Spitz, Lewis blast IOC's doping effort

MONTE CARLO -- With less than 12 months to go before the Olympic flame is lit in the new Australia Stadium, the battle to make Sydney 2000 a drug-free Games looks already lost. Though next year's host nation has led the way in developing new tests and imposing strict punishments on drug users, the mood last week in Monte Carlo at the annual conference of the IAAF, track and field's world governing body, was bleak.

"The whole thing has become a sad joke, and I'm afraid to say it starts at the very top," said Carl Lewis. "It's not just about drugs, it's about lies and federations covering up for people."Lewis, winner of a record total of nine Olympic gold medals, believes that the main problem is that officials of the International Olympic Committee do not really want to discover a solution.

"The commitment to find a solution to the problem of drugs is just not there," he said. "There are much better ways to test than they are doing, but I don't think they truly want to catch anyone in the first place. It's terribly sad."

Lewis' sentiments were echoed by swimmer Mark Spitz, whose seven golds at Munich in 1972 remain a record for a single Games. Spitz said that Sydney would be 100 percent clean if the authorities wanted it to be.

"The IOC has the capacity and the power and the might and the knowledge and the technology to test for a plethora of drugs that they refuse to test for because of pressures from certain countries."

"If, in fact, they considered the whole list of drugs for which they are capable of testing, these countries would not pass the test. It's as pure and simple as that.

"So the problem lies not in the fact that the drug testing is incapable of determining the offense. The question is, are they going to test for everything they can?

"And the answer, as I speak, is no."

If two of the men whom many consider to be the greatest Olympians of all time believe that drug-taking is still rife, then why should anyone else have any faith in the system?

"We have to concede that, if they really know what they are doing, an athlete can go right around the system," said Don Catlin, whose Los Angeles laboratory handled the testing for the Atlanta Olympics.

In February it seemed the IOC was finally getting serious about eradicating the cancer of performance-enhancing drugs that is slowly eating away at the very heart of the Olympics. It pledged to take the lead in creating a multimillion-dollar independent anti-doping agency that would oversee testing worldwide and be in place in time for Sydney.