, a national version of WADA that plans to conduct out-of-competition testing on American athletes.

Shorter brings a marathoner’s grit to the war on doping. He likens the situation to a race: It is time to make a decisive move.

“It’s a psychological battle as much as a chemical battle,” he said. “We’ve created some momentum, and it starts to play with the mind of the cheater.”

Meanwhile, in Westwood, researcher Catlin has quietly gathered top athletes from a low-profile Olympic sport--he won’t say which one--to join him in an experiment. After the Sydney Games, he hopes to form a club whose members will sign away the rights to their urine and blood, submitting to tests as often as once a month.

Members who remain drug-free will get good publicity and, maybe, payments from sponsors. Those who test positive will not be fined or banned, so they cannot appeal. But they will be kicked out of the club and everyone--athletes, coaches, fans--will know about it.

“Peer pressure works,” Catlin said. “We can slowly peck away at this problem.”

The odds of winning the doping war are long, but many researchers, coaches and athletes worry about growing talk of legalizing performance-enhancing drugs. They shudder to imagine a future when the floodgates are thrown open and drugs become a conventional part of training.

“You’d watch a runner break the world record one day, he’d be dead the next week,” Gray said. “It would be like allowing guys to commit suicide for the love of money.”

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Beating the System

In attempting to stay a step ahead of the anti-doping police, some athletes have resorted to stealth, science and lawyers.

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Low tech

* the 1968 Olympics, testers suspect that cheaters are using simple sodium bicarbonate to throw off the unsophisticated urine test.

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New drugs

Cheaters use drugs not yet detectable or banned. In the 1972 Games, for example, some pistol shooters used tranquilizers to steady their hands.

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Fast action

After steroids are banned in 1975, athletes switch to types that work faster and leave their bodies more quickly.

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Mixing drugs

Some athletes use combinations of drugs and other substances to avoid detection.

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Legal bailouts

An athlete sometimes succeeds in getting a positive test thrown out.

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Extra baggage

Athletes hide small bottles containing clean urine samples. In 1992, a German sprinter is suspended for allegedly concealing urine in her vagina, but she denies cheating.

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The latest fashion

No reliable test has been developed for human growth hormone or insulin-like growth factor, which increase stamina or muscle growth.

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Sources: Times files; news reports; Amateur Athletic Foundation.

Researched by JOHN JACKSON/Los Angeles Times

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The Olympic Drug War

Drugs have tainted the Olympics since ancient Greece, when athletes Greece, when athletes took psychedelic mushrooms for a competitive edge. In the early 1900s, marathoners such as Dorando Pietri were suspected of taking strychnine as a stimulant. At the 1952 Oslo Games, officials found traces of amphetamines and used syringes in the speed skaters’ locker room. But drug testing did not start until the late 1960s.

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Sources: IOC; Times files; Amatuer Athletic Foundation; news reports.

Researched by JOHN JACKSON/Los Angeles Times

About This Series

For decades, the Olympic movement has promoted itself as the United Nations of sport, a force for fair play. Then came reports of gift-giving and other corruption in Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Games. As disturbing questions swirled around the International Olympic Committee, The Times embarked on a yearlong examination of the movement: Who runs the IOC? How does the organization spend its money? How does it treat athletes? Can the IOC really change its ways?

This is the sixth of seven weekly reports leading to the Sydney Games.

Week 1--Struggle behind the Games: While the IOC brings in almost $1 billion a year, little trickles down to athletes in developing nations.

Week 2--All about money: Mighty nations and sports get a disproportionate share of IOC money through power politics and side deals.

Week 3--Man behind the IOC: The private side of IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch as he confronts his damaged legacy.

Week 4--The IOC’s new breed: After breaking ground for Arab women in sport, Nawal el Moutawakel of Morocco fights to change an organization long dominated by Europeans.

Week 5--Deal that had it all: NBC uses secret meetings, double-dealing and speed to outflank competitors and lands broadcast contracts from Sydney through 2008.

Today--War on doping.

Next Week--Culture of excess.