When you run a 9-second 100 metres or 19-second 200 metres
your body is gonna be ripped up.
Tyson Gay to Steve Mullings
‘It’s so obvious that they’re up to something,’ Victor Conte says of the Jamaican sprinters. But up to what? ‘State-sponsored doping.’
You would assume that Conte would know what he is talking about. His name is synonymous with doping, since he was the man who ran the Balco operation: a doping ring that in the early 2000s included the world’s fastest woman and man, Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery. He has been saying since 2008 that he thinks the secret behind the Jamaicans’ success is doping. He gets exasperated that nobody seems to listen. I suppose this comes with the territory of being a convicted drugs cheat, though these days, in his new guise as boxing trainer, Conte insists he is committed to the cause of clean sport. He is certainly a vocal proponent of fair play, and a crusader against drugs cheats.
But state-sponsored doping? That is some claim.
According to the IAAF, drug-testing at the 2009 Berlin world championships represented a big step forward. A thousand urine and blood samples were collected. The IAAF president, Lamine Diack, said that the samples would be stored for future analysis, using new testing methods as they were developed.
According to others, the testing was – and always has been -ineffective. Around 2 per cent of tests turn out positive – year after year that figure is fairly stable – which is either a sign that not many athletes are doping, or that most cheats are not caught. It is widely understood that in-competition tests are unlikely to yield many positives. The reasons are obvious: athletes know they are likely to be tested; drugs are of most benefit in training, not in competition. Failing a test at a major event is akin to failing two tests, says Dick Pound, the former head of WADA: ‘A drugs test and an IQ test.’
Pound estimates that 10 per cent of cheats are caught – which means he thinks that around one in five competitors are doping. The athletes themselves, when asked on the eve of the 2012 Olympics, said they thought it was around 10 per cent. Conte says it’s more like 60 per cent.
The truth is this: nobody knows.
Into the vacuum of knowledge, speculation floods. In the absence of facts, guesswork is all we have. We grasp at anything – rumours or threads, however tenuous, connecting an athlete to a notorious coach, chemist or doctor. And of course performances. In an event with the history of the 100 metres, a great performance is enough to elicit suspicion.
There are some who contend that there is a natural threshold: that anyone running below a certain time must be doping. But this is hugely problematic. Can anybody claim to know the limits of natural human performance? Or quantify how much of a difference drugs can make – what they are worth in terms of times?
Conte believes he has a reasonable idea. When he was running the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco) he gave his athletes ‘the full enchilada’ of doping products – the blood booster EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone, insulin, as well as a ‘designer steroid’, tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). This was his secret weapon, known as ‘the Clear’ because it was undetectable. And for years he got away with it.
He and his athletes, including Jones and Montgomery and Britain’s Dwain Chambers, might never have been caught. They were rumbled not by conventional drug-testing, but because in June 2003 a rival coach, Trevor Graham, a US-based Jamaican, sent a syringe containing traces of THG to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). With the syringe he included a note explaining that Conte’s athletes were using this mystery substance. The agency sent the syringe to an anti-doping lab in Los Angeles, which analysed its contents, identified its anabolic properties and developed a test for it. Then they retested Conte’s athletes, catching Chambers, among others, and setting in motion a chain of events that led eventually to the imprisonment of Conte and Jones.
Two days after Graham’s package arrived at USADA, Jeff Novitsky, a federal agent who had been carrying out his own (separate) investigation into the activities of Conte and Balco, discovered a letter while going through Conte’s rubbish. It was written by Conte, addressed to USADA and the IAAF, and accused Trevor Graham of systematically doping his own athletes with the help of a Mexican contact. Conte had obviously had second thoughts about sending it.
When Graham was outed as the anonymous syringe-sender -partly because he couldn’t help boasting about it – he accepted the praise that followed with humility. ‘I was just a coach doing the right thing,’ he said. ‘No regrets.’
But eventually he too was charged with doping his athletes (who included the 2004 Olympic 100 metres champion Justin Gatlin). Graham ended up with a year’s house arrest and a lifetime coaching ban. Another Jamaican who became embroiled in the fallout from the Balco scandal was Raymond Stewart, the coach to another Jamaicaborn athlete, Jerome Young, who ran for the US. Stewart also ended up with a lifetime coaching ban.
