EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: WADA chairman Dick Pound

By Published On: December 30th, 2004Comments Off on EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: WADA chairman Dick Pound

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: WADA chairman Dick PoundEditor’s note: For the past several years, many of us have been disappointed at the growing number of drug scandals that have plagued all parts of the sporting world. From cycling’s 1998 Tour de France scandal that began with arrest of a soigneur for the Festina team to the most recent focus on BALCO and its impact on track and field and professional baseball, doping has made all of us question the integrity of sport in some form or another.

Of course, it’s sad to say that our own sport of ski racing has not been immune, either. The NESP scandals of the Salt Lake City Games and Hans Knauss’s recent positive for Nandrolone underscore the fact that doping questions have been and will continue to haunt competitive sport across all disciplines.

Whether we willingly ignore evidence of cheating or end up wondering about the honest of those we had held in high regard, doping has an insidious effect on all of us who love sport for what it should stand for: A love of honest competition, the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and some form of relief from the daily pressures of the so-called ‘real’ world. In that sense, cheating and doping steal from all of us.

Recently, our colleague, Charles Pelkey, the news editor at our sister publication VeloNews and occasional contributor to Ski Racing, flew to Montréal, Canada, for an exclusive 90-minute interview with Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

While the interview touches on competitive skiing and other sports, it is admittedly focused largely on the doping issues affecting cycling. Nonetheless, Pound’s comments, his general philosophy and his approach to the problem of doping in sport may prove to be of interest to all of us. Despite, the cycling focus of the interview, Pound addresses Beckie Scott’s two-year journey from winning a bronze medal in Salt Lake to finally earning the gold that she deserved when officials declared that Russians Larissa Lazutina and Olga Danilova were, indeed, ineligible to compete in the Olympics because of doping violations committed at and before the Games.

Taking advantage of what the Internet has to offer – namely, bandwidth and space – we can present that interview in its entirety here on SkiRacing.com.


– The Editors

Ski Racing: In a lot of ways, you were regarded as a driving force behind WADA and the 1999 Lausanne conference that stemmed from the Festina scandal at the ’98 Tour.

From your point of view, can you offer up a thumbnail sketch of how this organization got its start?

Dick Pound: As you might recall, the conference came in February 1999, a really bad time for the IOC, because of the Olympic bidding scandal that was coming out of Salt Lake.

(Then IOC president Juan Antonio) Samaranch was saying that we might need to cancel the conference.

I said to Samaranch ‘We can’t afford not to do this… it’s too important. We need to go there, take the flack that’s inevitable and see if we can get out of Lausanne alive with an agreement.”

Like you said, the whole thing got its start with the Festina scandal. During the Tour de France (Samaranch) is there in his room in Lausanne watching it on television and he says something to the effect that “To me this is not doping. The IOC list is too long.”

He had apparently forgotten that he had some reporter with him following the IOC president around to see how hard he was working, that sort of thing sitting right there in the room. The guy was unable to believe what he was hearing. So out it came in the paper the next day and there was a firestorm that descended on Samaranch over this.

It was the sort of thing where people said ‘See? It’s just as we always suspected… the IOC is soft on doping.. and blah, blah, blah.’

It got to the point where we had to call an emergency meeting of the executive board of the IOC in August. Samaranch looks at all of us and asks ‘What are we going to do about this?’

‘We?’

My idea was that we needed to operate on the principle that nobody trusted us the IOC anymore and we need to establish something independent; something along the lines of the Court of Arbitration for Sport. We needed something that was not controlled by the IOC and not controlled by anyone.

So the idea was to put together the conference on doping in sport (in February of 1999) and I was given the task of putting together the preparation for the agency. I had this idea of creating blocks: The IOC, the IFs (International Federations), the NGBs, the athletes, governments and a sixth group that would include a sponsor, an event organizer and maybe someone from the pharmaceutical industry. That was model I presented at the conference in 1999 and the governments threw a complete hissy fit. It was ‘unthinkable’ it was ‘outrageous’ and unless they had at least half of the control, they were going to walk out and the world, as we know it, was going to end.

Samaranch was stopped in his tracks. He said ‘This is a disaster. We’re screwed.’

‘No, no’ I said. ‘This is wonderful!’ Because they wanted fifty percent control, but that also meant they were in and that they were going to have to pay fifty percent of the cost. So Samaranch sent me off to negotiate with the ringleaders the ministers and such and I asked ‘so you don’t like my model?’

‘No, no it’s outrageous….’

‘So you want 50 percent? Okay, you have it… but you have to pay 50 percent of the cost, too.’

Well, that was a different story all of a sudden… but we basically told them that we didn’t need them in to tell us how to spend our money, so either they pick up half of the tab or they’re out. The other thing we said is that we didn’t want this sort of glacial progress toward a goal that we’d all seen before and that we wanted fast action and to have everything in place by the Sydney Olympics in 2000… and they did it. We said They got the whole thing done by November of 1999. That’s when WADA was created. They then asked for a two-year moratorium on payments to get things organized and we agreed to cover the first two years and governments started paying into the agency in 2002.

