NO QUICK FIX IN WAR ON SPORTS DOPING

Olympics: Enforcers Step Up Tests For Steroids And Other Substances As
Games Near. But Many Are Hard To Detect, And Results Often Aren't Upheld In
Court.

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 Un iversity 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

"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."

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

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

* * * 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.

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

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

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

* * * 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.

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

* * * Sources: Times files; news reports; Amateur Athletic Foundation.
Researched by John Jackson/Los Angeles Times

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.

* * * 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