A POSITIVE RESULT TO A NEGATIVE ISSUE

SYDNEYG'DAY! WELCOME to the Olympics! You're busted!

So far, that should be the unofficial motto of these Games. Apparently, the
urine police of Australia are working overtime. The Aussies are collecting
drug violators the way ``Crocodile Dundee'' collected box office receipts.

The carnage has been amazing. One day last week, it was a Taiwanese
weightlifter being tossed out of the Games because a banned substance was
found in his system. The next morning, a Ukrainian shot putter and
Kazakhstan swimmer flunked out. The same day, two Romanian athletes were
expelled from the Olympic Village after positive drug tests.

Meanwhile, dozens of other competitors chose not to even come here because
they'd heard that the vigorous pre-competition drug tests -- new to the
Olympics -- would surely catch them.

``I knew that Australia was the country where, more than any other place in
the world, they would try to get it done right,'' said Frank Shorter, the
American marathoner who won Olympic gold in 1972. ``Australians are
passionate about fair competition.''

The USA, on the other hand, has been way too mellow about the Olympic doping
issue, probably because it's an issue only every four years and we are a
short attention-span nation. But that's why Shorter is so excited.
=46inally, federal officials are bringing out the big guns to fight steroid
use in our athletes.

And here is one reason: Our sports-crazy daughters started growing
mustaches=2E

This scary nugget of information slipped out Saturday when, during the
crowded first full day of competition at the Games, America's drug czar
suddenly showed up in town for a major announcement. Barry McCaffrey, the
White House drug policy director, committed $3.3 million in federal money to
help set up the anti-doping program at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake
City. Shorter is going to aid the effort.

Startling report

In an informal interview session with reporters, McCaffrey explained why the
issue of drug abuse in sports finally tripped his action switch. It seems a
thick report landed on his desk a year ago. Amid the reams of data, one
statistic popped out at him. Use of anabolic steroids among adolescent
females had ``skyrocketed,'' increasing by nearly 100 percent. And it was
almost entirely because of athletics.

Steroids can help kids grow large biceps. But they also can cause teenage
girls to develop facial hair while shrinking their breast tissue -- and
those are some of the least nasty side effects.

You can see why this situation definitely caught the attention of Donna
Shalala, the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. She was here
Saturday, too, explaining that a primary goal of the federal effort is
keeping athletic teens off the muscle juice.

``I consider it a fundamental health issue,'' she said.

As a sports journalist, you don't expect to cover the Olympics and have a
face-to-face conversation with Donna Shalala. But that is where some of us
found ourselves Saturday, asking whether new laws could help solve the
Olympic drug problem.

``There's no piece of legislation that's a solution,'' said Shalala. ``It's
got to be an ongoing process.''

She's right. If you pass a law against one specific steroid drug, athletes
will find another to use. That's how it works, how the game is played. For
example, with steroids getting easier to detect, the hot new substances for
athletes are human growth hormone (HGH) and erythropoietin (EPO). The first
helps bodies grow unnaturally large. The second helps increase endurance.
The downside is that both can also cause a person's heart to implode.

Incentive to cheat

Why would anybody take that risk? Just turn on your television over the next
two weeks: the possibility of becoming an instant American hero. And yes,
the media are as much to blame for creating stars who came ``out of
nowhere'' without looking deeper into exactly how those stars were able to
escape their particular nowhere.

And with so many new Olympic events being added for female competitors, the
risk to young women is especially great. Dot Richardson, who is the USA
softball team's second baseman, has as good a perspective as anyone on that
because she's also a doctor. An orthopedic surgeon, she plays in a sport in
which steroid and other drug use is minimal to non-existent. But Richardson
understands the forces that are at work.

``I think there's so much in front of the young girl athlete today,'' she
said. ``The scholarships . . . I mean, the pressure to get those
scholarships is out there. And then for someone to go on and excel in
college, with these new possibilities to become a professional athlete. It
tempts a lot of girls to try stuff. I just hope there's enough of us more
visible athletes out here to get out the word you don't need it.''

These issues, of course, have been with the male sports world for at least
25 years. The error most previous Olympic organizers made was to behave like
a school principal trying to catch a kid stealing from a locker
red-handed -- instead of monitoring the kid at home to see if he likes to
steal as a matter of habit and informing his parents that stealing has
consequences.

These Olympics won't bring about world peace or be totally free from drugs.
The tests still aren't perfect. But the Aussies could alter the Olympic
attitude toward those drugs. In the past, only medal winners and a few
others were tested -- and always after the competition. For the Sydney
Games, the decision was made to be pro-active and conduct random tests on
athletes by tracking them down where they trained and lived.

Has any of it paid off? Well, if you were paying close attention to Friday
night's opening ceremony parade, you may have noticed the incredible
shrinking Chinese delegation. Countries such as France and Italy appeared to
have larger delegations, partially because 27 Chinese athletes were kept
home after suspicious drug tests.

``The Chinese acted as a nation and I salute them,'' said McCaffrey. ``The
message being sent is terrific. We've got to get back to teaching the ethics
of the sport. The whole point of this isn't to catch cheaters. The point is
to reassure some 16-year-old kid in Indiana or in China who is watching
these Olympics on television that in the year 2004, he or she can come to
the next Olympics and win a medal without resorting to banned drugs.''

U.S. arrives late

Let's not mount the standing ovation too soon. Many European countries have
had government agencies focusing on this problem for a long while. They
wonder why the USA didn't act sooner. McCaffrey said it does no good to talk
about the past, only the present.

``We're about one third of the way to where we need to be,'' he said. ``But
this is the beginning of a new era.''

You may have noticed something else at the opening ceremony. For the first
time in history, the official ``athletes' oath'' included an anti-doping
clause. Some folks snickered. But if the globally televised pledge keeps a
little girl from growing a mustache somewhere, how could it be bad? And if
these are the cleanest Olympics in three decades, as they appear to be, why
would we possibly complain?

They have a dirty job, the urine police. But more power to them.

Contact Mark Purdy at mpurdy@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5092. Fax (408)
920-5244.