SR: Speaking of glacial progress, why didn’t you get the immediate support of, say, the UCI in 1999? Why did it take so long for them to sign on to the WADA protocols?

DP: Well no one signed on in ’99, but the UCI was represented on the board Hein Verbruggen was there right from the beginning. The first major project we had was to put together a world anti-doping code. That was a major hurdle and getting that done itself was an international miracle.

SR: How long did that take?

DP: About a year-and-a-half. We started working on it in early 2001, shortly after Sydney… in March of ’03.

SR: You mentioned the other day in the telephone conference call that you gave that in order to bring on the UCI and other IFs on board that you were willing to consider some of the concerns that they have about penalties and other issues….

DP: Actually, we didn’t make any changes to the code. We haven’t changed the anti-doping code for the UCI or for (soccer’s governing body) FIFA. What they were out there doing was repeating this mantra that the code contained within it an automatic two-year ban for any positive test. That wasn’t the case, though. If they had read the code carefully, it allows depending on the circumstances anything from zero to a two-year ban for a first offense.

If you have a deliberate, serious doping offense then yes, it’s two years. If it’s inadvertent, it can be cut in half and if there’s no fault whatsoever, it can be less than that… and
if you’re captured and held down by a squad of Nazi frogmen and injected with something, there’s nothing.

Our (Director General) David Howman put together a paper for them, just to show the various circumstances. That seemed to satisfy them, but we made no concessions to anyone.

SR: It’s been nearly six years since the Lausanne doping conference. The lasting image that we have is of Juan Antonio Samaranch holding up the so-called Lausanne declaration what was it, less than a page? and asking if it was ‘something we can all agree on?’ Short as it was, there was a lot of promise in that document. Now six years later are you satisfied with the progress?

DP: Pretty much. I mean I come from the private sector and I am used to getting things done faster than this, but when you try to organize 202 different countries and 35 international federations and 202 Olympic committees and so on, it unfortunately takes longer than you might like. But I think if we get this international convention (An international convention against doping in sport under the aegis of UNESCO, the United Nations organization responsible for education, science and culture, is being prepared and governments will formally recognize the Code through ratifying that document.- Editor) adopted next September at the UNESCO conference and then get it ratified in time for the winter Games in Torino, it will be a miracle, an absolute miracle.

If we do that, though, the big thing is that we’ll have everyone on the same sheet of paper. The big thing about bringing in the governments aside from their ability to stop trafficking and regulate the medical industry is that they are signing on to a single method of dispute resolution: The Court of Arbitration for Sport. If all of these countries sign on to this, it’s CAS that has the final call and someone then can’t go off to their state and local courts to overturn a sports-related sanction for doping.

SR: Certainly in cycling that was the publicly professed fear and they frequently raised the specter of some sort of civil court backlash against an otherwise conscientious governing body trying to stop doping. Mr. Verbruggen has said on several occasions that he fears the courts more than anything in these cases.

DP: Correct. Cycling aside, there are bigger cases. Let’s say we suspend a $10 million/year football player for two years and he rushes off to the courts. Then let’s assume that the courts overturn it and say that it should have been only six months, but by the time it’s worked its way through the system, he’s been off for two years. So what does he do? He writes us and demands $15 million for the ‘extra time’ he served. That was their big worry.

What I always said to the federations is that if they were worried about that, don’t suspend them for two years. Suspend them for two weeks and then I will take it to CAS and CAS will give them the two years. It would be out of their hands because the sanction was handed down by a court and not by the IF. Indeed, we may have to do that for a couple of cases.

SR: At this point, national governing bodies, and in some cases the national affiliates of WADA, are responsible for handing out penalties and…

DP: No, no WADA isn’t handing out any penalties.

SR: Not directly, but dealing with a situation I am familiar with, in the U.S. USA Cycling has handed off those responsibilities to USADA.

DP: That’s right. That’s a good example of a delegated authority, but they are acting on behalf of USA Cycling in that case. There’s recourse for someone to take it to CAS there, too.

SR: How comfortable are you with the consistent application of penalties? World mountain bike champion Filip Meirhaeghe announced his positive EPO test and admitted culpability and was just recently given a 15-month suspension. World time trial champion David Millar does the same, gets two years and his now thinking of appealing that as being too harsh, citing I believe Mierhaeghe’s case as an example.

DP: That’s what we’re looking for is consistency ‘harmonization’ in the vernacular of international organizations.

One step in that direction, of course, came on August 13, when the UCI signed on to the WADA code. As far as I know, they’ve adapted their rules to comply so that we now have the right to oversee every sanction they impose.

SR: That brings up other questions specific to the UCI. Why is it that cycling the sport whose problems gave rise to the Lausanne conference and WADA was the last to sign onto the code? Their timing was such that it was the last minute before their Olympic exclusion, but only after the Tour was over.

That timing, coupled with the UCI’s negative reaction to the independent observer’s report on the 2003 Tour, makes one wonder how that relationship is.

