U.S.

Doping Undetected

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

September 8, 2000 / 3:43 PM EDT / CBS

One of the contests at the Sydney Olympics won't be a test of who is faster or stronger, but a competition between athletes who use drugs and Olympic officials who've sworn to catch them.

A drug expert tells CBS News it's a battle the International Olympic Committee will lose.

Pennsylvania State University professor Charles Yesalis told CBS News that the IOC is neither equipped nor prepared to detect athletes using performance–enhancing drugs at the games.

Those charges mirror the findings of a White House-sponsored study released last week that said that between 30 and 90 percent of athletes in some sports use drugs to boost their performance.

In Sydney, meanwhile, testing is already underway in what the World Anti-Doping Agency calls its "intensified fight against doping in sport." So far, athletes from Canada, China and the Czech Republic have been banned from the games because of drug use.

CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey reports the IOC plans to test 3,000 athletes at the games. Ten thousand competitors are expected in Sydney.

However, Yesalis doesn't expect the IOC's efforts to make any real dent in doping.

"The bigger-than-life athletes doing bigger-than-life feats arguably are what sells the Olympic games," he said. "Those feats (are) what makes the Olympics a billion-dollar commodity."

In order to accomplish those feats, athletes may use blood doping, in which they store their own blood, filter out red blood cells and then inject those cells before competition. Doing so can boost performance up to 15 percent.

Also popular is EPO, or erythropoietin, which aids the growth of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Human growth hormone, or hGH, is favored by athletes in power events, like the shot put, sprinting or weightlifting.

While the methods are known, Yeselis said detecting them is another matter.

Down On Doping

The IOC's anti-doping policy is three-pronged.

It prohibits:

1) The use of performance-enhancing substances:

stimulants, such as cocaine

narcotics, including morphine

anabolic steroids like testosterone

diuretics

peptide hormones, like insulin

2) Blood Doping—the use of blood, blood cells or blood products—and Pharmacological, Chemical and Physical Manipulation, which is essentially doing anything to mask dru use.

3) The use of other drugs, like ethanol, marijuana, local anesthetics and costeroids.

Click here to read the IOC's Medical Code.

(Source: IOC)

He said hGH "is not detectable by our current technology."

In addition, "We have great difficulty detecting testosterone when it's applied as a skin cream or gel. We cannot detect human blood doping and that's not very complicated to do," he said.

Yeselis said even new tests for EPO may not work. And, he claims, there are plenty of athletes who will try to take advantage of the loopholes.

"I think there's a small percent of athletes who compete without drugs, another small percent who compete with drugs and get caught, but I think the large majority have used performance-enhancing drugs at one time or another and just do not get caught by those drug tests," Yeselis.

That poses a risk to the integrity of the games, but also to the athletes themselves: Yeselis said there's been very little testing of the long-term effects of the banned substances.

The study released last week by theNational Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (NCAS) at Columbia University concluded that the prevalence of doping is due to the lack of an effective policing system, the large sums poured into the Olympics by corporate sponsors and conflicting priorities among sports federations.

It also criticized the WADA, which was formed by the IOC, as not sufficiently independent from the games.

"The IOC has a vested interest and a built in conflict," said NCASA head Joseph Califano. "They want records broken every year. They want the corporate sponsorships. They want the money. They want the world attention."

The controversy over drug testing is not new.

In many ways, it began in 1988 when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the gold medal for the 100-meter dash in Seoul, only to lose it when steroids were detected in his system.

Since then, there has been tension between the IOC and officials of the U.S. anti-doping agency and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

There has even been division within the U.S. Olympic Committee. Two directors of drug control at the USOC, Dr. Robert Voy and Dr. Wade Exum, have resigned in protest over drug policies. The former directors claimed the USOC ignored the problem.

Last week, Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC's medical commission, said criticism of drug testing from America was misplaced.

"I'm very surprised that the United States criticizes others for not doing enough when they have only one accredited lab and do very few tests," he said. "Before criticizing others, the U.S. should start its own serious program."

On the other side White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey has been highly critical of the IOC's approach.

"I think that what we owe the athletes…is a guarantee that if they don't win, the person who did competed and won with god given talent—not because he had a better pharmacist," McCaffrey said.