Of the two Jamaican-born coaches, Stewart is far better known than Graham as an athlete. He ran in four Olympic Games, making the 100 metres final a record three times in a row. In the most notorious final of all, in Seoul in 1988, he pulled up injured mid-race – something he blamed on the Jamaican team not having adequate medical or physio support (he was treated before the final by a member of Ben Johnson’s entourage).
Stewart’s personal best of 9.96 seconds makes him the fifth-fastest Jamaican of all time. He first emerged at Camperdown High School, which developed an enviable reputation for sprinting from the late 1970s under its coach, Glen Mills – it was the ‘sprint factory’ as Mills himself told me. It was Mills who coached Stewart before he left Jamaica for Texas Christian University in Fort Worth in 1985. In 1983, running for Camperdown, Stewart won the 100 and 200 metres at Champs, held at its temporary home of Sabina Park in Kingston, winning the 100 in a record-equalling 10.3 (on grass). In 1984, he repeated the sprint double at Champs and later that year helped Jamaica to one of their most significant results – a silver medal in the men’s 4x100 metres at the Los Angeles Olympics.
Graham didn’t have the same distinguished career (I could find no record of him even running at Champs), though he did represent Jamaica, alongside Stewart, at the Seoul Olympics. He was a member of the 4x400 relay squad that won a silver medal, though he didn’t run in the final. He too left Jamaica for an American college – in Graham’s case St Augustine College in North Carolina.
When the Baleo case exploded, and then Graham was found to be as guilty as Conte of doping his athletes, it was a former discus thrower from Mexico (Graham’s ‘Mexican contact’) who appeared to be the thread connecting many of the world’s leading coaches and athletes. Ángel Guillermo Heredia Hernández, also known as ‘Memo’, the son of a chemical engineer from Mexico City, was part guru, part supplier. Although largely self-taught, what Heredia didn’t know about drugs and how to pass drug tests didn’t seem worth knowing.
Graham was the coach with whom he worked most closely, but Heredia’s introduction to the world elite originally came through Stewart. The pair met when Heredia went to Texas A&M University-Kingsville to study kinesiology. Stewart was launching his coaching, career, and Heredia told him he could help his athletes. He took Stewart to Mexico City to visit a laboratory where a member of his family worked; it was here that some of the world’s top athletes would later have their blood and urine screened to ensure they would pass drug tests.
Heredia began working with other coaches, too. In 1996 he was contacted by Graham, who drove to his home in Laredo, Mexico, with two of his less well-known athletes during the Christmas holiday. They stayed, said Heredia, for four or five days.
Now Heredia had access to some of the fastest sprinters in the world, including Montgomery and Jones, who at the time were both coached by Graham (they would link up with Conte later). Later, Heredia claimed that he also worked with Graham’s cousin, Winthrop Graham (another Jamaican), as well as John Smith (who coached Maurice Greene) and Dennis Mitchell. Thus did he spin a web connecting many of the world’s top sprinters from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. Between them, Heredia’s clients won twenty-six Olympic medals and twenty-one world championship medals. ‘At one time, between Victor Conte and me, you could say we had the whole of US track and field in our pocket,’ he told the journalist David Walsh in 2008.
It was inevitable, then, that Heredia’s name would become familiar to the federal investigator Jeff Novitsky, a toweringly tall, bald figure. When Novitsky finally tracked him down and confronted him, he knew as much about Heredia as Heredia knew about performance-enhancing drugs. Novitsky presented him with a choice: turn informer or go to prison. Heredia took the first option, becoming the prosecution’s star witness (Source A) and testifying against Raymond Stewart, Trevor Graham and the athletes he had helped to cheat. ‘Even at the last moment, I felt I was betraying my oath, the underground oath among athletes,’ he said later. ‘What hurt me was that, deep down, I didn’t want to put all this stuff on the table. I truly felt sad about it, but Trevor sent that syringe and in the end, I had no choice.’