DP: It’s not great at the moment. It’s not an accident that they waited until the end of the Tour and adopting the code at the last possible minute. But that was their prerogative. That was the deal in Copenhagen. That the Olympic movement would be on board in time for the Athens Games. The reasoning was that you had to give them the time to organize and get ready for it; to perhaps hold a congress, endorse the code and make changes to their own constitutions.

Anyway, that was the deal and cycling as we knew would be coming in very close to the end, as they did and as did FIFA. FIFA had a congress. I attended and assured them that their concerns weren’t major that the code satisfied their objections and offered protections for confidentiality and gave them some flexibility as far as sanctions go and it got unanimous approval from their congress. ‘Without reservation’ as they like to say in cases like that. In cases like that, it’s simply a matter of going there, stating your case… and not blinking.

SR: Obviously a lot of this is political… and as is the old American saying: All politics is local. Given the incredible amount of influence Verbruggen wields at the UCI indeed at the IOC level as well how do you characterize that relationship? How do you get along with Hein Verbruggen?

DP: I think friend-to-friend we’re okay. President-to-president? There’s a lot of static. He’s forever saying that I am like the sheriff from the wild west. I keep trying to tell him ‘Hein, you don’t understand. The sheriff is the good guy! Catching bad guys. That’s my job.’

He doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like the implication that cycling is not serious about this. He points out that cycling does more testing than any other federation and still gets criticized. I’ve offered to take over testing for the UCI. That hasn’t gotten a response.

SR: How would you do his job differently? What would you do, if you had Hein Verbruggen’s job?

DP: Oh in his position, I don’t know what I’d do. I think what he’s worried that if he’s too tough on it his professional road cycling group just breaks away and goes off on its own, telling the UCI that they don’t need them.

But once the convention is signed and the code becomes a matter of domestic law, these guys aren’t going to be able to ride off into the sunset and be unregulated. Once that happens, he’ll be in a little better position to do something.

It’s a little like football. You’re paying someone $20 million a year to play. You have no interest, whatsoever, in losing that player for two years because of a ‘simple little thing’ like drugs. The convention will be a big step.

SR: While the money might be a touch smaller he was only making 1.2 million euros a year the Hamilton case is nonetheless one of the more high profile you’re dealing with at this point.

DP: True.

SR: What was your reaction to the UCI decision yesterday (November 30, 2004) to eliminate the Phonak team from its ProTour?

DP: I think it’s a good sign. I could sa
y that I am agreeably surprised. It’s the first serious step that the UCI has taken with respect to a team. It’s clear that the practice was systemic.

SR: Given that, though, the bulk of enforcement, the bulk of testing and the bulk of penalties meted out are focused on individuals. It was the Festina scandal that gave rise to all of this. Why not focus more effort on teams, on doctors on staff and others that may be just as culpable as the athlete?

DP: The code does provide for that. As of our meeting two weeks ago, we’ve now changed the doping control form at the suggestion of the IOC athletes’ commission space for an athlete to list the names of the doctor and the coach. That’s now required information. In the case of a positive test, all three will be involved.

SR: Have you been involved in sanctioning a coach or a doctor at this point?

DP: No. Not up to this point.

SR: How do you propose going about that? Take, for example, the case of Dr. Michele Ferrari, who has now been convicted in an Italian court of sporting fraud. That was a case of an individual prosecutor going after someone in a doping case. It brings up the question of harmonization again. Are you comfortable leaving cases like that in the hands of civil authorities?

DP: Yeah. Yeah. We’re in the business of monitoring compliance with the code. We don’t enforce them. The only time we become involved as a party is when we’re not satisfied with what the federation or country has done. Then we have our own independent right to take the case to CAS.

SR: So in Ferrari’s case, what do you do? He’s already convicted. Do you seek a ban? Do you go to CAS seeking to keep him from having anything to do with coaching and treating athletes? Certainly the civil authorities didn’t have that option sitting in front of them.

DP: Well, in his case, the first thing you do is see how CONI (the Italian Olympic Committee) handles it. ‘You’ve now got someone convicted of fraud, CONI. What are you going to do about it?’

There is a limit to what they can do, too. You can’t stop someone from practicing medicine the court could and did do that but as far as sports are concerned, the Italian cycling federation can keep him from working with a team or working with their national delegation….

SR: What about individual riders?

DP: That’s different, the riders are…

SR: No I mean if you have someone convicted of fraud in connection to his work with athletes, wouldn’t the code then have some provision for athletes who chose to work with him especially for the period of time that he is under suspension of sorts?

DP: Yeah maybe. I mean this is all new ground at this point.

SR: That doctor’s relationship with Lance Armstrong was a major part of David Walsh’s book ‘L.A. Confidential.’ Have you read that book?

DP: No. No, I haven’t. Not yet.

SR: Can you describe your reaction to Armstrong’s “open letter” to you earlier in the year?

DP: I was somewhat surprised to see that his comments implied that I had accused him and every single cyclist, which is certainly not what I did. I never mentioned his name or any name and I regret that he never tried to contact me to check what I had said before accusing me.

SR: Earlier this year, you made an interesting comment regarding competitors who chose to stay away from Athens, implying that despite their various explanations, the athletes might simply be staying away because of new tests and the increased vigilance of testers. Did you have anyone specifically in mind when you made that comment?

