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A drug-free Olympics equals fair contests
By Richard Pound
Scripps Howard News Service
With the advent of the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the world turns its attention from crumbling economies and fortified caves to couples dancing on ice and skiers soaring through space. A natural antidote to war, the Olympics has always hallowed the ideal of a pure mind within a sound body as a basis for friendship among nations.
Abstaining from drugs goes to the heart of the Olympic message: one set of standards for all contestants who play by the rules.
As a former Olympic swimmer, I wouldn't want to race against someone who drank a magic potion and grew an extra arm. This example is not so far from "blood doping" — the intravenous administration of red blood cells or related products to raise the blood's oxygen-bearing capacity.
Steroids, amphetamines, abused painkillers, and human growth hormone can seriously injure people. If this form of cheating isn't eliminated, all honest athletes are put under pressure to mortgage their future for a few moments of glory.
Young people emulate sports stars, not only by joining soccer leagues or wearing advertised footwear but by imitating doping. From 1991 to 1996, steroid use among 12th-grade girls doubled in America. In 1999, it rose 50 percent among adolescents.
The World Anti-Doping Agency is working to develop better tests for detecting EPO (recombinant or artificial erythropoetin), which increases red blood cells. By the 2004 Games in Athens, we will institute a uniform drug code. Further research may lead to a reliable test for human growth hormone and a simplified alternative to urine/blood screening.
The world still remembers with horror East German coaches who ruined the lives of 10,000 young female swimmers by subjecting them to a drug regimen for years prior to competition. Infertility, masculinization of girls, cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses are just a few risks associated with such substances.
In the year before Salt Lake, the World Anti-Doping Agency will have administered 3,500 out-of-competition drug tests to supplement testing arranged by the seven winter sports. In addition, the agency will oversee International Olympic Committee tests with twelve independent observers at the Games.
The World Anti-Doping Agency's independence from the committee is critical in terms of reliability and credibility. The 35 Olympic international sports federations conduct their own testing and have agreements with the agency to allow unannounced tests. At Salt Lake, the agency will launch an educational Internet site and an athlete's drug "passport" to document clean or dirty records.
All these actions are administered not to attack our fine athletes but protect them and the fans. Nothing could be more unfair than creating a caste of chemically engineered gladiators with whom no normal person could successfully compete.
Olympians are competing against former gold medallists throughout the ages. Every year, world records have been broken in many events, indicating that the human race is making progress. Such achievement would be meaningless if today's athletes had a drug-induced physiological advantage over past counterparts.
The World Anti-Doping Agency's logo is an "equal" sign. All people deserve the same chance to compete irrespective of religious or racial background, class or gender, nationality or ethnicity. Whether an advantage is mechanical or chemical, no one will be allowed to cheat by putting springs in shoes to jump higher or taking drugs that put a spring in one's step.
The Greeks considered the Olympics so important that they based their calendar on its timeframe. The highest honor awarded the victor was a branch from a wild olive tree, which we connect with the blessings of peace. Out of hatred for Greek culture, the Roman Emperor Theodosius discontinued the Games in 394 A.D., but in 1896 a French educator revived them. Thus, the torch was passed from the old world to the new along with its reminder that aggression, if sublimated and controlled, need not injure fellow human beings.
Richard Pound, a swimming finalist in the 1960 Olympiad, is chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, chancellor of McGill University and former vice president of the International Olympic Committee.
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January 26, 2002
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