Testing times for the anti-dope programme

By PETER CALDER

It doesn't bear thinking about, really. Your favourite athlete - a person of leonine grace or titanic strength or peerless skill, a legend, an idol, a champion - with pants pulled down and shirt hitched up.

That's the view Penny Edwards gets of them - well, selected ones anyway. One of about 15 New Zealanders in the army working in doping control at the Olympics, she has to make sure that the sample of urine the athlete is giving has actually come from that athlete's body at that time.

We don't go far into the details but Edwards, an Aucklander who worked in doping control at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, tells me there's only one way to know and that's to watch - presumably in relative close-up.

It would be overstating the case to say that the Games were rocked by the Tuesday announcement that Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Ivanov had been stripped of his silver medal - the first in this Olympiad to fail a drug test taken after competition. For most observers it was not just a matter of if an athlete would get busted but when. The IOC's pious protestations that Sydney would be hosting the clean Games have been swamped in a sea of steroids and diuretics.

Ivanov and Belarus hammer thrower Vadim Devyatovsky, expelled for testing positive for the steroid nandrolone in an out-of-competition check, were the first to be caught since the Sydney Games began but the list of Olympians dropped before the event started stands at 33. This includes 27 Chinese axed at home presumably because they realised they would fail tests if they did come.

A further eight - four of them weightlifters - have failed pre-Games random tests in the Olympic village.

With the Games entering their seventh day this morning, a question mark still hangs over the test for the newest performance drug of the millennium - EPO or erythropoietin. The drug, originally developed to fight kidney disease, stimulates the production of oxygen-rich red blood cells and developing a dependable test for it before the Sydney Olympics was a major priority for the IOC.

A test was approved at the end of August but there are rumours that it may be scientifically questionable or legally vulnerable.

Tellingly, perhaps, none of more than 40 athletes who have failed drugs tests so far has been caught through the EPO test.

Penny Webster does not offer an opinion on the reliability of the tests themselves. She's an administrator, not a doctor, she's at pains to point out, who ended up in the field because she was practice manager at Auckland University's Student Health Service when the university clinics were appointed to deal with out-of-competition doping control in New Zealand.

And she says most of the job at the Olympics is knowing how to get along with people.

"You have to be very particular with paperwork," she says. But you have to be a people person. When [the athletes] come through into the doping control station they may be tense and very upset if they've lost. On the other hand they could be elated. There are a lot of feelings involved.

"And the way you deal with people dictates how you will be received and how well the whole process will go. If you get their backs up it's going to be worse."

Athletes selected for testing - which means all medallists, though each sport has a different basis on which others are randomly chosen - have 60 minutes to present themselves for testing after they are notified that they must. Most take it in their stride, says Webster. "They're elite athletes and it's part of their lifestyle."

But it can get complicated. Yesterday, Webster was working at the tennis centre where players, who spend all their lives on the international circuit, have a good command of English.

"But it's a different matter with the weightlifters from Belarus or Tajikistan. They will have their own representative and a language service specialist to translate what's going on."

Although what happens might be predictable and even obvious, especially for athletes who've done it before, nothing is left to chance in a procedure which must be scrupulously supervised to ensure its results aren't open to legal attack. That makes it a linguistically complex interaction, Webster explains. The athlete must be asked to agree that seals on containers are unbroken and must be told how to give a specimen.

Despite that precision, I wonder if doping control is fighting a losing battle against ever more inventive dopers.

"Sometimes it seems like that, the money they have and the lawyers they can afford," says Webster.

"There are a lot of athletes out there who manage to turn a positive test into a negative test on a technicality. That's why the rules are so pedantic, so there's no room for challenge.

"It is frustrating [when positive tests are overturned] but it has come such a long way."