Masback and US race for high ground

Drugs in sport

All week, athletes throughout the United States have been dodging phone calls, failing to return messages. Gail Devers has been an exception. "I'm very positive," the veteran sprint-hurdler said. "I want people to know that."

It was perhaps not the best choice of words. Already, amid the fallout from the drug tests for THG and modafinil, 10 US athletes have been very positive. More positives are expected once the results of retrospective testing become known, and when the federal grand jury hearing about the affairs of the Californian "nutritionist" Victor Conte runs its course in a San Francisco courtroom.

What Devers intended to covey was that not everything was negative - or chemically positive - in American athletics. "Not everyone in track and field is doing wrong," she said. "Not everyone is making bad choices."

Precisely how many starred-and-striped athletes have done wrong remains to be seen. According to Gary Wadler, a leading expert on drugs in sport in the United States, the submissions under oath of up to 100 athletes in the Conte case could prove to be a lid-blowing experience over the next few weeks. "This is our opportunity to respond as a country as Canada responded in the Ben Johnson case," he told USA Today, "not just to lock someone up but to engage in serious introspection at the national level, which could have international ramifications."

That much also remains to be seen. Like Canadian athletics before the Seoul Olympics and professional cycling before the Festina team-car bust, track and field in the United States had been in denial about drug-taking for years. Its ostrich stance was clear when it was revealed during the 2000 Olympics that CJ Hunter, the shot-putting former husband of Marion Jones, had tested positive for nandrolone. Even after the International Amateur Athletic Federation, as the world governing body was known at the time, announced the results of four positive tests on Hunter, Craig Masback, the chief executive of USA Track and Field, the governing body in the United States, tortuously refused to confirm the fact.

Arne Ljungqvist, head of the IAAF's medical commission, had already let it be known that USATF had failed to disclose "12 to 15" positive tests since 1999. Dick Pound, the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, declared: "The United States should lead the way rather than being led, kicking and screaming, into being part of the solution. It's like alcoholism. You have to admit there's a problem. If you're in denial, it's not going to be dealt with."

But Masback was still firmly in denial, making the staggering claim that USATF was "the world leader" in efforts to detect drug cheating. A former Oxford University student, Masback always was a little off the pace in the days when he raced in the wake of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett. His assertion did not quite tally with the evidence provided in April this year by Wade Exum, former director of the US Olympic Committee's drug control programme: that 19 American Olympic medallists, among them Carl Lewis, had continued competing after failing tests. It was also at variance with the revelation during the World Championships in Paris in August that Jerome Young had been allowed to help the US win the Olympic 4 x 400m relay in Sydney after testing positive for nandrolone.

It has come as little surprise that so many US athletes have been snared in the drugs-net retrospectively laid after the discovery of the use of tetrahdrogestrinone, the designer steroid more popularly known as THG, and moda-finil, a stimulant. It has come as a shock, though, to see USATF reinvent itself a crusading force against drugs, announcing a "zero-tolerance" policy and proposing life-time bans and $100,000 fines.

"We have not done everything we could have done in the past," Masback conceded two weeks ago. "We have been perhaps too aggressive in taking the rights or the defence of single athletes and placing those ahead of the needs of an entire sport."

It was even more stunning, though, to read Masback claiming in an article posted on the Runners' World website on Thursday: "Now, even the cynics have to agree that the US is willing to bust its own."

THG was uncovered only because an anonymous coach sent a syringe to the US Anti-Doping Agency, which was set up by the US Olympic Committee in response to repeated criticism of USATF's lax approach to drugs. The zero-tolerance declaration came only after the US Olympic Committee appointed three officers to oversee the work of USATF, threatening to dismantle the governing body if it continued to fail to take the issue of doping seriously.

According to Masback: "USATF is aggressively and straightforwardly addressing issues with which we have long grappled." He also claimed "the THG situation" has been "oddly liberating for USATF," adding that, "questions we have long raised are now being asked by others".

Questions were asked later that same day when it emerged that the US could lose its 4 x 400m relay world title because Calvin Harrison's positive test for modafinil was actually the second he had registered for a banned stimulant - turning two positives into another big negative for American track and field.