An
exclusive feature
kindly written for Drugs In Sport
by Robert S. Weiner, Director of Public Affairs, White House National
Drug Policy Office 1995-2001.
When US Drug
Czar Barry
McCaffrey first insisted in 1999 at the IOC's Drug Summit that the
Olympic anti-doping program be "independent, open, accountable,
no-notice, and retroactive," at first there was ire from the Olympic
leadership. McCaffrey "had problems in his own country", said IOC
president Juan Antonio Samaranch. "Plainly wrong, " wrote Dick Pound,
the new World Anti-Doping Agency head. Then there was support.
McCaffrey built
respect and
even friendship from both Samaranch and Pound of Canada because, at
last, they saw that drug scandals would go on and on unless the world
took strong action. An independent and thorough effort against drugs
was "a good deal," General McCaffrey, a Gulf War hero with no special
interest ties, asserted, because the Olympics could focus on sports.
The old cover-ups hiding drug use were against everyone's interest,
McCaffrey rightly proclaimed.
We are now, once
again, in one
of the worst sports drug scandals in history. The new designer steroid
THG is claiming some of the world's best athletes - U.S. stars
including Regina Jacobs, British sprint champion Dwaine Chambers, and
who knows how many others from various countries. Dozens of athletes
from all sports are being subpoenaed in front of a grand jury.
Unfortunately,
we no longer
have the institutional leadership of McCaffrey, nor the expertise of
the first U.S. Anti-Doping Agency Director, Frank Shorter, who had
pressed the EPO testing now routinely done. They are no longer in
office. But Pound is still pounding, and hard, despite limited support.
IAAF
(International
Association of Athletic Federations) President Lamine Diack could only
shallowly and narrowly assert in December, "We are where we are today
because the United States have proved to be lax." Now, it is easy to
dump on the big superpower, but unfortunately for Mr. Diack's argument,
the rest of the world combines into infinitely more athletic power,
population, and medals than the U.S. will ever singly accrue. It is
easy to blame a scapegoat, but doing so only shows the person's own
weakness.
In fact, Jacques
Rogge, IOC
President, is now on a campaign to publicly flog the U.S. for a single
sprinter, Jerome Young, just found to have cheated in Sydney in 2000.
If the IOC wants to publicly flog America because it now knows
retroactively that Jerome Young cheated in winning a 400-meter relay
medal in Sydney three years ago, what about 10,000 East Germans whose
1970s and '80s state policy is now documented in the courts as forced
steroids, and all the Chinese swimmers who took drugs in the '80s and
'90s? What about the regular busts of African distance runners,
including the current world steeplechase champion from Morocco; the
Bulgarian weightlifters who make a regular diet of steroids, with three
just expelled including the Olympic champion; the recent disgraces of
the Spanish, Russian, Slovenian, and Norwegian skiers in Salt Lake and
since; the just-busted Olympic women's shot put champion from Belarus;
and the still unpunished Austrians for the room full of blood doping
equipment found at the end of the Salt Lake Olympics, to which the
Austrians asserted they were conducting flu prevention… And these
citations only scratch the surface of the daily clippings of busted
athletes from around the globe. Fair and equal is fair and equal and
the world must be brought in as a whole.
As Olympic
heptathlon hero
Jackie Joyner Kersee recently stated, "People are showing that
anti-doping is working." The recent busts for high-tech drugs that
athletes and coaches thought they could hide are indeed a true
testament to McCaffrey, Shorter, and Pound. But Pound, who is all
that's left of the trio in terms of institutional power, and who has
bad memories of perhaps the worst of all drug scandals with co-Canadian
Ben Johnson's super-human bulging to 100-meter Olympic Gold in Seoul in
1988 in 9.79 seconds, needs help.
The new sports
drug scandal is
a cyclical flare, which will be repeated again and again unless:
The U.S. has
other major
structural problems as well: Even though the U.S. has finally paid its
WADA dues, Dick Pound was right that the post-McCaffrey White House
Drug Czar's office is now "a complete vacuum." It even refused to host
a summit on drugs and sports when USA Track and Field begged it to do
so after the THG discovery - asserting that the White House Drug Office
does not respond to "press" statements. McCaffrey would never have
issued such a feeble response; he would have recognized the overarching
problem and seized the initiative. The new Drug Czar, John Walters, has
only sent lower officials to major sports drug conferences - even the
100+ nation World Code conference last year -- and has not called a
single news conference with sports initiatives - despite the fact that
over 500,000 American youth abused steroids last year. President Bush's
rhetoric in the State of the Union about the dangers of steroids and
the need for professional sports to take action is nice voluntarism but
won't mean a lot without actionable follow-up by his team in office -
and the action needs to be more than banning substances two years after
they are already replaced by other equally bad ones on the market.
And on the WADA
payment issue,
Walters is also regularly almost a year late in paying the U.S. dues to
WADA, citing "U.S. funding cycles." I wonder if American Express or
Visa allows him such latitude in paying his own bills. Surely he could
arrange an executive order allowing timely payment of bills so that
world and U.S. youth can be protected from the dangers of drugs. Many
entities would cut off services to a customer with that credit record.
It is clear he finally made the payment under pressure of political
embarrassment, because he finally did what he could have done all along
in expediting it before the legislative appropriations process was
completed when a bill needs to be paid.
Yet admitting
for U.S.
failures and inadequacies, solving drugs in sports is a worldwide
problem, and all nations must take responsibility. Not only the
integrity of competition but the health of all children is at stake.
Robert
Weiner was Director
of Public Affairs for the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy May 1995-August 2001.