DP: No, it was just a general comment.

SR: Back to the Hamilton case. I recall being in on the telephone press conference with IOC medical director Arne Ljungqvist, back in September and he went over the apparent mishandling of the B sample from Athens and….

DP: You know, they didn’t even tell us about that call until it was in progress.

SR: Really?

DP: Not a word. I went to the IOC and asked ‘What kind of bullshit is this? You guys are having a call on this topic and you don’t even advise us until it’s going on already?’

‘Oh well… it was an oversight’ or some other weak excuse. I was not too happy about it.

SR: You’ve seen the explanation of the handling of the sample, though. Is the IOC’s explanation a valid one?

DP: It was mishandled in the lab, initially. The response that was given to the IOC was clear. There should have been an instant reaction from the IOC. That didn’t happen until after the Games. It wasn’t initially ticked as a positive because the lab director at the lab in Athens blew it. He was not convinced of the expertise of the folks who were advising him that it was a positive test in front of him. So there was an internal breakdown as far as that was concerned.

I believe that it was someone on the independent observers’ team that said ‘look, this is a positive test! We have two populations of blood in this sample. It is clear as day.’

The lab director had some kind of hissy fit, saying that he didn’t agree with that.

SR: Which then opens the door for a defense, doesn’t it? If someone of that caliber has his doubts… Why shouldn’t Hamilton seize upon that as reason to put the whole process into doubt?

DP: Sure, but what he overlooks is that upon reconsideration the lab director acknowledged that it was a positive test and should have been reported as such.

SR: Does this underscore a problem with letting the IOC handle testing at the Olympics? Should WADA be doing it?

DP: The responsible medical authority for the Tour de France is the UCI. The responsible medical authority for the Olympic Games is the IOC. What we do is to provide an independent report on it.

SR: The timing on the announcement of Hamilton’s Athens positive seems at least superficially suspicious, suggesting perhaps some sort of coordination between the IOC, the UCI and WADA, no? News of the Athens was held off until they were able to secure a second pair of samples from the Vuelta. Is this unusual?

DP: I think our people did suggest to the UCI that they do a targeted test on this guy.

SR: I think it was right around the time of the Ljungqvist press conference that you considered Hamilton’s gold medal to be tainted. Do you still stand by that statement?

DP: Hell yes I do. This guy dodged a very serious bullet when the Greek lab froze the samples.

The problem was that you have two vials the serum and the whole blood. Both are in the same package and the two call for distinctly different handling. The serum can be frozen, while the whole blood needs to be refrigerated. We have to fix that system.

When you have both together in the same package you can’t open it without screwing up your chain of custody, so it’s either all going to be refrigerated or all going to be frozen. In that case the lab director decided that the serum might need to be tested for HGH and other stuff and so he froze it. That, of course, destroyed the red cells in the whole blood sample.

So all Hamilton had to do is ask to have the B analyzed and he gets to keep his medal, since there is nothing left to test. He got to keep his medal, but somewhere in that whole process, they get the word out that he needs to be tested at the Vuelta… and that test showed the same stuff as did the A sample from Athens. So yes, yes his medal is tainted. He doesn’t deserve to have a gold medal. The tests show that. As I said, he dodged a bullet.

SR: What do you know about the UCI’s notification of Hamilton and his team that there were ‘inconsistencies’ in blood samples taken in May?

DP: I was interested to learn that myself. I really don’t understand what they’re doing notifying pe
ople. Are they telling them to be careful? If so, I don’t know what that’s all about.

SR: Is that an example of UCI policy prior to signing the WADA code? Is that something that could conceivably continue now that they’ve signed on?

DP: Well, if I were doing it and ran across something like that say, something short of a positive, but still a sign of something going on I would let them know that we’ve spotted it. The message would be something like ‘folks we don’t know what you’re up to, but we do know something is going on. You had better clean up your act.’ Maybe that’s what we were seeing in this case.

SR: Certainly one of the approaches tried by the UCI was to institute a program of longitudinal medical records keeping, so that if an athlete has an inexplicable increase in, say, hematocrit the athlete, his team and doctor are required to provide some sort of explanation.

DP: If you have a longitudinal history and you do see a spike like that, we either get an explanation or we will consider it a doping offense.

SR: So you consider evidence outside of a laboratory positive sufficient to pursue a doping case?

DP: I’ve never been one to believe that the only evidence of doping is to find an analytical positive. I believe indirect evidence is also worthy of consideration.

SR: What sort of indirect evidence?

DP: Well, I can watch you shoot up and report it. Of course, in a case like that, I would have to be a credible witness and not just someone who knows you can ride faster than I can and I want to eliminate you from the competition.

An admission, of course.

You could be fixed with documents as in the BALCO case showing possession and intent.

Finally, an inexplicable physical change in which the only reasonable conclusion would be that it’s doping.

We’re going to have to test this… a lot of this is new ground, both legally and scientifically. We have to kick the tires a bit and see how CAS responds.

SR: How do you define your own role? How do you achieve a balance between what might be competing demands of trying to rid the sport of cheaters and protecting the rights of individuals?

DP: If you’re charged with a doping offense, you’re entitled to full knowledge of the charges and what the facts are and you have the opportunity to be represented and to make your case. But, that said, I don’t think it’s a criminal offense and you don’t have the benefit of having someone have to prove a case ‘beyond all reasonable doubt.’

Doping is a regulatory offense. Part of the deal of being able to participate in sports is that you agree not to use drugs. Part of the deal is that you agree to be tested. When you are charged with a doping offense, you get a fair trial and whatever the outcome is, the outcome is. But to hide behind privacy laws and all is just nonsense.

SR: It was just a bit ago that the European Community’s top court ruled against the two swimmers that sought redress claiming that you and the doping code were infringing on their right to earn a living.

DP: Oh give me a break.

I am an attorney. If I steal my clients’ money I can’t stand up and say ‘listen, I have a right to work!’ The court’s gonna say ‘yeah Pound, you have a right to work, but not as a lawyer.’

You have a right to right to work, but if you’re cheating you do not have the right to work as a cyclist. It is an economic crime as well as a sports crime.

SR: The most relied upon bit of evidence in your business is still the analytical positive. What procedures what safeguards do you have in place to ensure that you don’t allow bad science to slip through the process and destroy the reputations and careers of honest athletes?

DP: We have a rigorous review policy. For one thing, we put together panels of the best group of international experts in each field and we don’t approve a test unless there is a degree of certainty that the test is reliable.

SR: And you went through that same process with regard to the homologous blood doping test?

DP: Of course.

SR: You mentioned the human growth hormone test. It’s often been mentioned that the test is there, but we’ve yet to see a positive. Is there a reason, indeed a policy, to announce a test as being ready even before it is… just so it serves as a deterrent?

DP: There are certain drugs that you have on the list, even though you know that you don’t have a test for them, simply because you know they are performance-enhancing and you simply opt to list them and wait until the science catches up. With that in mind, we are spending a great deal of our budget upwards of 25 percent on research… on targeted research.

The science is there in some case. Human growth hormone you’ve always been able to test for….

SR: But not recombinant.

DP: True, but I think we can do that now. Now the question is how far back do you want to go with that test. That’s one reason we want to save samples.

SR: How long are you considering saving samples?

DP: As long as they’re scientifically reliable. With frozen urine, it’s not too hard, because it’s pretty stable. Overall, though, we have a limitation period of eight years.

SR: So what happens? Say you have a gold medalist or the winner of a major tour. Do you go back, declare him or her positive and then do what?

DP: You withdraw the medal. If you can get the money back, you get the money back. If you’re a cheat, you have this sword of Damocles hanging over you and with the knowledge that science is getting better and better and better. Rest assured. If you’ve cheated, we’ll get you.

SR: What about legitimate drugs? There are a remarkable number of riders who have been certified to use acceptable prescription drugs. Indeed, a remarkable number of asthmatics who ride the Tour every year….

DP: Ahhh yes, the peloton full of brave asthmatics riding at the Tour. It’s not just in cycling either.

SR: Is there a means by which you review those more carefully… with greater scrutiny?

DP: Yes. Yes, we have now the TUE process the Therapeutic Use Exemption review process. There is a panel looking at all of these applications at the international level and there are similar panels at the national levels, too. If the evidence isn’t there, if they are not convinced, we don’t give the exemption.

And you have to do this before you get caught.

SR: One of things that was a bit unexpected in all of the police raids in recent years in Belgium last year, at the Giro before that and even at the Tour in ’98 were the large amounts of amphetamine confiscated by police. That seems like such an outdated drug, but it has been appearing consistently in the list of confiscated drugs. Does that suggest to you that there are sophisticated developments in masking agents or that people are using them out of competition or, as some have claimed, that team staff and support personnel are also taking drugs?

DP: There may be new developments. I certainly operate on the assumption that there are drugs and masking agents out there that we haven’t uncovered. That’s one of the reasons that we’re funding a lot of research. It’s also why we’re freezing samples for future testing.

SR: The big threat looming on the horizon is genetic doping. How are addressing that issue? Have you seen any evidence that it is already playing a role in sport?

DP: No, I haven’t seen any evidence and I believe that it really isn’t there yet. Most of these things are in the early stages of development still being tried out on rats in the laboratory. There are a few clinical trials out there for a few specific things, but nothing has really gone beyond the trial stage.

What we have done is to contact the l
eading researchers in that field. You may have already seen this, but Lee Sweeney (Professor of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) is working on genetic alteration of muscles in rats. He’s looking to make advancements in the effort to combat diseases like muscular dystrophy and such. He says that about half his e-mails come from colleagues in the field and the other half come from people who ask ‘can I have this? I am an athlete and I would love to have 800-inch thighs.’ So, there is an interest in it.

The first meeting we had with researchers down on Long Island, we set up in early ’02. The stuff they told us was remarkable… about the progress they are making in combating diseases and such. It was impressive. Then we told them our problem and the humanistic and ethical issues in sport and the fact that a lot of drugs being used now were developed for therapeutic uses and were then misapplied.