In the end, Travis Tygart, the head of USADA, was less than impressed with Heredia. After the initial slew of information, he ‘went quiet’. He disappeared back to Mexico for a while. Then he reappeared in the sport of boxing with a new name, or a variation on his actual name: he was now Ángel Hernández. The man who identified the trainer formerly known as Ángel Heredia was Victor Conte (on Twitter). When he was outed, Heredia explained that Hernández was simply easier to spell to reporters. But to Conte it looked like he was trying to hide his identity. He wanted to know why.
Since his re-emergence, Hernández/Heredia has worked with some top boxers, including his fellow Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez, insisting that his methods have changed, that he is in favour of clean sport and that his fighters are drug-free. But in a sport that has traditionally had something of a lax attitude to doping, some are reluctant to take him at his word – his old nemesis Victor Conte foremost among them.
There have also been rumours – many of them fuelled by Heredia himself, through a series of tantalising, provocative tweets – that he still works with track and field athletes. In August 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, he gave an interview to the German publication Spiegel. This was instantly notorious; and for athletics fans it made for grim, depressing reading. Asked if he would watch the 100 metres final in Beijing, Heredia replied: ‘Of course. But the winner will not be clean. Not even any of the contestants will be clean.’ There is no way to prove this, pressed the reporter. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ replied Heredia. ‘The difference between 10.0 seconds and 9.7 seconds is the drugs.’
It was a long interview, 3,000 words, presented in its entirety as a Q&A. In it, Heredia buried the myth that drugs can transform athletes: ‘In reality you have to train inconceivably hard, be very talented and have a perfect team of trainers and support staff. And then it is the best drugs that make the difference. It is all a great composition, a symphony.’
He went on to explain why athletes take drugs: ‘Athletes hear rumours and they become worried. That the competition has other tricks, that they might get caught when they travel.’ He said when they take drugs: ‘When the season ended in October, we waited for a couple of weeks for the body to cleanse itself. Then in November, we loaded growth hormone and EPO, and twice a week we examined the body to make sure that no lumps were forming in the blood. Then we gave testosterone shots. This first programme lasted eight to ten weeks, then we took a break.’ He revealed how they circumvented the tests: ‘I had to know my athletes well and have an overview of what federation tested with which methods’; he gathered information by using ‘vigilance [and] informers’. And he explained what he used: ‘I always combined several things. For example, I had one substance called actovison that increased blood circulation – not detectable. That was good from a health standpoint and even better from a competitive standpoint. Then we had the growth factors IGF-1 and IGF-2. And EPO. EPO increases the number of red blood cells and thus the transportation of oxygen, which is the key for every athlete: the athlete wants to recover quickly, keep the load at a constantly high level and achieve a constant performance.’
Asked why he seemed to lurk in the shadows, Heredia said: ‘I rarely travelled to the big events, but that was because of jealousy: the Americans didn’t want me to work with the Jamaicans and vice versa. But shadows? No. It was one big chain, from athletes to agents to sponsors, and I was part of it. But everyone knew how the game worked. Everyone wanted it to be this way, because everyone got rich off it.’
The only way drug-testers could win, he added, was if they invested all the money generated by the sport and tested every athlete twice a week – ‘but only then. What’s happening now is laughable. It’s a token. They should save their money – or give it to me. I’ll give it to the orphans of Mexico.’
He concluded: ‘Peak performances are a fairytale, my friend.’ Which might be the only thing on which he and Victor Conte agree.
I am speaking to Conte, or rather, Conte is speaking to me down the phone from California. You don’t ask Conte many questions – you simply tee him up, and off he goes. The former rock guitarist, who looks a bit like a TV magician with his slicked-back dark hair and pencil moustache, lives up to his reputation as a larger-than-life figure. Or, as some have described him, a publicity-hungry big-mouth whose regular briefings of reporters during the Balco investigation infuriated his own lawyers and perhaps helped land him behind bars. Yet he is also engaging, curious – and deeply suspicious.
After spending four months in prison in 2007, he too re-emerged as a boxing trainer, also professing to have changed his ways – to be fair, Conte has continued to cooperate with anti-doping organisations -and as the owner of a nutrition company. Conte hates Heredia, or Memo, as he insists on calling him. The reason for his animosity, he explains, is simply that while he opted ‘to accept the full consequences for my mistakes and not testify against anybody in the case, Memo chose to throw all his athletes under the bus . . . He was their leader and when caught, Memo ratted his athletes out.’ (Their animosity plays out on Twitter, where Conte interrogates Heredia and Heredia goads Conte in response, sometimes, just to rub it in, adding #felon to his tweets.)
