Sunday, July 23, 2000

America on trial

A former US Olympic Committee doctor has stunned the American sporting world with shocking claims about drug-taking just weeks before the Sydney Games.

Dr Wade Exum has sued the USOC claiming constructive dismissal, linked to claims that his colleagues undermined anti-doping legislation so effectively that up to half of all American competitors in Olympic sports who have tested positive in recent years have been neither named nor penalised.

Exum, 51, joined the USOC, which is based in Colorado Springs, in 1991 as director of drug control. But in his deposition to the federal court, he claims that colleagues had "thrown roadblocks in the path of anti-doping enforcement". The USOC has responded by saying his suit is without merit, and by criticising the timing of it so close to Sydney.

To complicate matters, Exum, who is black, has also claimed racial bias, saying that white colleagues who were not even doctors were made his supervisors.

Exum said his efforts to stop athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs resulted in those supervisors criticising him for not being a "team player". Exum resigned from the USOC in June.

So far, Exum has refused to name names, but says he will do so in court, despite the fact that urine samples and their origin are theoretically kept from the testers by a system of codes. Exum has acknowledged individual athletes have been interviewed by his lawyers in preparation for the suit, though he would not say if any would be subpoenaed to testify in court.

At a press conference on Friday, Exum repeated his general claims. He said: "My intent basically has been to improve the outlook for athletes' health and for fair play. And also to extract some sort of retribution from the USOC for what they've done to my reputation, to my health and to my future."

Following the press conference, Scott Blackum, the USOC's senior managing director of sports resources, said an internal investigation into some of the charges produced no evidence to support Exum's claims. "The bottom line, from our standpoint, is basically that all of his allegations are either untrue, unsubstantiated or irrelevant," Blackum said. "I asked Dr Exum on a number of occasions to provide me with specifics. He refused to do that." Rich Young, a lawyer hired by the USOC to investigate some of Exum's claims, said he "didn't find any cover-ups or improprieties".

None the less, Exum's claims fit in strongly with allegations made by an immediate predecessor of his at the USOC. As Chief Medical Officer, then Head of Sports Medicine and Science, Dr Robert Voy was in an even more senior position at the USOC than Exum. Yet Voy also walked away in frustration after five years, citing very similar collusion of officials with "guilty" athletes.

Voy wrote a book about his USOC experiences, entitled Drugs, Sport and Politics, in which he claimed scores of examples of athletes being let off positive drug tests. One of the worst cases was that of John Powell, a discus thrower who had tested positive at the US championships in 1987. Voy wrote of Powell: "To make matters worse, during the testing process Powell did not seem the least bit worried, concerned, upset or remorseful. In fact, he went so far as to say, 'I don't care what you find. If you find something, so what?' He must have known there were forces in his corner, forces that could protect him and set him free."

Powell's name was never made public as having failed a dope test, and he went on a few weeks later to win the silver medal at the IAAF World Championships in Rome. Voy, like Exum, felt that he was forced from his post, and wrote: "I understood that many people at the USOC were in the business for one reason - to bring home the gold. Just how the athletes accomplished that, well, few cared."

Jean Poczobut, a former French national athletics coach and one of the movers in the pursuit by French sports minister, Marie-George Buffet, of the 1998 Tour de France cyclists, said yesterday that he was not surprised by Exum's claims. "It's something that we've suspected for years," he said. "Even when someone is caught, like Dennis Mitchell and Mary Slaney, they're exonerated by the US athletics authorities. But it's not just athletics, it's across all the sports. And what about the US pro sports?

"It's ridiculous that that baseball player [Mark McGwire] can use androstenedione with the blessing, more or less, of authorities and advertisers, and it's a banned drug in any Olympic sport. Generally speaking, the US pro sports only test for recreational drugs, not for performance-enhancing ones. Remember, you only find what you're looking for." US attitudes towards performance- enhancing drugs have long been, at best ambivalent. For all the holier-than-thou pointing at the former East Germany and ex-Soviet bloc countries, the use of such drugs began in the mid-fifties on the west coast of the US. Anabolic steroids had been developed to assist concentration camp victims restore wasted bone. Body-builders soon realised the drug's potential, and the hammer and discuss throwers and shot putters who attended the muscle beaches soon latched on. As far as authorities' attitudes go, when discus thrower Ben Plucknett tested positive after a high-achieving season, he was immediately given the cachet of Athlete of the Year.

The sort of posturing that Voy and Exum claim that the USOC does publicly, while turning a blind eye privately, also masks the enormous influence the Americans wield in sports politics circles, as much for the overwhelming numerical superiority of their top competitors as for the fact that US television is a financial motor for the Olympic movement. While many people would cite the Ben Johnson expulsion from the 1988 Games as the end of innocence in Olympic sport, there are many inside, including your correspondent, who feel that if Johnson had been an American, rather than a Canadian, he would never have been found positive in Seoul.

Following the Tour de France EPO scandal in 1998, US Olympic officials formed a "think tank" to review the perception of their drug control efforts and issue recommendations. The panel suggested the creation of an independent drug control organisation, a recommendation that led to the formation of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Exum said the move was purely a public relations effort. "It is a sham," he said on Friday. "You read that it is an independent agency. I invite you to look into the backgrounds of all of those who are associated with it and find any sort of independence."

Exum, the only African-American in an administrative position at the USOC, also charges that he was professionally discriminated against, based both on his race and his long-time campaign to bring a degree of integrity to the American drug control program. Exum was particularly frustrated when he found that his immediate supervisor, James Page, had himself been banned for life in the 1980s by the national and international governing bodies of skiing for developing a doping program for an American Nordic skier. USOC spokesman Mike Moran said Page had appealed against the ban and been reinstated by the US Skiing Association in 1990. Exum, who was the only medical doctor on staff at the USOC, said he realised he might be facing an uphill battle soon after taking his job in 1991, the year that Voy's book was published. At a conference that year, a Canadian official wished him luck and stated that the Americans had a reputation for running "not a doping control program, but a controlled-doping programme".

Exum noted that, in the nine years since, he has seen little evidence to counter that assertion. He said that during his tenure he had "never once seen an athlete sanctioned by the USOC for using a prohibited substance". Some of those athletes later went on to compete and win medals in Olympic competition. Exum said that knowledge of those quashed positive results "went all the way to the top" of the USOC and no action was taken.

"The question of medals is less important to me than the question of those athletes who were denied the chance to even compete at the Olympics," said Exum. "In my opinion the poor bastard is the one who finished fourth (in an Olympic trials) and never even got to go."

BY CHARLES PELKEY
Sunday Times