RACIAL PROFILING EMERGES

An Orange County Register Olympic Special Report

OLYMPICS: The USOC cooperated in a controversial Australian project,
contributing funding and test subjects, to determine parameters for
EPO testing.

COLORADO SPRINGS - The United States Olympic Committee provided
Olympic-caliber athletes for an Australian drug-testing project this
year that included blood testing to determine potential differences
between African American, Asian and other ethnic groups.

USOC also endorsed the Australian Institute of Sport program that gave
Australian athletes a potentially fatal performance-enhancing drug
banned by the International Olympic Committee.

Documents obtained by the Orange County Register reveal that the
USOC's participation in and support of the AIS' $2 million effort to
develop a blood test to detect the use of artificial erythropoietin,
commonly known as EPO, for the 2000 Games came despite ethical and
scientific objections by the USOC's director of drug control, who
resigned in part because of those objections.

The confidential AIS research proposal, outlining the plan for the
project, and other confidential AIS and USOC documents obtained by the
Register reveal a repeated emphasis on obtaining "blood profiles" of
African Americans for the AIS project.

"There are some disturbing things in there," Dr. Herman Ellis, USOC
drug testing crew chief since 1994, said of the AIS documents.

Ellis also is the chairman of occupational and preventive medicine at
the Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tenn. "There are a lot of red
flags."

"To be honest I was surprised anybody would be proposing something
like that," Larry Payton, a drug-testing crew chief at the 1996
Olympic Games in Atlanta and the director of student health at
American University, said of the AIS project.

"I understand that a lot of people feel the need to do something to
get rid of drugs in sports ... but this is an attempt at some sort of
quick fix that's just not well thought out and certainly not
appropriate."

EPO is a hormone produced naturally in the body. Synthetic EPO has
been available for pharmaceutical purposes since the mid-1980s.
Currently there is no IOC-certified blood or urine test that detects
use of synthetic EPO, an injected hormone used primarily by endurance
athletes because it boosts the user's red blood cells, increasing the
body's oxygen-carrying capacity.

Yet, despite concerns of several USOC anti-doping committee members
about the nature of blood testing, the USOC, according to the
organization's records, covered $10,000 in expenses incurred by AIS
officials while performing blood test on U.S. athletes at the U.S.
Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs this past spring.

USOC officials even proposed recruiting U.S. Air Force Academy cadets
to participate in the study when it became clear that the AIS would
fall short of its goal of blood testing 100 Americans.

During a March 4 USOC anti-doping committee meeting, documents show,
committee members even raised the possibility of injecting Air Force
Academy cadets competing in athletics with EPO. A group of U.S.
weightlifters tested in Colorado Springs in April also said the
purpose of the test was originally misrepresented to them.

The athletes said they volunteered for the blood tests after they were
initially told the test was for Human Growth Hormone, a banned muscle
building performance enhancing substance prevalent in weight-lifting
and other strength events.

The lifters said they later found out their blood tests were part of
the EPO project.

"We were misled," said Wes Barnett, a bronze medalist at the 1997
World Championships.

The documents also outline the procedures in which healthy athletes,
some as young as 18, were given EPO and intravenous iron supplements,
the latter which posed a "risk of life threatening allergic reaction."

Critics of the AIS project said they are further made suspicious of
the institute and its motives by the presence of a high altitude house
next door to the laboratory in Australia, where the EPO test is being
developed. In the artificially thin air chamber, elite Australian
athletes lived for several days, even weeks in an effort to increase
their red blood cell count.

Although high altitude chambers aren't illegal under IOC rules, the
IOC is so concerned by their ethics and medical safety that it has
banned them from the Olympic Village in Sydney and is expected to
re-evaluate its stance on them after the 2000 Games.

"Mad scientist stuff," said Dr. Wade Exum, who resigned June 2 from
his position as USOC director of drug control in part because of his
opposition to the USOC involvement in the AIS project.

USOC documents show that USOC anti-doping committee chairman Baaron B.
Pittenger and other committee members and leading USOC administration
officials aggressively pushed the AIS project despite ethical concerns
raised repeatedly by Exum. Other committee members voiced concerns
about potential political problems of U.S. involvement in
ethnic-based-blood profiling.

"Under no circumstance would we identify athletes by race," Dr. Ralph
Hale is quoted in the March 4 meeting minutes. "That, that would
certainly get us in trouble." Hale, however, remained one of the
projects staunchest supporters.

