High Performance

The night before the men’s 400-meter freestyle race at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Rick DeMont, a 16-year-old from the Bay Area, woke up wheezing. He’d been taking allergy medications since he was 4, and that night he took an anti-asthma pill, called Marax, so he could breathe.

The next morning, before the race, he took another Marax. It contains ephedrine, a stimulant. Ephedrine, then and now, was on the International Olympic Committee’s banned list.

But DeMont didn’t believe there was any reason for concern. Before the 1972 Games, he had filled out a standard medical form listing medications he was taking, which, he presumed, meant that the authorities had been dutifully notified. He was at the Games, swimming, competing, so everything had to be OK, right? No one had told him otherwise.

That night, DeMont raced, and won, by one-hundredth of a second over Australia’s Bradford Cooper. A few days later, however, after easily swimming a qualifying heat in the 1,500 meters--a race in which he was the world-record holder--DeMont was told he had flunked doping control. Bewildered and angry, he watched the 1,500 final from the stands. In short order, he was also stripped of his gold medal in the 400; it was awarded to Cooper.

Thirty years later, DeMont is still bewildered and occasionally angry. At the 1972 Munich Games, he unwittingly emerged as the first high-profile casualty of the IOC’s campaign to slow--if not stop--athletes’ use of performance-enhancing substances, a cat-and-mouse affair that until the last couple of years has been most noteworthy for inconsistency in effort and result.

For 30 years, DeMont, now a painter and an assistant swim coach at the University of Arizona, has had his reputation stained by the events in Munich. An Australian newspaper story published two years ago, during the Sydney Games, labeled him the No. 2 Olympic “drug cheat” of all time--behind only Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the men’s 100-meter dash in Seoul in 1988 but was later found to have been using steroids.

In DeMont’s case, the fault in Munich was not his but that of U.S. team physicians, who didn’t look at DeMont’s medical form before the Games and relay the information to IOC medical authorities. Testifying during a congressional inquiry three years after the Munich Games, Douglas Roby, a U.S. IOC member, said he believed DeMont would have had his gold if the team doctor had simply “assumed responsibility for the oversight.”

The DeMont case stands today as a reminder of the complex political and pharmacological issues that still--after 30 years--trouble the Olympic movement as the IOC tries to rein in athletes’ use of drugs and other performance-enhancing substances. And, as the IOC confronts a new generation of cheaters willing to embrace a host of methods for enhancing performance--revolutionary chemical substances, perhaps even the manipulation of human genes--the DeMont case resonates as an illustration of the value of caution and precision in applying policies and politics.

That the fight against doping is the IOC’s oft-proclaimed priority is without question.

“The IOC, I can say this, under my presidency, will be a witch hunter in doping,” Jacques Rogge, a Belgian physician elected IOC president last year, said recently. “Zero tolerance. Pushing relentlessly to test, and to catch the cheats. And we support WADA wholeheartedly.”

WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, created in the wake of the doping scandal in the 1998 Tour de France, has made what even skeptical experts consider significant progress in advancing the fight against doping. Perhaps most important, WADA represents not just sports officials but governments worldwide. It coordinates out-of-competition testing and monitors IOC testing at the Games.

In the United States, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was constituted to take responsibility for drug testing away from the U.S. Olympic Committee. It took over that responsibility after the Sydney Games.

The IOC and WADA have pursued with vigor the illicit use of the synthetic hormone erythropoietin, or EPO--which boosts red blood cell production, thus enabling athletes to train longer and harder--and earlier this year surprised competitors at the Salt Lake Games with a test for darbepoetin, an EPO variation.

“I will acknowledge that some progress has been made,” said Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor and authority on the history of doping in Olympic sports. “I’m using words like ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ because they,” meaning the IOC and officials at Olympic sport federations, “don’t deserve better.

“There’s this awful history of them sticking their heads in the sand.... I’m going to have to see them perform for four or five years before I grab my pompoms and start leading the cheers.”

