New Muscle in Anti-Doping Drive

The unprecedented weekend police search of Austrian Olympic skiers’ quarters could signal a tough new approach in the campaign to eradicate doping in international sports, authorities and experts said Monday.

Authorities seized 30 packages of antidepressants, asthma medication and 100 syringes, some used, Italian state prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello told Austrian television.

It was the first time police in an Olympic host nation had raided athletes’ quarters during the Games in a search for performance-enhancing substances; until now, enforcement has been handled by sports authorities. Sports doping is a crime in Italy punishable by up to two years behind bars.

Walter Mayer -- the banned Austrian ski coach whose suspected presence in Italy triggered the searches -- crashed his car into a police cruiser that had been set up as a roadblock Sunday night in an Austrian town 15 miles beyond the Italian border. He was reportedly taken briefly to a psychiatric facility Monday.

Lab analysis on the evidence seized by Italian police is ongoing; no arrests have been made. International Olympic Committee officials are awaiting results from surprise doping tests, administered Saturday night on 10 Austrian biathletes and cross-country skiers even as police were searching team quarters in the mountain hamlets of San Sicario and Pragelato about an hour outside Turin.

Though the raid’s bizarre aftermath grabbed headlines, it was the double-barreled approach -- with sports officials and law enforcement teaming up to a degree not seen before at the Olympics -- that was the talk of the international sports world.

“It’s the first time to my knowledge that sports authorities and public authorities have acted to try to get at a doping situation,” said Dick Pound, head of the Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency, adding that the Olympic spotlight creates “a deterrent effect out there for everybody to see.”

International Olympic Committee spokeswoman Giselle Davies said: “The IOC has always been clear in saying that fighting doping in sports is for the sports authorities, and at the Games for the IOC. But a wider collaborative approach between the world of sports and the world of governments clearly gives a stronger result.”

Mayer, 48, has been banned from Olympic participation through 2010 as a result of a blood-doping scandal four years ago at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Blood-doping is the practice of artificially increasing the oxygen in an athlete’s bloodstream. Nonetheless, he has otherwise continued to serve as Austria’s biathlon and cross-country skiing coach.

Mayer was not issued an Olympic credential and was thought to have traveled to the Games on his own. Officers acted on a tip that he was believed to be in Turin with the Austrian team.

“Clearly, an intervention like this can inevitably cause a bit of disturbance, but we are using the least-invasive methods possible,” Turin chief prosecutor Marcello Maddalena told reporters. “The intervention of the judicial authorities is necessary because sports authorities are not self-sufficient.”

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel acknowledged that Mayer should not have been in Turin, but he also voiced concern that Italian authorities had treated Austrian athletes “like criminals.”

Others, including athletes and doping experts, expressed concern that enforcement efforts might be going too far.

Austrian skier Hermann Maier, an Alpine star who won a bronze medal Monday in the giant slalom -- the fourth Olympic medal of his career -- cited a Feb. 9 incident in which he said two doping officials approached him pretending to be fans, then demanded he submit to a test.

The reason for such a ruse would be unclear, given rules that permit random, unannounced testing year-round.

“I happily stand for controls, and they are good to have,” Maier said. “But they should follow certain rules and don’t turn out to become a personal attack against certain people. One should not treat athletes as if they were Osama bin Laden.”

The prospect of a police raid on the Olympic village caused tension between Italian authorities and the IOC in the run-up to the 2006 Games. Ultimately, a compromise was reached: The IOC would run doping controls, and the police would make no plans to raid the village, though retaining the right to enforce Italian law.

The inquiry began when two World Anti-Doping Agency control officers, on a testing mission in late January, discovered what they believed to be blood-doping equipment in the basement of a pension-style hotel in Ramsau, Austria, connected to Mayer.

The raid on the Austrian quarters -- located not in the village, but in two chalets -- comes amid stepped-up legislative and judicial attention in recent years to the issue of doping in sports.

The BALCO doping scandal in the United States led last year to a number of congressional hearings and to prison terms -- albeit short sentences -- for BALCO founder Victor Conte and others.

A scandal at the 1998 Tour de France cycling event first signaled the efficacy of police intervention in sports matters. Customs officials at the French-Belgian border stopped an assistant for the Festina cycling team and discovered banned substances in his car. Festina was kicked off the Tour.

The 1998 incident sparked the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, funded equally by governments and the IOC, with a projected 2006 budget of $23.8 million.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., assumed oversight of U.S. Olympic doping protocols in 2000 after the Sydney Olympics.

Experts have long insisted that drug testing -- the No. 1 tool in the anti-doping campaign -- can only go so far, a point underscored by the BALCO scandal, which revolved around the discovery of a “designer steroid” called THG. With a tweak of a molecule, scores of known performance-enhancing chemical compounds can be made undetectable, doping experts say.

The IOC is conducting about 1,200 tests at the 2006 Games, an increase of more than 70% over four years ago at Salt Lake City. Only one athlete has tested positive, Russian biathlete Olga Pyleva -- for the stimulant carphedon.

Even so, introducing the police into the equation is “necessary if the authorities are going to stand a chance in the struggle to save high-performance sport from the doping, both legal and illicit, that is already going on,” said University of Texas professor John Hoberman, an anti-doping expert.

Traditionally, U.S. law enforcement authorities have not sought to bring the power of the state or federal governments to bear against athletes suspected of doping.

Another expert, Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, has maintained for years that police intervention holds “tremendous promise -- if you have the stomach to do it.” “Is it American to go banging on somebody’s door in the middle of the night?” he asked. “There’s a big part of me that says, is it worth it?”

Times staff writers Chris Dufresne in Sestriere, Italy, and Tracy Wilkinson in Rome contributed to this report.