"We made no special attempt to identify our athletes by race,"
Pittenger said this week.

Yet U.S. athletes who submitted to blood tests conducted by the AIS at
the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in April said
they were asked on profile forms for the tests to state their ethnicity.

And three top AIS officials have confirmed that of the approximately
80 athletes tested in Colorado Springs around half were identified as
African Americans.

"Maybe half of them were black," said Peter Davis, the AIS EPO project
director. "We got a pretty good sample of African Americans in the
U.S. in Colorado. [The USOC] were very cooperative with our group when
we were over there and they helped us immensely.'

The AIS project is divided into two parts.

The first part was a group of 106 of club-level athletes in Canberra
and Sydney who were administered EPO and an iron supplement or a
placebo over a period of up to eight weeks to determine the changes in
a series of blood parameters.

The second part was to develop reference ranges in elite athletes for
the blood parameters. To establish the parameters, the AIS performed
blood tests on 1,200 elite athletes from a range of ethnic groups in
12 countries including the United States.

But critics charge that the blood profiling based on ethnicity is at
the very least misguided and, according to a leading manufacturer of
pharmaceutical EPO, unnecessary.

"I have never heard of any differences among the different ethnic
groups or races in terms of having different sensitivity to EPO," said
David Kaye, a spokesman for AMGEN, the Thousand Oaks-based
pharmaceutical company that supplied EPO to the AIS project.

The AMGEN statement reinforces a belief held by some critics of the
AIS project that the blood profiling of ethnic groups amounts to
genetic racial profiling. Concerns about what will happen to the blood
drawn from the different ethnic groups after the blood profile tests
are performed, that the blood might be used for other tests not
outlined in the AIS proposal have also made critics suspicious of the
projects.

The AIS project has also revived concerns with African Americans and
others that some in the international sports science community believe
and are determined to prove that the success of African American
athletes can be explained through genetics.

"That's exactly what this is: racial profiling," said Allen Murray, a
biochemist and president of the Irvine-based Glycozyme Inc. Murray is
developing a urine test to detect EPO. "These guys are going on a
fishing expedition."

"What immediately came to mind when reading [the AIS documents] is
that this is really profiling based on race," said Payton. "African
American athletes, for lots of reasons, have had great success, but
there's always been this contention that there was some intrinsic
reason for the success of this group."

"My major concern in looking at this thing was that this was something
that can result in what I have always taught to be racial profiling("
said Exum, who announced plans to file a lawsuit against the USOC.
USOC officials have portrayed Exum as a disgruntled employee.

"They (the AIS and USOC) will look at the different parameters in what
they are calling 'different' ethnic groups, and they're saying on the
surface that they hope the 'different' ethnic groups don't show much
variation.

"But my experience with them has been that they're always looking for
some sort of variation so that they can say that this ethnic group is
different from that ethnic group, and so deserves some different kind
of treatment."

"I think it's hard to draw the line between whether it's racial
profiling or just looking at different populations of the world," said
Dr. James Betts, a USOC anti-doping committee member. "Do I think it's
racially motivated? No."

"I understand (African Americans') sensitivity," said Larry Bowers, a
professor at Indiana University Medical Center, director of one of
only two accredited Olympic testing labs in the U.S. and also a member
of the USOC anti-doping committee. "I can only reassure them that it
was certainly not intended as a slant on any ethnic group."

AIS officials said they are surprised by the criticism, which they
said is off base.

"I wasn't aware that there were problems with this in the U.S.," said
John Williams, secretary of the AIS ethics committee.

AIS officials said the blood profiles of different ethnic groups,
especially African Americans, are necessary for the test to withstand
legal challenges from athletes who test positive for EPO. Williams and
other AIS officials also point out that the project was approved by
both the IOC and Australian government, which each contributed $1
million to fund the project.

According to AIS and USOC records the project was also reviewed by
Sept. 20 at the Australian Government Analytical labs by a committee
of four international experts including Bowers.

"Anyone trying to put a racial angle on our study is absolute
nonsense," said Robin Parisotto, a chief researcher at AIS. "We're not
doing any genetic studies on these people."

In fact, said Williams, that in coming to Colorado Springs, AIS was
"really after blood profiles from African Americans."