Conte claims that in 2009 he was told by a track and field insider (a former athlete turned agent) that Memo was working ‘with twenty-five track athletes, most of them Jamaicans’, including Usain Bolt. The allegation that Bolt was involved with Heredia was published by Deadspin, the sports website, in August 2011 (‘What Do Usain Bolt and Juan Manuel Marquez Have in Common?’ read the headline. They Train With the Same Admitted Steroid Dealer’). This was flatly denied by Bolt’s agent, Ricky Simms. ‘I have no idea why Usain’s name was brought up,’ he said. ‘Usain has no connection with any of these people. Nobody from Team Bolt has any connection or knows any of these people.’
‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’ says Conte. His conviction that the Jamaicans are up to no good is unwavering. He says he first became suspicious when he saw the results of the Olympic trials in 2008. ‘First thing that caught my attention: the most decorated Jamaican athlete, Veronica Campbell-Brown, ran 10.88, got fourth and didn’t even make the team. Then those three girls ahead of her got all three medals. I looked up Shelly-Ann Fraser. She ran 11.3 the previous year and I don’t believe it’s possible, based on what I know, to run five metres faster in the course of one year.’
But how can he know that? ‘Look, here’s the comparison I use. Kelli White [100 and 200 metres world champion in 2003] could run 11.19. With all the sophisticated drugs I was giving her, with some of the best coaching in the world – and she was a hyper responder – she went from 11.19 to 10.85 legit and 10.79 wind-aided. I mean, this is a really sophisticated doping programme with excellent coaching. Do I believe it’s possible to make those types of gains in a period of one year without the use of performance-enhancing drugs? I personally don’t believe that’s possible.’
There is one significant difference between White and Fraser-Pryce. White was twenty-three when she ran 11.19 in 2000. She was twenty-six when she made the leap to 10.85: an unusual age at which to suddenly improve – and as we now know, it was drug-fuelled. When Fraser-Pryce made her big improvement, she was twenty-one: an age at which sudden gains are not so unusual, albeit hers was dramatic. Fraser-Pryce explains it by saying that the previous winter was the first she trained seriously, lost weight and added work at Juliet Cuthbert’s gym to the technical training she was doing with Francis and MVP. (And despite Conte’s example of White, it remains difficult to quantify the effect of drugs. Chambers, with ‘the full enchilada’, actually went slower.)29
Conte says that he watched events in Beijing and Berlin in a state of bewildered curiosity, partly because he didn’t see the Jamaicans coming. For almost two decades he had been a fixture on the global athletics circuit: he was trackside as Ben Johnson blasted to the gold medal in Seoul in 1988, and subsequently he became a regular behind-the-scenes fixture at athletics meetings, with his little black bag full of pills and potions. He says that throughout his period at the top of athletics he was not really aware of the Jamaicans, apart from the individuals – such as Raymond Stewart, Merlerie Ottey and Bert Cameron – who emerged from some US college or other.
He had never even heard of – far less met – the coaches behind the Jamaican gold rush. ‘My sources were telling me that what’s so strange about all this is that they were not all that high on Glen Mills as a coach,’ Conte says. ‘They just don’t think he’s all that good as a coach. They think Stephen Francis is a much more scientific and much better coach.’
Conte wasn’t the only sceptic. Immediately after the Berlin world championships, Stephen Francis was also sounding a warning bell. In a remarkable interview with a Jamaican journalist, Kayon Raynor, Francis was spitting nails after his latest falling-out with the JAAA.
It was Beijing all over again: a dispute with the governing body over the pre-competition training camp. Before the championships it was reported that Francis’s athletes – including Asafa Powell and Shelly-Ann Fraser – would be sent home for missing the camp. They eventually ran, won their medals then returned to Jamaica to the news that they could face fines over the training camp fiasco. Francis was livid, particularly, he told Raynor, when he believed the JAAA should be focusing their attention on more important matters.
‘The problem the JAAA have is that they are sitting on top of, in my opinion, a serious drug problem,’ he said. ‘I think that is the problem they should be addressing. They have three athletes, five athletes, who have tested positive for a fairly serious substance which could be covering up bigger substances.’ He was talking about Yohan Blake and the others who tested positive at the national championships. Francis said that by selecting these athletes for Berlin, the Jamaican federation ‘made a fool of themselves’, and then ‘embarrassed the country’ when, on being sanctioned, the athletes were later withdrawn.
Five years later, I am speaking to Francis after a training session at UTech. I mention this interview and ask if he still believes Jamaica is sitting on top of a big drugs problem. ‘I don’t think . . . I don’t see the signs as much now as I saw then. I suspect that for there to be a continual drugs problem you have to have the science to keep up. Anything that you have has maybe a two-year window before they catch up with you and people move on to something else.’
He repeats a familiar refrain, one you hear all the time on the island: that serious doping is a problem in the US, not in Jamaica. Bert Cameron, the 1983 400 metres world champion who now coaches in Jamaica, told me that it has always been an American phenomenon; ‘I am totally against anybody who takes an enhancing substance because of what I went through in the eighties and nineties. People who were not better than me, I see them running faster. But we couldn’t say anything. If we do, we get blacklisted, and can’t go to Europe. Now it’s different, you can speak out now.’
Have things changed? Francis shrugs. ‘I am no longer worried too much about the drugs, because guess what: most of the time someone gets a one-year boost then they have to back off because they’re on the testing list.’
At MVP they are strict about drugs and supplements, insists Francis (though as we shall see, there are limits to how much they can control what athletes do of their own accord). But how, when drugs appear to be so prevalent, does Francis convince his athletes they can reach the top without doping? ‘Because most of them see that the people who they train with, they see how the success comes about, right? The supplements we use here we have been using since 1999. We haven’t had a change, mainly because I can’t trust any other companies to not put stimulants and that kind of stuff in, to give you a buzz. So therefore we take the same thing as all the high schools are taking. So everybody here eventually sees “Oh, it has nothing really to do with what you take.”
‘When Asafa was coming up he used to take nothing,’ Francis continues. ‘You had to fight him to take a little creatine. You had to follow him. The drug-testing form would come in and he’d have nothing on it.’
Francis admits that he does understand the temptation. ‘Let’s face it, if you’re faced with something that you know is going to make you better, and you know the chance of being caught is very small, then you’re probably going to take a chance. But we operate a closed shop. We don’t let anyone in from outside. We don’t go to gyms. We use our little ragged gym here to do our weight training. We are self-contained.’
Many of the more recent cases of doping seem to come about when athletes hook up with freelance ‘gurus’ – budget or low-rent Müller-Wohlfahrts who describe themselves as sports doctors, chiropractors or anti-ageing specialists, and who convince athletes they can help them with legal potions and treatments that often turn out not to be legal after all. Usually it is the athlete who faces the consequences alone, with the ‘guru’ free to carry on their business. Has Francis been approached by such outsiders with offers of help? ‘Oh yeah, I mean, over the years people come to you and say, “Bwoy, I have this thing that can do this . . .” You tell them: “Send me an email.”’
Are these people from Jamaica or overseas? ‘Mostly overseas. You tell them, “Send me an email”, and the email come in and you don’t answer and it more or less stops.’
Victor Conte is convinced that one overseas ‘guru’ who has links to the Jamaican athletes is his old bete noire Angel ‘Memo’ Heredia. He is not the only one who is suspicious. But Heredia is a perplexing, enigmatic figure. He regularly tweets that he is in, or on his way to, Jamaica. I was told that he lives these days in Florida – only a two-hour flight away. In November 2014 he tweeted: ‘Thank you Jamaica!!! Nice training gear’, and attached a picture of a Puma top.
Conte tweeted back: ‘Interesting that Usain Bolt is a Puma athlete.’
Which is exactly the point. Why would Heredia send out tweets like this if he really was working with Bolt? ‘Why tease people, you mean?’ Conte replies. ‘Because he really wants to be associated with the success of Usain Bolt. He wants that credit. That’s the reason.’
