All guns blazing in anti-doping war

Tour de France record-holder Lance Armstrong accuses WADA chief Dick Pound of maligning innocent athletes. Picture / Reuters

Any western worth its salt must have a showdown. Traditionally the sheriff and star gunslinger face off and only one is left standing.

Sport of late has imitated art. Playing the sheriff is Dick Pound, a shoot-from-the-lip Canadian, a former Olympic swimmer, former vice-president of the IOC, a lawyer who is the founding head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) set up in 1999 to combat the blight of doping.

His stated intention is to clean up his patch.

The fastest gun in the west is played by Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor, record seven-time Tour de France winner, a man defending his place in sports history and in his fans' hearts. On or off the bike, it's not his nature to back away from a foe.

His gripe is that Pound unfairly maligns innocent athletes.

The finger of suspicion has often been raised against Armstrong but the Texan has never been sanctioned for failing a drug test, neither has he come out on the wrong side of an inquiry.

The latest inquiry was by Dutch lawyer Emile Vrijman, who had been asked to look into a French newspaper report claiming that Armstrong was doped on the banned blood-boosting drug synthetic erythropoietin, or EPO, during the 1999 Tour de France.

Vrijman, a former chief of the Netherlands' anti-doping agency, made a stinging attack on WADA, Pound and the Paris laboratory that performed testing that was leaked to the newspaper. He claimed they broke their own rules and assisted the newspaper. He criticised Pound for speaking publicly after the story broke in a way "designed to ... discredit Lance Armstrong".

The lab had, Vrijman said, prepared improper reports under pressure from WADA and there were so many protocols designed to protect the integrity of the testing process that the results had no evidential value.

"The investigator has determined the [laboratory] and WADA, to an undefined extent in co-operation with the French Ministry, have behaved in ways that are completely inconsistent with the rules and regulations of international anti-doping control testing and in certain cases even in violation of applicable legislation," Vrijman wrote in his report.

Armstrong sought to sheet home his latest victory by calling on IOC president Jacque Rogge in a letter to expel Pound from the IOC for abuse of process. Athletes who contravened the rules expect to be censured, said the retired cyclist, so too should officials.

Pound responded with sharp criticism of the Vrijman report - sanctioned by the International Cycling Union (UCI) - as unprofessional, partial and interested primarily only in how the information leaked out.

L'Equipe reported that six of Armstrong's samples tested positive for EPO but the news alone was unlikely to lead to an official doping charge.

There was no test for EPO in 1999 but urine samples were frozen and examined for research purposes later when improved testing technology was available.

There was only a B sample to examine (the A samples were destroyed after testing in 1999) and regulations require both A and B samples to be positive before an athlete can face a sanction.

The episode highlights the delicate balance of policing doping while observing civil liberties. Those whose feathers Pound has ruffled accuse him of tarring guilty and innocent alike.

The IOC is talking of arranging mediation, between Armstrong and the UCI on one side and Pound and WADA on the other. Their histories suggest a meeting of minds is unlikely.

If Pound is evangelical in combating doping he has Ben Johnson to thank for his epiphany. Johnson, pumped to the eyeballs on steroids, bolted away with the 100m gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, failed the drug test, was stripped of the medal and ultimately banned for life after repeat offending. To his embarrassment, Pound backed Johnson until the evidence was overwhelming.

Pound's role as anti-doping Tsar evolved after his prospects of becoming IOC president faded. His marketing nous is acknowledged as key to the transformation of the five rings into a multibillion-dollar industry, but his leadership ambitions were ankle-tapped by patriarchal former president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who gave Pound the troublesome tasks of dealing with the IOC's dirty linen - graft and doping - then failed to endorse his succession bid.

Pound has taken to his task as founding head of WADA with characteristic gusto, swagger, courage and a mocking humour.

He has overseen the development of the system which required nothing less than a positive doping test before action could be taken to one more akin to mainstream justice where circumstantial evidence can be tendered.

Pushing for the US Anti-Doping Agency to bring a case against American sprinter Marion Jones, Pound was unimpressed by her 150 tests without detection of a banned substance.

"The question has never been did she fail a test," Pound told the Washington Post in 2004, "it is whether she had drugs and took drugs. That's what a positive doping case is."

He has bullied and cajoled sports to sign the WADA code, thereby advancing the goal of a universal method of combating doping (cycling signed on the eve of the Athens Olympics under threat of missing the Games), and seems undeterred by threats of writs.

"The first word from every American child is 'Mommy'," Pound said with a yawn when Jones called in her lawyers, "the second is 'I'll sue'."

Track and field, cycling, what Pound calls the professional "gladiator" sports, are among his problem children. "You cannot watch an American football game and think all of those players got to be that size eating mother's oatmeal porridge. They just did not."

Of another US institution, he said: "If you are a parent and you take your son to a major league baseball game, for instance, as the players come out you say 'son, some day if you put enough junk into your system and you can lie convincingly enough you could be a baseball star!' "

The crunch comes, he says, when parents give up on sport as an option for kids because of the risk to health and values.

No athlete has gone as far in their condemnation of Pound and WADA as Armstrong. No one could argue with the essence of his letter, that while requiring athletes to "play true", those whose job it is to detect cheats must do the same.

But it was apt that it coincided with one of cycling's biggest scandals, the seizure by Spanish police of nearly 100 bags of frozen blood and equipment for treating blood, and banned drugs and documents about doping procedures performed on cyclists.

This follows similar scandals at the Tour of Italy in 2001 and the 1998 Tour de France, the so-called "Festina scandal" in which 234 vials of EPO and steroids, human growth hormone and other stimulants were found in the boot of a Festina car bound for its nine-rider team.

There had not then been a positive drug test in the tour for a decade, something cycling authorities held up as evidence doping was not an issue. Suddenly the genie was out of the bag. WADA was established as a result.

The Association of Professional Cyclists are among those who have threatened to sue Pound, complaining that he is "disrespectful".

Challenged last year about his lack of diplomacy, he said: "Drugs are not a diplomatic issue. It's a matter of cheating. Part of the reason we have such a big problem is that sports leadership, until we created WADA, thought this was a diplomatic problem and treated it like that.

"What happens in diplomacy is that the rogues say whatever they think they should say to make the issue go away, and then they do whatever they were doing before."

Pound accuses the UCI of "a clinical denial of a serious problem ... [who] based on performance should not be allowed outdoors without white canes and seeing-eye dogs", and notes that when cyclists do speak out about doping they are dismissed as cranks.

Armstrong insists he has never used performance-enhancing drugs. The "bullseye" of suspicion fell on his back because he rose to such a height in a drug-addled sport from cancer and brain surgery.

His request to have Pound sacked also coincided with the publication of the latest of a succession of people who claim Armstrong has doped, all of which the Texan has countered with a simple denial: "It never happened."

Frankie Andreu, another former team-mate and once a close friend, and his wife Betsy testified this year that Armstrong told cancer doctors in their presence in 1996 he had doped with EPO, growth hormone and steroids. Armstrong swore under oath it didn't happen.

An ESPN television interviewer asked Armstrong about others last week, including New Zealander Stephen Swart, a former team-mate who has said he and Armstrong were among senior riders who decided to take EPO in 1995. "Complete nonsense", Armstrong said.

Dr Prentiss Steffen, a US Postal cycling doctor before Armstrong joined the team, claimed Armstrong telephoned after Steffen had publicly spoken about the team and doping, and threatened "I'm prepared to spend a lot of money to make your life miserable". Armstrong: "Not true."

Former US Postal staffer Emma O'Reilly claimed she carried at the management's request pills from Spain which she delivered to Armstrong in France. Armstrong: "Not accurate."

The United States' other cycling legend, Greg LeMond, three-time tour winner before EPO became an issue, claimed that after he had criticised Armstrong's association with a doctor subsequently convicted of involvement in doping, Armstrong had threatened that he could "produce 10 people to say that [LeMond] took EPO".

Armstrong: "Again, not true."

Armstrong says his best defence is his consistency throughout a long career, that when the bright light of suspicion fell on him he didn't disappear but got faster and that he's fought all allegations fired at him.

"I never run from anything. If you've got stuff to hide, you wouldn't do like I've done."

Phil Taylor studied doping in sport on a journalism fellowship at Cambridge University, Britain.