They agreed that the potential was there, but hadn’t given controls much thought. I asked how we test for it.

They said we were screwed on that front, simply because there would be no way to do it. But we pushed and pushed and the first guy said ‘well maybe if you did a muscle biopsy’ which isn’t really an option in athletics. It’s pretty intrusive.

I asked them to pretend that perhaps I was the guy who decided who got the Nobel prize in medicine next year. What would it take to come up with a means of testing? Still, they said we didn’t have a chance… unless it didn’t require direct evidence.

‘It doesn’t have to be direct’ I said. ‘Just as long as it’s scientifically sound and verifiable…’

‘Oh, that’s different, then…’ and they began a lengthy discussion on just how one might accumulate indirect but sound evidence of genetic doping. The homeostatic conditions in the human body are so balanced that if you push there, there will be an effect somewhere. You just have to figure out where it is.

I am confident that we can track it… and develop a test, even as this type of science is working its way through the trials process.

SR: That’s a great example of getting cooperation from researchers in the field, but what sort of help are you getting from the pharmaceutical industry? I recall working on a story about Amgen and found that they didn’t even care to acknowledge that their product, Epogen, was even being abused.

DP: It’s interesting. In 1999, when we held the conference on doping in Lausanne, the international association representing the pharmaceutical industry is just down the road in Geneva. We invited them to attend and they didn’t want to come. Maybe they didn’t have the budget to come over from Geneva… what is it 20 francs on the train or so?

That said we do now have some relationships with the individual manufacturers.

SR: But not with the trade organization itself?

DP: No, no. Not with the trade organization. It’s better that way, anyway, since the trade group doesn’t necessarily have the relevant information anyway. So we work with individual companies.

SR: You’re having some success on that front then. Have companies helped you develop tests? Take, for example, the test you rolled out in Salt Lake. The one for NESP. Did the companies help develop that?

DP: I am not sure if the company helped with that or not.

I find it interesting in that I recently saw a piece in the Italian press suggesting that the economic impact of performance-enhancing drugs is now greater than that of recreational drugs. That includes, of course, everyone from elites down to kids trying to get on the high school football team. But if that’s true, we’re looking at an immense problem and a problem that could offer some a huge profit margin.

SR: That raises the whole question about how widespread the problem is. In triathlon, for example, despite the recent positives at the Ironman in Hawaii, the buzz is that performance-enhancing drugs are really a problem in the age classes, where you have wealthy 45-year-old lawyers and doctors taking on the sport and doing what they can to turn in a top time. One observer recently said he had his suspicions about anyone over 40 or 45 turning in a sub-10-hour Ironman.

Does WADA see that as a problem and, if so, how does it get treated in the scope of your overall mission?

DP: We have to concern ourselves at the international level first. I think the two positives that turned up there show that some progress is being made. We do a push down in terms of responsibility to the national level and you’d like to push it down to all levels in terms of education, so as to educate people on reasons not to do it… After that, you might go to the 45-year-old lawyer, but at that point… I mean how dumb is an athlete who will do that to himself at age 45? And for what? Bragging rights?

Obviously, cases like that prove that money isn’t the sole factor in this. A lot of people say that the reason people dope is because of the money. But in same instances it has to be more than that. I don’t know a lot of people who get rich off of masters prizes and I sure don’t know a lot of wealthy weightlifters.

SR: Of course we all know about wealthy baseball players. That brings up a point about other areas where you don’t exercise much influence at this point. Back at the conference in 1999, Verbruggen was red-faced angry over comments made by the Americans’ ‘Drug Czar’ Barry McCaffrey. I think Verbruggen was especially angry being lectured by an American since the big three baseball, football and basketball have never really taken a big step in controlling anything but recreational drugs.

DP: Yeah, yeah, but his point is like the guy who gets pulled over for going 100mph in a 60mph zone and tells the cop that he should be focusing on all of those guys zooming by at 150.

SR: True, true, but even if he does get his ticket, you still have guys going 150 down the road. How do you bring those guys into the fold?

DP: That’s one of the things that we all agreed upon when we drafted the world anti-doping code in Copenhagen. Everyone athletes, IFs, governments agreed that in order to be effective, we couldn’t just stop at the Olympic movement.

I’ve written to the commissioner of the major sports baseball, football, hockey, basketball and golf. Hockey is in complete denial. They didn’t even bother answering.

The others all say three things basically:

1. There is no problem in (name the sport).
2. Even though there is no problem, we have a doping policy that we’re satisfied with.
3. Even if we wanted to do something, it’s a matter of collective bargaining and our hands are tied.

That last point is what really floors me. I mean it’s completely antithetical for a players union to be opposed to anti-doping. I just don’t understand the belief structure.

I saw some hope last year while watching the American president’s state of the union address. There, while my wife who is an American and I were watching just to see if this year’s speech was any more boring than last year’s speech, this little nugget appears where he raises the issue of doping in sport.

His message was clear to them: ‘Folks, you have a problem. Either you fix it or someone else will fix it for you.’

Right out of the blue. It was an important message… even more so now, with the BALCO case going on in San Francisco.

