Athletes strive for success without suspicion

By PHIL TAYLOR

When cyclist Sarah Ulmer broke the world pursuit record in Melbourne last month, a Frenchwoman among the onlookers was as pleased as any of the cheering New Zealanders at the velodrome.

It wasn't just Ulmer's winsome personality that moved Marion Clignet, a former holder of this record who, at 40, is nearing the end of her sparkling career.

It was because you could be as sure as is possible these days that Ulmer's record was free of the taint of doping. As Clignet noted, Ulmer's improvement has been inexorable and unspectacular. She has not come from nowhere.

She is not a Michelle Smith, the Irish swimmer, who couldn't make a final before suddenly collecting a swag of golds at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Those astounding results earned her lunch at the White House with President Bill Clinton but Smith was later banned when caught sabotaging her urine sample with whisky.

Ulmer was seventh at those games, a 20-year-old at her first Olympics. Four years later, in Sydney, she was fourth, a heartbeat from a medal, and now she's the fastest in the world.

Ulmer has chiselled away at her time like a sculptor honing a work of art. She took eight years to reduce the 3m 43.1s she posted for the 3000 metres in Atlanta to her record 3m 30.604 last month.

The event is timed in thousandths of a second for good reason. Clignet was the first woman to break 3m 31s in 1996. In the years since, a mere third of a second has been shaved from it.

For Clignet, who rode poorly by her own standards in Melbourne, Ulmer's record was "the only little rainbow in my day. Sarah has never made any radical jumps. She's just made it little by little and, now, she's there." It was the sort of triumph sport badly needs: success without suspicion.

That was not what American athletics sprinter Kelli White delivered last August. The setting was Paris' Stade de France. White was using her first official speaking engagement as the new world athletics 100m and 200m sprint champion to speak about narcolepsy, a disease characterised by fits of sleepiness.

Instead of rejoicing, she was there to try to convince the world she was narcoleptic, not a cheat. There was an audible snigger from the audience of journalists when she responded to the question of why she had not remembered to declare she was using the stimulant Modafinil to treat her narcolepsy. Athletes take a lot of things, she said, and she just forgot.

Modafinil was then a new name to add to the sports doping lexicon. White's explanation was a joke, her use of drugs a con but, as Sunday Times sportswriter David Walsh wondered, were we entitled to feel animosity towards her when we know she is not alone? Was she more culpable than some who finished behind her? Probably not.

Was her denial unique? Certainly not. It is 15 years since sprinter Angella Issajenko explained the cheat's modus operandi to the Dubin inquiry sparked by Ben Johnson's positive test at the Seoul Olympics: "When an athlete gets caught, you deny, you deny, you deny. It's what all athletes say when asked about steroids."

A few days after the world championships at which White won her golds, US Federal investigators raided the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco) in San Francisco, setting in motion what has become the United States' biggest doping scandal. They discovered documents which pointed to an elaborate doping operation run by Balco owner, Victor Conte jnr.

Conte has been indicted on suspicion of developing the new steroid Tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and distributing it and other drugs to athletes. What was special about THG was that unlike other steroids which are made for use in medicine and hijacked by sports cheats, this was specifically designed to beat doping controls.

Conte called the drug "clear", presumably a reference to the clear test result the drug was designed to produce. The testers have a test for THG but only because a coach anonymously sent them a syringe with residual amounts of the steroid.

Before news of the leak spread, a test was developed and five track athletes tested positive, including British sprint star Dwain Chambers.

But it is the content of Balco documents which is commanding attention. According to leaked information, the documents are said to contain evidence or raise questions about a list of top athletes.

Notable among them are the "first couple" of sprinters, Marion Jones who was the star of track and field at Sydney 2000 and her husband, world 100m recordholder Tim Montgomery.

They have been interviewed by investigators and Jones has come under immense public pressure as US authorities strive to send what they hope will be a clean team to the Olympics.

On Thursday it was reported the American Anti-Doping agency confirmed they had notified Montgomery and three other athletes they may have committed drug violations which could keep them from the Olympics. Montgomery's lawyers said he would fight to keep running and said he had passed every drug test he had taken.

Similar fighting talk came from Jones who has vowed to sue if there is an attempt to stop her competing at Athens in August and who this week verbally lashed out at International Olympic Committee chairman Jacques Rogge in response to his comment she should reassess who she associates with.

