CLEAN SHOULD BE DRUG OF CHOICE

KNUT JENSEN has been dead for 38 years. It's too late for him to explain
anything.

All we know is this: He was riding in the Olympic road race in Rome when he
collapsed, fell from his bike and fractured his skull. An inquiry into his
death revealed that he had been taking Ronicol, a drug that stimulates
blood circulation.

Did Jensen collapse because of the Ronicol? Or was it that the race simply
wore him out, in spite of the drug?

There is no way to be sure. All drugs have healing powers. All drugs can be
abused.

But Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic
Committee, wants to start permitting athletes to take drugs that don't
damage their bodies. He has proposed "drastically" reducing the IOC's list
of banned substances.

Samaranch made this announcement on Sunday, revealing an appalling sense of
priorities. The last month has brought an array of doping scandals, most
notably at the Tour de France, which was exposed as an illicit
pharmaceutical convention. The string of busts should have been a warning
to both the rogues and to the tempted innocents. If the IOC were waging a
real drug war, Samaranch would have boasted that the dopers were finally
losing ground, that cheaters couldn't hide anymore.

Instead, he aimed to make the sports world safe for some types of chemical
manipulation. He tried to minimize both the shame and the risks of
performance-enhancing drugs.

U.S. Track & Field performed just as poorly when news leaked out that
shot-putter Randy Barnes and sprinter Dennis Mitchell had been tentatively
suspended from international competition because of positive drug tests.
Craig Masback, the chief executive officer of U.S. Track & Field, said he
was outraged that someone in the international federation had disclosed the
test results prematurely. His prepared statement read like something from a
defense attorney, not an athletic official.

Barnes and Mitchell do have the right to confidentiality until a second set
of tests confirms the first round of results. But Masback needn't have
resorted to righteous indignation in defending them.

Like Samaranch, he seemed to be shortchanging the ideal of clean
competition. Barnes, in particular, did not merit a resounding show of
support. He has already been banned from his sport once for using steroids.
He served two years, missing the 1992 Olympics, where all three medalists
in the shot put were convicted steroid users. Barnes came back and won the
gold in '96.

The Olympics are loaded with such comeback stories. Consider the
heartwarming tale of Alexander Kurlovitch, a Russian weightlifter. He was
stopped by customs officials at the Montreal airport in 1985 for
transporting more than $10,000 worth of steroids. He won gold three years
later in Seoul and again in Barcelona. According to University of Texas
professor John Hoberman, Kurlovitch tested positive for steroids in 1995,
but still got clearance to compete in Atlanta.

When athletes test positive, there is always an excuse around the corner or
a reprieve and a medal waiting down the road. That doesn't leave much for
the clean athletes.

The Tour de France cyclists made a great show of their cynicism on
Saturday. Ever since a Team Festina official was nabbed with a car full of
drugs, intense scrutiny has fallen on all of the riders. They delayed the
start of Saturday's stage to protest being treated "like cattle." But
wouldn't a truly pristine athlete, upon hearing about a mother lode of
drugs in another team's possession, want the most rigorous testing possible?

Cycling is so dirty that the competitors don't even know how to feign
innocence. Paul Kimmage, a friend and fellow journalist from Ireland, wrote
an autobiographical account of his years as a competitive cyclist. Without
naming names, he told of drug use so rampant and so extreme that he once
saw a competitor inject himself without even climbing off the bike.

Clean riders do exist at the elite level, but Kimmage wrote that they know
enough to keep quiet. When his book was published, he became a pariah.

His old friends on the circuit called him a liar and a loser. They still
do. They said star cyclists thrived on sweat alone. That's what everyone
said when the Festina was seized. There had to be an explanation, they
said, because that sort of thing didn't happen in cycling.

Then, when a Festina official confessed and the team was ejected from the
Tour, the story did a complete flip-flip. Everyone does it, the booted
riders said, so should we be penalized?

This despicable theory of relativity has become all too common in
competitive sports. The corollary is that doping is a victimless crime.
Samaranch is playing right into that point of view with his call for a
shorter list of banned substances.

But Knut Jensen suffered. So did Tommy Simpson, a cyclist who died in the
1967 Tour de France from amphetamine use. European journalists say that at
least a dozen cyclists, a conservative estimate, have died in their sleep
because endurance drug EPO stopped their hearts.

That's just a theory, though. No one can prove that they died because of
EPO, but then again, no one can effectively test for the presence of EPO.
If Samaranch wants to eliminate some drugs from the ban list, he can only
justify the move by vowing to devote the leftover resources to tracking and
eliminating pernicious drugs such as EPO.

In the meantime, he would do well to invite the NFL and major league
baseball to help upgrade the pursuit of steroid abusers. He could recommend
that the IOC and the NBA drop their silly vigils against marijuana.
Athletic competition doesn't encourage the use of pot; it should be
irrelevant to sports authorities.

But it matters to fans and to sponsors, and Samaranch is a world-class
Coca-Cola pusher. His empire rests on the mythology of the Olympic flame.
Over the years, positive drug tests have been shredded. According to
research done by Texas professors Jan and Terry Todd, at least two alarming
drug stories were shunted aside by CBS when it covered the Winter Olympics
in 1992 and 1994. For the purposes of Olympic image-making, the truth is
like a lot of drugs -- safe only in low doses.

1998 San Francisco Examiner

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski