NOT ALL DRUG TESTING IS EQUAL
Tough, year-round Olympic protocol far from the norm
The words “drug testing ” are as much a part of sports these days as “walk-off home run,” “Big House,” “Deflategate” and “another misbehaving athlete.”
You hear or read that a sport you’re watching uses drug testing and you immediately think the sport must be clean. That’s the power of those two words. They carry a level of trust that leads us to believe that what we’re seeing play out before our eyes is true and honest. As a consumer, you breathe a little easier believing that you’ve paid your money for something that’s legit.
It doesn’t matter that Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones, the greatest male and female cheaters in sports history, never failed a drug test. That fact confounds everyone, but most come to the realization that those two gamed the system for years but nonetheless eventually were caught, so we still can lean on drug testing as our fail-safe for clean sport.
Here’s the tricky part, though. There’s drug testing — and then there’s real drug testing.
Most Olympic sports have real drug testing: 365-day-a-year, knock-on-the-door, provide-a-sample-as-the-collector-watches drug testing. This is the kind of drug testing that athletes such as Missy Franklin, Gabby Douglas and Ryan Lochte have accepted and even embraced for their entire elite careers in exchange for the privilege of representing their nation in the Olympic Games.
Katie Ledecky, the 18-year-old swimming phenom who will be one of the biggest American stars heading into next summer’s Rio Olympics, might as well have been born into this kind of testing. Track and field athletes, swimmers, gymnasts, the U.S. women’s national soccer team — this is their life. And they take it incredibly seriously. They know that if they decide on the spur of the moment to visit their grandmother for the weekend, they need to send a message to USADA with her address in case a collector needs to find them that weekend, wherever they are. Not being able to be found is entirely the athlete’s fault, not the collector’s, and might eventually lead to a drug suspension.
If this sounds extreme, consider that this has been standard operating procedure in U.S. Olympic sports since 2001, and it’s one of the reasons why many people put Olympians on a pedestal much higher than they do almost any other athletes.
It’s worth noting that rudimentary testing for performance-enhancing drugs began at the Olympics in 1972. Major League Baseball didn’t get the memo until 2004. So, if you want to trust any athlete, your best bet is an Olympian.
But not necessarily a professional athlete whose sport is in the Olympics. USA TODAY Sports obtained a Sept. 10 letter from the International Golf Federation that says it will allow male and female Olympic-eligible golfers to be available for stringent Olympic drug testing for only 13 weeks prior to the Rio opening ceremony.
That’s 13 weeks for golfers and 52 weeks for swimmers, even though they’ll be at the same Olympics. See what I mean about drug testing and real drug testing?
But golf ’s Olympic testing window is nearly twice as long as the amount of time the U.S. AntiDoping Agency was given to test Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao before their May 2 title fight. That was just seven weeks.
“That’s far less than is optimal,” USADA CEO Travis Tygart said in an exclusive interview Wednesday, “but what we’ve decided is that seven weeks is better than nothing in the hopes that it will instigate change eventually to a year-round program.”
Tygart said that USADA has turned down working on more than a dozen other boxing matches because the testing period for the fighters was going to be less than four weeks, which was unacceptable to USADA.
“The question for us is are we willing to help these athletes have a higher standard of testing that has not yet evolved into a yearround status, but we hope it gets there?” Tygart said. “The answer to that is yes.”
In the meantime, there’s a patchwork quality to worldwide drug testing as international sport continues to work its way through the so-called Steroids Era, which is by no means over. Tygart is not pleased golf Olympic hopefuls will be in the USADA and World Anti-Doping Agency testing pool for just 13 weeks.
“Anything less than a yearround program is not the ideal,” he said. “Athletes deserve better.”
But he’ll take what he can get. And so should we. Any drug testing is better than none at all.
Christine Brennan cbrennan@usatoday.com USA TODAY Sports