"So we have tried to get the major ethnic groups," Davis said. "They
can't say, 'Well we've been at altitude or I've been smoking or I've
been injured or I'm gay for whatever.' Hopefully, we've looked at the
major parameters that athletes are likely to come up with, although
they can be pretty creative I'm sure.

"Anthropologically, to get really picky, there's really only
Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid and then I think there's a fourth one
is a ... like Australian aboriginals or whatever they're classified
as.

"So there's really only four ethnic groups in the world and everyone
stems from those four so we certainly have enough from each of those
four groups, and we're trying to get the aboriginals as well.

"I don't think the genetic or physiological differences vary too much
with the different sub groups within those four major groups.

What I'm saying is we don't have Arabians [in the blood profiles] but
Arabians are no different than English, they're technically the same.
They look different, sound different but they're the same as are South
Americans and white Americans."

So are there differences between African Americans and say
Kenyans?

"Don't know yet," Davis said. "(The data) hasn't been
done."

But that's an area the AIS is looking at?

"Yeah," Davis continued. "We're doing Kenya right now, in fact. We've
also done athletes in South Africa, and there was a fairly good mix of
blacks in South Africa."

Are their differences between Caucasians and Negroids?

"Yes, yeah, well potentially," Davis said. "There are in other
parameters. That's hopefully what we'll find out that there are or
there aren't differences."

AIS officials and project supporters in the USOC maintain blood
profiling is necessary in order to meet legal and IOC standards.

"Unfortunately, the legal system is such that if you don't have a
sufficient, broad base of data, you don't have enough data," said
Bowers. "The first line of defense if some African American tests
positive at the Olympics, of course, is going to be African American
blood is different to Caucasian blood or Asian blood is different to
Caucasian blood.

And they're going to say 'did you test it on African American blood?'
And we wouldn't look very good in court if we hadn't tested it. That's
why we did blood profiling."

"The whole purpose," said Davis, "of the profiling is to look at the
(blood) parameters, the profile, the normal reference ranges for the
different ethnic groups, blacks, Asians, English, Caucasians ...
sorry, different age parameters, injury, altitude, non-altitude,
smoking and so forth. So we have the profiles of as many different
scenarios that you can come up with."

The AIS' Parisotto said he tried to set a up group of athletes to
administer EPO to in Boston was unable to because of logistical problems.

The AIS had more success in finding participants in the United States
for the blood profiling part of the project, although AIS officials
acknowledge they fell short of their goal of testing 100 American
elite athletes.

In a Dec. 16, 1999, letter to USOC assistant executive director Jim
Page, then AIS sports science director Dr. Ross Smith wrote that the
institute "would like to have a high number of Afro Americans in the"
blood profile group.

In a Jan. 28 conference all for the USOC standing advisory committee
for the project Hale relayed the AIS request for African American
participation, although he added it would be difficult to find a large
percentage of African Americans in Colorado Springs.

The international panel of experts that reviewed the AIS proposal in
September and included the USOC committee member Bowers also
recommended the "effect of variations between ethnic groups must be
researched."

In the March 4 anti-doping committee meeting Pittenger states,
"Originally, Australia was going to do this through their own
population and it pointed out to them that it was a very small
population with very little ethnic diversity. And they really needed
to have a much broader base of blood samples."

Later in the meeting, after committee members raised concerns about
racial issues, Pittenger said. "We told them in the return letter that
we would provide them with samples so we're representing a typical
American team for the Summer Games. And we specifically told them that
we would not identify anything by race."

But a form titled "USOC SUBJECT CONSENT FORM FOR PARTICIPATION IN
HUMAN SUBJECT RESEARCH: United States Olympic Committee In Cooperation
with the Australian Institute for Sport," that U.S. athletes tested on
April 24 at the Colorado Springs training center were asked to sign,
states: "the research team is attempting to sample elite athletes from
diverse sports, age, gender, ethnic heritage, place of residence, and
use of dietary supplements groups."

It also reads that the "study will be conducted on ...elite athletes
from several countries and a range of ethnic backgrounds."

Another consent form asked athletes to specifically state their
ethnicity, according to athletes tested in Colorado Springs.

"We were definitely asked," recalled Barnett.

"It was right there on the form: give us your race. They had a box for
everything from Eskimo to Iranian to Mexican. They wanted that."

Barnett said he refused to fill in his ethnicity.

"But,' he added, "who's to say they didn't do it when I
left."