That might be the reason – but it doesn’t mean he is working with Bolt. It makes little sense. When he gave his interview to Spiegel, he claimed all the Olympic 100 metres finalists were on drugs. Does that suggest he was working with any of them? One theory is that he began working with Bolt between Beijing and Berlin. But why would the Olympic champion and world record holder – the fastest man in history – decide to hook up with a man intimately involved in the sport’s biggest ever drugs scandal? (Moreover, a man who threw his athletes ‘under the bus’ when he was caught.)
I tried phoning Heredia, then emailed him, and eventually he responded: ‘Congratulations on your upcoming book, can you brief me more about your project? Such as questions, topics, etc. Best regards, Heredia.’ I replied to his email but didn’t hear back. I tried calling again – he appeared to be in Puerto Rico.
Conte is desperate to expose Heredia, partly because they are rivals once more, in boxing now, partly because he thinks he’s up to no good – mostly, I suspect, because he despises him. Interestingly, they have never met. ‘People wonder why I’m out there doing this,’ he says of his public feud with Heredia. ‘It’s because I’m trying to put a spodight on the cockroaches so they gotta go back into hiding.’
Conte has little faith in the anti-doping agencies, including WADA, though he does concede that the game has changed. He echoes what Francis says, that testing has improved. It has become more difficult to dope; it requires more sophistication (which doesn’t mean doping has been eliminated; it hasn’t). He doesn’t think there are new, undetectable steroids, like ‘the Clear’. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m convinced there isn’t. Lemme tell you the reason why. All anabolic molecules, steroids and other molecules, have a very similar, what they call mass spectrogram fragmentation pattern. These sit on a graph like mountain tops going up, so they know where these peaks are in the graph.
‘Therefore – and I’ll explain exactly why I say this – if you have these peaks that are in a certain range as testosterone – and every single anabolic steroid is similar in structure to testosterone – well, it triggers an alert to go back and look closer at this sample.’
Under anti-doping rules introduced post-Balco, the labs no longer have to know what a substance is – all they have to show is that it is similar to testosterone, i.e. that it is an anabolic steroid. ‘That sucked out the designers; it shut it down,’ says Conte.
But there are still major loopholes, he says, such as the rule that says an athlete’s ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone (its ‘mirror’) must be no higher than 4:1. ‘A piece of cake to beat,’ Conte claims. ‘You get these fast-acting gels and creams and if you take this stuff after the tester has come, in a matter of hours you’re back down below the 4:1 ratio.’ Under the ‘whereabouts’ programme, whereby athletes nominate a one-hour daily window to be tested, they can be confident they will not be tested for another twenty-four hours, at least. ‘So these guys can use testosterone on a daily basis and beat the test,’ says Conte.
But not necessarily. Not with a more advanced (and costly) method – the carbon isotope ratio (CIR) test. ‘We know, for example, that Lance Armstrong was using testosterone during the Tour de France,’ Conte says. ‘They’d have busted his ass if they’d used the carbon isotope test. But in all his career they never tested his urine using the CIR method. Why?’
Conte wants the samples collected in Beijing and Berlin tested using this method. The samples can be kept for up to ten years, then tested using the latest technology – so the IAAF and IOC have until 2018 and 2019. There seems to be no will to test before then, though Conte has tried. ‘I gave Dick Pound lots of information about who I thought was using performance-enhancing drugs and who their coaches were. He presented this to WADA and specifically asked them to test the samples from the Olympic Games in 2008 and the world championships in 2009 and they absolutely refused to use carbon isotope ratio testing for synthetic testosterone on those samples. They didn’t want anything to do with that.’
I checked this with Pound, the former WADA president, and he clarified and corrected Conte’s claim in an email: ‘The samples at the Olympic Games are “owned” by the IOC and the IAAF and they are the only organisations that can retest. WADA has no rights to retest such samples. I have no specific recollection of speaking to [WADA director] David Howman on that matter, but I expect that if I had, that is what he would have reminded me.’
Pound did add, though, that, ‘WADA had tried to get more testing done on the samples from Athens, but the IOC refused to do so.’
