The Real Scandal

The greatest threat to international sport isn't payoffs in Salt Lake. It's "doping,' the use of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. Do officials turn a blind eye?

IT STARTED TO GO WRONG FOR FRENCH cyclist Erwan Mentheour between Paris and Nice, when race officials tapped him for random drug testing. Just before the 1997 competition, he had taken erythropoietin (EPO), an anemia drug that increases the number of red cells in the blood and thus an athlete's endurance. MenthEour's trainer and doctor swung into action, desperately trying to thin out his blood before he gave a blood sample. They started an IV drip of chilled glucose. They bled him. But still he tested positive. He was thrown off the racing circuit--but not for long. He claimed that his red count seemed high not because he'd taken EPO but because he had had diarrhea and was dehydrated. MenthEour was back on his wheels in two weeks. In fact, his excuses were all a sham: for almost as long as he'd been racing, MenthEour tells NEWSWEEK, he had been taking drugs (""doping'') to improve his performance. ""For two years I took EPO, growth hormone, anabolic steroids, testosterone, amphetamine,'' he says. ""Just about everything. That was part of the job.''

The drumbeat of scandal has filled newscasts and sports pages all year, with revelation after revelation about the Salt Lake City Olympics organizing committee spreading around money and other favors to win the 2002 Games. But a little graft in Utah pales beside what a growing number of coaches, trainers, officials and athletes call the real scandal in sports. The greatest threat to the image, integrity and even the continued existence of elite-level international competitions from the World Cup to the Tour de France to the Olympic Games themselves is the use of illicit performance-enhancing drugs. ""Doping'' among world-class competitors is rampant, admit many athletes, and the governing bodies of individual sports, as well as the International Olympic Committee, turn a blind eye. ""The IOC,'' charges epidemiologist Charles Yesalis of Pennsylvania State University, an expert on Olympic doping, ""has known about the drug epidemic in sport for the last 40 years and has covered it up. There is no difference between the bribery scandal and the drug epidemic in the Olympics. They are intertwined.''

Only the most naive sports fan can still be shocked--shocked!--that drugs and athletes go together like socks and sweat. The pressure to win is crushing, the millisecond difference between gold and silver can amount to millions in endorsement contracts and appearance fees and the banning of doping agents in some sports but not others introduces a moral loophole that a trainer can drive a relay team through. Small wonder, then, that one athlete after another is getting nailed for doping. But even more seem to be getting away with it. In part, that reflects the ever more sophisticated ruses trainers and coaches use to elude the IOC's drug-testing system, which has been part of the Games since 1968.

But new evidence emerging in the wake of the Salt Lake City scandal suggests that the IOC and some sport federations, far from being the stalwart defenders of the purity of athleticism, are soft on drugs. Critics contend that the IOC, for instance, has sometimes discarded positive results, fearing they would tarnish the image of the Games. And the IOC continues to use ineffective testing methods that athletes can outwit and challenge. Last week, at the IOC's World Conference on Doping in Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, this dirty little secret exploded into public view. There, representatives of federations that run such sports as cycling, soccer and track and field failed to reach agreement on a mandatory two-year ban for doping: sports organizations led by soccer and cycling vetoed that as too draconian. Delegates couldn't even agree on how to establish an international anti-doping agency, which was the ostensible purpose of the conference, in large part because European and American sports officials balked at letting the IOC run it. Afterward, Canadian swimmer Mark Tewksbury--three-time Olympic medalist, member of the Canadian Olympic Association and of international swimming's athlete commission--resigned his Olympics posts in protest over ""the inability of the IOC to seriously clean its own house.'' He told NEWSWEEK, ""If there's bribery in [selecting] Olympic cities, there's bribery in drug testing.''

The IOC flat-out denies that. Since 1967, the IOC's medical code has prohibited doping, which it defines as the use of ""substances belonging to prohibited classes of pharmacological agents and/or the use of prohibited methods.'' Since the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, the IOC has been routinely testing competitors for these agents. An athlete caught doping faces the loss of medals and a suspension from competition. Prince Alexandre de Merode, who has headed the IOC's Medical Commission for all of its 31 years, is unrepentant in the face of criticism of the IOC. ""We are not speaking of the past,'' he said last week. ""We have to speak of the future . . . This [conference] is the first time that I hear everybody saying doping is an important problem.'' He called his critics' charges ""coldly insulting.''