Shamed - drugs in sport

Three years ago Carl Lewis refused to attend a parade of former champions at the US Olympic trials in Sacramento, California. He said he could not be part of such a ceremony so long as there were drug-related cover-ups in American athletics. “I can give six names that were covered up in 1996. Some did win medals in Atlanta,” he said.
At the time it appeared a laudable stance from one of the greatest Olympic athletes. What Jesse Owens was to the first half of the 20th century, Lewis had been to the second half. He won nine Olympic gold medals, but his status as a sporting icon owed as much to his untainted character. Now it appears that Lewis was a beneficiary of the very cover-up he railed against. His Sacramento protest was a gold-medal performance in hypocrisy.

How could he have forgotten that eight years earlier he had failed three drugs tests during the 1988 US Olympic trials at Indianapolis? News of his failed tests was contained in a letter he received from US Olympic Committee (USOC)executive director Baaron Pittenger, pointing out that his urine samples contained traces of three banned products, pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and phenlypropanolamine.

The same letter told Lewis his punishment would be nothing more than a warning. At the time, the USOC guideline for a first ephedrine offence was a six-month ban; Lewis should not have been allowed to compete at the Seoul Olympics. Being an intelligent man, he would have known how lucky he was, but that did not deter Lewis from taking the high moral ground when Ben Johnson became sport’s most notorious drug cheat in Seoul.

The decision to let off Lewis and other would-be gold medallists in Seoul, Joe DeLoach and Andre Phillips, was taken by the USOC in the knowledge that the detected substances could well improve their performances. “The levels may have been sufficient to enhance performance and create an advantage over your competitors,” Pittenger wrote in his letters to the athletes. Yet a warning was considered sufficient.

Pittenger was the most influential figure in clearing the athletes to run at the Olympics and other major championships. He readily accepted that the positive tests were the result of “inadvertent” use of banned products. He was part of a three-man appeals committee that routinely dispensed leniency. The other two members were Dr Don Catlin of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) laboratory in Los Angeles and Dr James Betts, a surgeon based in Berkeley, California.

“All I can say is ‘shame’,” said Anita De Frantz, a bronze- medal rower for the US in 1976 and a member of the IOC.

The cover-up for Lewis, DeLoach and Phillips was part of a far greater scandal that involved more than 110 US athletes from a wide range of Olympic sports. Tennis player Mary Jo Fernandez tested positive for ephedrine, but was not suspended. She too won gold in Seoul. Neither was the footballer Alexi Lalas sanctioned after he tested positive for testosterone in the run-up to the Barcelona Olympics. America, the most powerful Olympic country, ran a drug-testing system that was corrupt.

The circumstances of the disclosure of this scandal are remarkable. Wade Exum was director of the USOC drug policy from 1991 to 2000. In 2000 the USOC did not support his pursuit of a top position within the World Anti-Doping Agency. Angered by his former associates’ refusal to back him, he decided to sue the USOC for racial discrimination.

In his court case, Exum intended to use 30,000 pages of USOC correspondence and documentation to support his accusation that the committee had covered up for many doping offenders. When his charge of racial discrimination was dismissed on April 8, he decided to release his evidence to the Orange County Register, a California newspaper, and Sports Illustrated.

What would have happened if the USOC had supported Exum from the beginning? The mass cover-up would probably never have come to light. We get a glimpse of how drug- testing operates at the elite level only because one high-ranking official became embittered. It was an uncommon occurrence that revealed what may in fact be common practice in many countries. UK Athletics’ performance on the drug issue in the late 1990s was abysmal.

The ramifications of what Exum has put in the public domain are far-reaching. Lewis’s name will no longer command the respect it once did, and the Olympics have been further damaged. Too many Olympic champions now turn out to be cheats: the East German champions of the 1970s and ’80s; Johnson in 1988; Michelle Smith de Bruin in 1996; and, most spectacularly, the Russian Larissa Lazutina at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Lazutina became the most be-medalled female athlete in the history of the Winter Games. No sooner had she achieved that feat than she tested positive for the blood-boosting drug darbepoietin.

David Wallechinsky has written a history of the Olympics in which he documents endless stories of sacrifice and dedication underpinning the pursuit of gold. But he wrote his book before evidence of systematic doping by the old German Democratic Republic came to light and before anybody fully understood that many other countries conspired with athletes to cheat. Wallechinsky’s book was meant to be a factual account of each Olympiad; now it lives in a grey twilight between fiction and non-fiction. Open any page, and it is a surprise not to find a proven cheat. The men’s 100m final at Seoul stands as testimony to the extent of the problem: four of the first five finishers have since recorded positive tests and/or admitted using banned substances.

In the wake of Exum’s revelations, there will be calls for investigations and sanctions against the US Olympic team. There will be criticism of Exum for waiting so long to reveal the conspiracy, and there will be pledges to renew the battle against doping in sport. We have heard it all before, and it amounts to precious little.

Cities interested in hosting the Olympics need to wise up. Should they commit billions of pounds to a sporting event that has been the stage for so much corruption and cheating? When cities stop wanting to host the Games, when sponsors and television channels withdraw their backing, only then will there be a serious attempt to combat the scourge of doping.

Sport needs heroes. Without Pele, football’s World Cup would be diminished. Without Muhammad Ali, heavyweight boxing would hardly have survived into the 21st century. Last week the Olympic Games lost one of its icons. Lewis has no right to complain. He claimed he had taken a herbal supplement, not knowing it contain banned products. It was his responsibility to know.

The evidence suggests the substances were performance-enhancing. Frank Webbe of the Florida Institute of Technology has presented a research paper on the effects of ephedrine. “You do feel the effect,” he said. “You feel jazzed up. Drugs like this potentially make you run faster, react quicker, to be able to summon more muscle fibre for strength. Saying you took it over the counter and you didn’t think it would enhance your performance just doesn’t stack up.”

Rather like Lewis’s gold medal collection. That, too, doesn’t stack up any more.