SR: It’s been a year, though. Have you seen anything from the White House or Congress on that front?

DP: Well, it’s been a busy year, hasn’t it? But the point is that he’s now on record. That means something. He has given every indication that the U.S. will be a party to the international convention on doping in sport. There is no exclusion for professional sport.

SR: When the convention is signed, ratified and p
ut into effect, what action could one take were one not to get the direct cooperation of the NFL or Major League Baseball?

DP: If I were king for a day, I would muse publicly about the need to maybe have a look at this anti-trust exemption for baseball. That might get their attention.

Or perhaps it might be worthy to ask if it’s appropriate for any sport to play in or use facilities that are paid for by the public. Or to ask if it were appropriate to allow tax deductions for advertising and sponsorship.

SR: You won’t be king for a day… but you will have the force of the international convention behind you. What does that give you in the effort to bring major professional sports into the compliance with anti-doping standards?

DP: It will certainly help. For one thing it shows that there is a commitment out there. There is a great tendency to believe that the only professional leagues that are not in compliance are in the U.S. That’s not true. They are just among the more successful. But there is also cricket, some of the rugby stuff, Australian rules football, the Japanese baseball league… there are lots of them.

SR: At this point then your biggest weapon is the support of the Olympic movement, correct?

DP: Oh yes. When the IOC changed its charter to include compliance with the anti-doping code as a precondition for participation in the Olympics… that became a big hammer. That’s what brought cycling into the fold. That’s what brought many of those sports into the fold.

SR: After the Berlin Wall came down, the details of the doping programs in East Germany and other east bloc countries came out. While that was a super-organized program, has there been a replacement in the sense that there is a similarly organized country, sport or even sub-culture that you consider to be the worst when it comes to doping?

DP: I still think there are countries out there where there is a strong suspicion that doping is very active. I believe Hungary, for example, had a terrible time in Athens this year. Byelorussia is another country where there are some serious suspicions. The Russian woman shot putter used bloody Stanozolol… and she’d been busted for Stanozolol before and she came back and used it again!

SR: Again, the Olympic movement gives you some muscle in controlling that?

DP: Well, yes and no. At the Olympics, the only thing that can happen is that you get disqualified and lose your medal. The international federation then has to come in and impose its own penalties. If they don’t, or if it’s not enough, we then have the right of appeal and we will take those cases to the CAS.

SR: I think one of the most embarrassing aspects of the Olympic rules is that competitors who medal at a Games and then later test positive in another event are allowed to keep the medals in which didn’t turn up positive. That happened in cross-country skiing in Salt Lake City. Has there been a change in the Olympic movement to allow an athlete to be stripped of all medals he or she may have ‘earned’ at a single Olympic Games, even though he may have tested positive in only one of several events?

DP: I think the IOC blew it in those cases (Larissa) Lazutina and (Olga) Danilova and (Johann) Muhlegg.

There are three different things at play here. One of the Russian girls had tested positive at a FIS event before the games, but the process hadn’t worked its way through yet. The outcome was almost certain. When the appeal was lost and her sanction stood, she was retroactively ruled to be ineligible, so she lost her medal. Our skier from Canada – Beckie Scott – is the one that benefited from that. She went from third to second.

Then the other, which the IOC didn’t step up to the plate in the way should have in the case of Muhlegg and the other Russian woman, is to say ‘look, the Olympic Games is a single event and when you cheat at the Olympics, you are disqualified from those Games.’

That policy was appealed to the CAS and the IOC lost. All of those medals were stripped this past spring. The nice result of that is that the policy was not only changed, it was changed retroactively… and again, our skier Beckie Scott, set a record having moved from third to second and then to first. She won bronze, the silver and the gold in the same event.

SR: That’s great… although she was denied that moment in Salt Lake, celebrating a gold medal, eh?

DP: True, true, but we can say that she would probably prefer to earn it that way than to be listed as having finished third behind two convicted dopers.

She and I got into a bit of a tiff before the games, actually. She came up to me before the games and said ‘Look, there are people out here cheating and you’re not doing enough about it.’

I said we were doing what we can. Eventually, I believe, she came to realize that we were. I mean she skied to third that day and the old guys in the suits proved to the world that she was really first. You need both things to happen. It’s frustrating for her, but we couldn’t simply go around disqualifying people based solely on suspicion.

SR: In the U.S. we have had a couple of interesting cases involving tainted supplements leading to positives. One case, cyclist Scott Moninger actually still had sealed containers of an amino acid supplement that were subsequently opened in a lab and shown to be contaminated with Nandrolone. Have you tried to get some sort regulation imposed on that industry?

DP: You’d like the industry to be regulated. I hope that steps will taken to do that, but No.2 you need people to know that this is a strict liability offense. It’s up to you to know you’re ingesting. If you don’t know what’s in it, don’t take it.

SR: Has there been any attempt to gain the cooperation of the supplement industry?

DP: Not formally… and I think it’s a tough thing to do. In the case you describe, of course, he had sealed containers still, but what about the case where perhaps someone tests positive and as an explanation adds something to an open container of supplements and offers up the defense, ‘well gee all I had was this?’

