Richard Pound: Time to come clean in Year of Excrement

If Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin were not household words before the past couple of weeks, they might be about to go down on the dark side of the sport history books.

Landis, winner of the fabled Tour de France following a Cinderella comeback late in the race, erasing a disastrous day-before, now seems to have taken a morning-after pill to recover from the previous failure and will likely be stripped of the crown that is the dream of all cyclists - the Yellow Jersey in cycling's showcase.

And Gatlin, the world's co-fastest man, has tested positive for the same drug, testosterone, the daddy of all the power drugs and the uncle of most of the modern anabolic variants.

Aside from the ignominious Tim Montgomery, turned in by a complicit teammate, these are the biggest names outside of professional baseball to have been caught for drug use since Canada's Ben Johnson after his world record, gold medal-winning performance in the 1988 Olympics, which did more to put Canada on the Olympic map than any gold medal in hockey.

What is going on?

Let us resign ourselves to hearing the customary flow of denials of any drug use, notwithstanding the scientific results of the tests, performed by expert World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratories - or, if we revert to Major League Baseball (MLB) terminology (they have better lawyers), any "knowing" use of drugs.

We will have to wait for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to organise an appeal process, since both are American athletes, before any formal sanction can be pronounced.

Who knows, USADA may subscribe to a suggestion that both athletes, in separate sports, were ambushed by a roving squad of Nazi frogmen and injected against their will with the prohibited substances. But, if USADA does not bite, Landis faces a two-year suspension and Gatlin (because of an earlier violation) a lifetime suspension.

What, we may well ask, does all this mean? Are there no sport heroes to be trusted to be what they seem?

First, we - like everyone else - must face the fact that there is a drug problem in sport today, one that has been allowed to build up over decades, ever since veterinarians made it clear to athletes that, so long as they did not mind chronic acne and shrunken testicles, testosterone could help them bulk up, be stronger and recover faster.

This problem is not restricted to cycling and track and field, but they will serve as convenient examples.

Take cycling in 2006. If 2006 were to be measured in the Chinese cycle, it would be the Year of the Excrement.

Among the active riders in the immediate post-Armstrong era, those who finished second, third and fourth in the 2005 Tour de France were busted in a Spanish doping investigation and prevented from competing in the 2006 Tour. This year's winner has tested positive. These are not the losers at the back of the peloton, nor the journeymen riders in the middle of the pack.

They are the best. Landis was the winner. It would be the equivalent of disqualifying an entire Olympic final.

Next, despite the vociferous protestations, it is all too clear that cycling authorities have been unable, some suggest unwilling, to cope with the problem. Indeed, not unlike MLB, there has been an institutional denial of the existence of a problem.

Six weeks before the devastating revelations of the Spanish investigation, International Cycling Union (UCI) officials were assuring me that there had been a cultural change in cycling, that whatever might have been going on in the past, there was no longer a doping problem in the sport, to the extent that the UCI was actually considering a possible reduction in the number of tests it would perform.

The Spanish investigation established that there was an organised scheme to cheat, involving riders, teams, doctors and even UCI officials, and major amounts of money to the organisers of the scheme. This was accompanied by a code of silence among all those involved.

If the problem is to be solved, there must first be an acknowledgment that the problem exists. As in alcoholism, or other addictions, if one refuses to acknowledge the existence of a problem, no cure is possible. The next step is to reach out for help.

The answer lies in the formula established by the World Anti-Doping Agency, a partnership of the sport movement and governments on all five continents. We are faced with organised and sophisticated cheating, so we should be willing to use every weapon in our combined arsenals.

Doping offences can be established without the need for a positive analytical result. Sport officials know who the athletes are, where they are, more or less what they are doing to dope, who the coaches are, but they have no power to seize evidence, to compel people to provide evidence and to enforce trafficking rules.

Possession and use of most doping substances without medical prescriptions are already illegal (as in Canada), so the combination of the sport and public authorities provides a means to get at the full range of the evidence needed to stop doping.

For cycling, this could be the first day of the rest of its life. If I were Landis' lawyer (which I am not), I would say that, if you love your sport and want to get back into it as soon as possible, tell it like it is - like it really is. Give everyone the chance to clean it up, or take the risk that, in the Year of the Excrement, your sport may be flushed into the toilet. Go after the enablers. They are the ones who wrecked you and your sport.

Landis, exposed as he is now, could become the saviour of his sport. Continued denial will only consign him to a life of ridicule and obscurity. Same for Gatlin.

Sport should be fun. It should be clean, something of which its participants should be proud, the community should be proud. It should be something you would want your kids to do - without having to be chemical stockpilers and liars.

Richard W. Pound is a Montreal lawyer, a member of the International Olympic Committee and president of the World Anti-Doping Agency.