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	October 19, 2003

MORE ON THE SPORTS DOPING SCANDAL The inimitable Malcolm Gladwell, he of The Tipping Point, wrote an expose last year of the epidemic of illegal drug use in sport, and how athletes, coaches and laboratories are able to stay one step ahead of the testers, and reap gold medals and competitive advantage over clean athletes as a result. Gladwell's work, and several other exposes, make it clear that the IOC and the USOC are not only incapable of policing drug use in sport, but are quietly involved in covering it up. Clearly, if amateur sport were suddenly cleaned up, there would be very few new world records for a long while, the integrity of all the existing records and recent medals would be suspect, and the Olympic movement might never recover. Now there's a new report that suggests that, just maybe, anti-drug forces might be able to get sport cleaned up even without Olympic authority support. The US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), acting on an anonymous tip from an American coach, has just released an announcement (requires Acrobat reader -- click on 'USADA Statement' from this press release page to launch the file) that they have developed a test for a steroid that is closely related chemically and in effect to banned steroids, but was previously unknown and undetected. The new steroid, called THG, was developed by a California laboratory. It has now been chemically identified, and in a first set of tests 350 American athletes tested positive for the drug. This was just from samples taken from athletes participating in June's US Championships. If confirmed, all of these athletes would be banned from participating in IAAF events for two years, including the 2004 Athens Olympics. They would probably have to forfeit any medals they won in the World Championships in Paris that were held shortly after the June event. What's even worse for this apparently huge ring of cheaters, THG is an inert substance whose presence stays in urine samples for years, and testers could now go back and re-test samples of past Olympic winners, and possibly strip hundreds of them of their medals and world records. And it doesn't stop at American athletes or even amateur sport. The laboratory that developed THG, Bay Area Laboratories (BALCO), also represents such global sports luminaries as Ivan Lendl, Barry Bonds & John Elway, supplying them with performance-enhancing "nutritional products". This is a huge scandal, and could lead to the decimation of teams for next year's Olympics, or even a cancellation of the event. Stay tuned -- this is gonna be big. Update 11pm Oct.19: The above number (350 positive tests), cited in the link above,  now seems in doubt. Other 'unnamed sources' are saying the number of positives was only 'up to 20' of 450 or 550 tests. The USADA is refusing to provide any numbers whatsoever, and say that they won't discuss numbers until the grand jury investigating the scandal has finished its work. More updates as/if additional information becomes available. 12:10:48 PM  trackback []  comment []

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