Rogge: "She was married to a man [shotputter C.J. Hunter] who was found positive for doping. She is now living with a man who is accused of doping. She is today technically innocent, but ultimately she has to ask herself something about the perception that people might have, that people might say, 'Are you sure you are living with the right people'."

Rogge reserved his harshest criticism for Jones' association with Charlie Francis, the disgraced coach who masterminded Johnson's drug regime. "To have a link with someone like Charlie Francis is not a criminal offence," Rogge said, "but it is damn stupid. You can't disqualify her, but it is stupid to train with a guy with the reputation of Francis."

Asked about Rogge's comments, she told a news conference: "That is ignorance. We can sit down and I will explain to him - that is the only thing I can do. I am sorry that he did not consider my previous statements ... and then I read something like that."

Jones, who has never failed a drugs test, said she was happy for "all my samples" to be tested again to prove her innocence. Her attorney had issued a statement fiercely attacking Rogge for his "unfair" statement. "It shows an utter lack of appreciation for the integrity of the process," Joseph Burton said in a statement.

White's name was also in Balco documents. Remarkably, she not only admitted she received steroids from Balco, but that she also used the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) and masking agents to hide the presence of performance-enhancers.

She has agreed to tell US Anti-Doping Authority investigators what she knows. Those investigators are sifting tens of thousands of pages of Balco documents seized by federal police and handed to them by a US senate committee.

The letters to Montgomery, Alvin Harrison, an Olympic 400m silver medallist, and sprinters Christye Gains and Michelle Collins indicate if circumstantial evidence is strong enough, bans will be sought against athletes who have not failed drug tests. The approach is a sea change for a country which has a culture of sports doping.

"It's been a major shift," says David Howman, a New Zealander who is director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada). "And it's been a necessity because they were being scorned by the rest of the world, told not to point the finger at Chinese swimmers when they were not tidying up their own backyard".

That the US Government was taking notice of sports doping was underlined when President George W. Bush included the issue in his state-of-the-nation speech earlier this year. Bush's comments came after lobbying by Wada, including by Howman, who spent a couple of weeks in Washington before Christmas.

There are signs that attitudes are changing in the US, where fans are used to gridiron and baseball players juiced and buffed like the Incredible Hulk.

During the Balco revelations, the deaths of some college athletes were linked to the use of banned drugs. About the same time, the results of baseball's anonymous tests - done to gauge whether there was a problem in the sport - came out. Despite players being warned of the tests, 5 per cent were positive. The baseball positives, in particular, caused an outcry.

Howman says a worldwide attitude change is occurring. "There is a societal shift in favour of what we are doing, instead of people just saying 'Poor old Linford [Christie], or poor old Ben [Johnson], he was just the unlucky one who got caught'."

Governments which hadn't paid or had dragged their heels, are paying their Wada dues (this time last year Wada was almost broke) and sports are signing up to Wada's antidoping code, which will unify the approach across the world.

Standing fast beside Wada is the International Olympic Committee under Rogge. Though sports to be included in the games have been confirmed until the 2012 Olympics, Rogge has left hanging the threat that sports which don't do enough to combat doping may be dropped.

Doping controls for these Olympics will be more invasive and the net will be thrown wider than before. All athletes named to compete can be tested wherever they may be from July 30, the date the Olympic village opens.

But sports officials need to do more. More funding is needed for antidoping, more understanding is needed of the problem and there is too little transparency in the reporting of testing.

And help is needed from agencies with real investigative power. It took the US's tax and narcotics police to bust open Balco, just as it was French border officials who revealed the scandal of the 1998 Tour de France.

The Kelli Whites of the world are needed, too, no matter that she is speaking up only after being cornered and receiving the minimum two-year ban.

White said her ban gave her the time to evaluate the choices she made and to choose the way ahead. "If I can make a difference in cleaning up the sport, then I will have done more for the sport than anything I could have done on the track," she said.

Her story shows what the antidopers are up against. She has admitted using EPO and steroids for three years but did not test positive for either.

The challenge facing sport will be evident when the IAAF takes back White's 200m gold medal from Paris last year and hands it to second-placed Anastasiya Kapachinskaya. The Russian won the world indoor title in March and then tested positive for steroids.