In recent months, a new threat has emerged--the idea that athletes could manipulate their bodies or enhance their performance by use of genes. That is, an athlete could inject a gene into his or her body and suddenly become stronger or faster.

In March, WADA sponsored a Long Island, N.Y., conference that, for the first time, brought together sports officials and leading genetic-research scientists. Among them: Dr. H. Lee Sweeney, a University of Pennsylvania researcher whose experiments with genetically modified mice and rats show the double-edged nature of such research.

Sweeney’s research, funded by the National Institutes for Health and the Muscular Dystrophy Assn., involves injecting a synthetic gene coded for a factor called IGF-1, which plays a critical role in muscle growth and repair, directly into the animals’ muscles, via a harmless virus. One injection is sufficient for the life of the animal.

Rats injected with the gene got 15% stronger. Those injected with the gene who then undertook a rat version of weightlifting got 30% stronger. Recovery from injury was complete and rapid. Injected rats who were allowed to grow old did not lose muscle strength as they aged.

The possibilities for beneficial therapy for dystrophy sufferers--as well as aging-related muscle problems--are great. So, too, however, is the lure for cheaters.

Sweeney said, “I’ve gotten contacted by lots of athletes, even one coach,” whom he declined to name, “who wanted me to treat his whole football team, which I thought was pretty amusing.”

Without a muscle biopsy, detecting genetic manipulation done in Sweeney’s lab is currently impossible. It seems farfetched to imagine the IOC ordering muscle biopsies on 10,000 athletes who compete at the Summer Games--particularly given the cultural and religious objections now to tests that sometimes involve the simple drawing of blood.

Sweeney said it’s simply a “matter of time” before athlete use of gene therapy surfaces at the Olympics. In an opinion held by other experts as well, he said, “I think the next Olympics,” in Athens in 2004, “is too soon. I don’t think they could get it together by the next Olympics. But the one after that,” in 2008 in Beijing, “if some nation moves to the forefront in some strength or speed activity, I might be a little suspicious.”

Rogge said the issues involved with genetic manipulation are “fascinating” but said, “I’m not pessimistic.” He said, “Classic doping with drugs will still be the major danger for years to come.... Because it’s easy to get. It’s cheap. It’s not sophisticated. Everyone can get access to anabolic steroids. Everyone can get access to EPO. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist.”

Last year, the IOC, announcing one of several surveys conducted at the 2000 Sydney Games, said athletes had admitted taking an average of six to seven types of medication each. Products the athletes admitted taking included anti-asthma products, multivitamins and painkillers.

One athlete, IOC medical chief Patrick Schamasch said, took 29 types of medication.

Dr. Gary Wadler, a New York physician, professor and author who in recent years has served as advisor to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said, “We’re a lot smarter in 2002 than we were in 1972.” Nonetheless, he added, “We’re still working our way through the same issues--issues relating to strict liability, which is the keystone in the Olympic movement, issues of therapeutic exemption and issues involving the disorder that comes up the most frequently in the Olympic movement, and that’s asthma.”

The incidence of alleged asthma sufferers in the Olympic population has startled experts.

Last year, the IOC announced the results of a study finding that 7% of the athletes at the Sydney Games had declared they were asthmatic; the incidence in the general population runs to about 1%, the IOC said. Because many asthma inhalers deliver a combination of medicines that can include stimulants, IOC officials were suspicious.

Prince Alexandre de Merode, longtime head of the IOC medical commission, described the 7% rate as “very bizarre.” He said, “It looks like the Games for the sick.”

A couple of weeks ago, Dick Pound, a senior Canadian member of the IOC who now heads WADA, wryly told reporters at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England, “What the survey found was pockets of extremely brave athletes who have apparently overcome asthma. Canada, Australia, Britain and Germany were the countries mentioned. That is where they have an inordinately high number of athletes who appear to suffer from this condition but bravely put it behind them.”