SR: I do appreciate all the time you’ve given me today. I do want to wrap up with a question about your motivation. You have a career as an attorney. You were once touted as a favorite to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch. That didn’t happen, but you seem to have taken this on with a great deal of enthusiasm and passion. What’s driving you these days?

DP: That’s easy. I don’t like people who cheat. Period.

That’s the thing about sport. Whether the rules are artificial or not, they are the rules. That’s our deal. If I’m slower than you I don’t get to start before the gun goes off because you can run faster. I don’t get to hollow out the shot so that it weighs 12 pounds instead of 16 because I find it easier to throw 12. And part of our deal is that you don’t use drugs. That’s partly out of health considerations and partly out of ethical concerns.

I don’t want my kids or my grandchildren to have to consider becoming chemical stockpiles in order to be good at sport, just because there are a bunch of sociopaths out there doing the same thing. I don’t want them to lose by three inches or a tenth of a second to someone who is cheating. That destroys the whole purpose of sport as a social, educational and personal tool.

SR: Has sport transcended that at this point? Is it now more about money? Is it now more about satisfying the demands of sponsors?

DP: Well, as far as sponsors are concerned, I don’t think they want to see doping either. We saw that when we did the Olympic marketing. Sponsors want the good things of the Olympic movement. I think the consumer understands that, too. I mean the Olympic movement may not have it right, but at least they’re trying.

It’s not like the professional gladiator sports
. I mean, to be frank, no one gives a shit how a 350-pound lineman got to weigh 350 pounds. It sure wasn’t oatmeal and porridge when he’s at mom’s. And they don’t care. They’re there for the entertainment, but think of all of the angst that’s out there whenever there’s a positive at the Olympics or in the world championships of track and field. People want this to work out. They want it to be something they can be proud of their kids being involved in. If we don’t do something to ensure that, we’re facing the biggest danger there is in sport these days.

SR: You were in Olympics, what 40, 44 years ago…

DP: Ahh yes and thank you for counting back so far. It’s always nice to be reminded how old you are. Yes, yes… it was 1960. I was a mere child.

SR: Do you believe that the environment has changed since then?

DP: Yes and no. I like to present the medal in the 100-meter freestyle, which was my event and the closest I’ll ever get to a medal in that. The guys to whom I give the medals now would have been basketball players in my day.

They’re bigger. I mean they’re six foot six, six foot eight. They’re faster, they’re fitter, the technique is better, the pools are better… that has changed, but the excitement of being there at the Olympics and representing your country hasn’t. I believe that excitement was the same for people there in 1912 in Stockholm and I was sure excited in 1960 in Rome. I am sure it was the same in Athens this year… and it will be the same in 2008 in Beijing.

SR: Do you think the doping environment has changed in that time?

DP: Yeah, I am sure it’s more sophisticated. I don’t know how much more endemic it is, but it is certainly more sophisticated. So we have to be more sophisticated, too.

SR: The assumption is that you guys are always a step behind the cheaters.

DP: Yeah. I accept that. But we’re only one step behind. We’re not miles behind. When you get your hands on a THG, for example, you can have a test within weeks. Because of that THG is a dinosaur drug right now. No one will use it. It was cutting edge at the time and I operate on the assumption that there are more out there and we’re testing stuff people haven’t considered.

Take the case of THG. Once you have that in the lab, you can start tweaking it yourself and seeing what sorts of spikes you might get on a mass spectrometry reading. The biochemist can figure out what people might be doing to a drug like even Stanozolol. They make a small change and suddenly we see what a particular spectrometry spike might represent. So, I hope that we can eventually be in the position of being ahead of the curve at times, long before people know what it is we know, so that we can come up to them and say ‘Hello. Guess what you just took and guess what we just found and don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.’

SR: Did you ever face the issue when you were competing?

DP: It was just starting. I sure hadn’t heard a lot. I was 18 at the time. We heard about the Perry O’Brian guys, who had started to experiment with testosterone. And you have to remember that there were no rules against it at the time. Those guys were saying ‘hey this is great! I can throw this thing 70 feet instead of 60. Hey this is good!’

Across the pond, the Soviets were experimenting with it. I mean after they joined the Olympic movement in ’52, they came in with a vengeance. It was during the Rome Olympics that a Danish cyclist died during the road race from dehydration, stimulants and I don’t know what else. At that point, the IOC concluded that things were getting out of control and they got the medical commission up and running. They came up with a list of banned substances, which of course, immediately pushed all of that underground.

It wasn’t until ’74 or so before we could test for anabolic steroids. In ’76 here in Montreal I swear the East Germans were over the top. I could stand behind Cornelia Ender (who won four gold medals in Montreal) and you couldn’t see me. The East Germans were sophisticated as hell with that. They even had a reentry program, where they brought some of these athletes back down to normal levels and allowed them to lead pretty normal lives. Ender, for example, is back to a very normal size and she has a couple of kids now.

SR: Some of the lawsuits show that wasn’t always the case, though.

DP: True. There were some real messes.

SR: Well, again, thank you for your time.

DP: My pleasure.



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About the Author: Pete Rugh