Flashes of Panic

I keep saying I think Usain Bolt is clean (actually, I hope he’s clean), but I’m not such a naif that I think track is drug free. Who should we be suspicious of? Two kinds of athletes: Americans, and entire countries which appear to support a national doping program.

Let’s take the first one first. I’m not suggesting all American athletes are doping; what I am suggesting is that America (and, to a lesser extent, Canada) has a unique combination of relatively well-paid athletes and relatively accessible and advanced domestic pharmaceuticals. American athletes are more likely to have the means to obtain the juice, and more likely to be financially rewarded for juiced performances. For that, despite our federation’s admirable dedication to doping controls, they get a special exception from class #2.

That is “entire countries.” Out-of-competition testing is considered the backbone of doping control, because it’s easy to duck competition tests: you train on the juice for months, then stop in advance of competition, flush it out of your system, kick ass and give a clean test. Simple, unless someone shows up un-announced and asks for a test while you’re training. Athletes are required to comply with these requests; there are stacks of stories of otherwise-blameless athletes receiving bans for missing tests or refusing tests.

Ducking out-of-competition tests requires extensive planning and support. IAAF staff tell some chilling off-the-record stories about how it’s done. Imagine, for example, that the athlete gets a call from national customs agents warning them that testers have just arrived at the airport. Alternately, the tester knocks on the athlete’s door, but is arrested by local police before the athlete answers. When the tester is released several hours later (“So sorry, a misunderstanding,”) the athlete(s) are all ready and waiting at a local hotel.

Samples have to be handled carefully for accurate results, and there’s room to skew things there, too. Perhaps the tester is arrested after collecting the samples, and the samples are “accidentally” destroyed. Perhaps there’s a national law against removing blood from the country, so samples need to be smuggled out. (One story involved a testing team making plane reservations to throw the authorities off their track, then leaving town by train.)

None of this can happen without some degree of governmental support from bureaucrats who believe the medal table is more important than drug-free athletics.

What countries are doing this? Not Kenya, for one, and probably not Ethiopia either. There are some African countries viewed with great suspicion, however, even though, like Kenya, some of their stars are now winning medals for other countries.

We saw a corner of the Russian apparatus uncovered in July, and most of the stories I’ve heard involve them; unfortunately, nearly every Russian athlete (there are a few exceptions) has to be viewed with a jaundiced eye in the wake of their scandal just as every American looked suspicious after BALCO. Russia’s neighbors bear watching; Ukraine lost a heptathlon medalist to a positive test during the Games.

Catching dirty athletes is like stopping spam, though; there’s no hard-and-fast rule, but rather a series of factors which make an athlete’s performances suspicious. It just looks like “being from Russia” is one of those factors now.

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