Conte doesn’t believe the samples will ever be tested. ‘Because if they go back and do the tests, what does this do to the credibility of the Olympic Games? It would make everybody question everything. It would be bad for business.’ But there is conflicting evidence for this. Appearing to support Conte’s argument, a WADA-commissioned survey of athletes at the 2011 world championships claimed, staggeringly, that 29 per cent admitted doping in the past year. The findings were never published but were leaked in 2013 to the New York Times by three of the researchers, who said that when they presented their results to WADA, they were told that the IAAF would need to review the final draft. Nick Davies, the IAAF spokesman, told the paper that the study ‘was not complete for publication’ and was ‘based only on a social science protocol, a kind of vox pop of athletes’ opinions’. However, he ‘indicated blood tests from the world championship [in August 2013] in Moscow would be combined with the previous research to produce what the IAAF believed would be a more comprehensive study’.30
But Conte’s claim that the authorities will never do retrospective testing is not quite accurate: in 2013, the IAAF announced that after testing 100 samples from the Paris world championships in 2003, five medallists had been caught. ‘We have an eight-year statute of limitations on anti-doping, so seven years past the event is really when you want to test, using the most up-to-date equipment,’ Davies told the BBC. ‘The message we’re trying to give out is: “Don’t even think about it, because even six or seven years down the road, something you think you got away with you won’t.”’ In the new WADA code, introduced in 2015, the statute of limitations has been increased to ten years.
The anti-doping fight has been stepped up considerably since Conte was up to his tricks with Jones, Montgomery and the rest. . Back then it was easy to beat the system, mainly because there wasn’t really a system. WADA was only established in 1999, and it was a couple more years before it became operational; the national agencies followed.
Now, for the top athletes at least, there is the ‘whereabouts’ programme of out-of-competition testing – if not by the athlete’s own national anti-doping agency then by the international governing body. ‘Well, even that’s possible to circumvent,’ Conte says. ‘Here’s the big loophole. You’re allowed two missed tests in any eighteen-month period, right?’ Three missed tests constitutes an anti-doping offence. ‘So, for whereabouts, you say you’ll be at training centre X, then go instead to training centre Y They miss you: strike one.’
True, though the testers could return the next day, and the day after that, and if they miss you each time, that’s three strikes, which means a doping offence. Conte counters that the athlete could have used the fast-acting, quick-clearing testosterone cream on day one, and have no concerns.
State-sponsored doping? Conte’s allegation is extraordinary, but the fact of what he alleges is not, of course, unprecedented. The programmes in East Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s are well known, but there must be other countries in which sporting authorities covered up positives, or turned a blind eye, or actively helped their athletes to pass tests. The USA stand accused of doing exactly that before the 1984 Olympic Games.
What does ‘sponsored’ mean, exactly? I am not too sure. It’s not quite state-organised, or state-sanctioned. But it suggests something more than turning a blind eye.
In Jamaica, the national anti-doping agency, JADCO, did find positive tests almost from the moment they came into being in 2008. There was a steady stream, in fact, mainly for relatively minor offences, including Yohan Blake and the others in 2009. Then, at the 2011 national championships, they caught Steve Mullings for a second time, which meant a life ban.
Mullings had been a Champs star – a contemporary of Asafa Powell but considerably better as a teenager – who lived and trained in the US with Tyson Gay and his coach, Lance Brauman. He was a member of the Jamaican team at the world championships in Berlin, part of the quartet that, with Bolt, Powell and Michael Frater, won gold in the 4x100 metres relay. He then struggled with injuries but in 2011 made a dramatic improvement, running 9.80 seconds in Eugene, Oregon, in early June. Previously his best was 10.03, but in 2011 he beat 10 seconds on no fewer than seven occasions. He was twenty-eight.
At the Jamaican national championships a few weeks after his 9.80-run in Eugene, he tested positive for furosemide, a diuretic suspected of being used as a masking agent. It was his second positive, after failing a test for testosterone in 2004 – also at the Jamaican national championships. News of his latest positive broke just days before the 2011 world championships in Daegu.
I spoke to Mullings thinking that, with nothing to lose, he would offer some insight into the world of athletics and doping. But he is more interested in clearing his name and remains furious with JADCO, who, he says, made a number of mistakes in his case, and showed a reluctance – suspicious, he claims – to allow him to submit to a DNA test. Despite all the apparent evidence against him, and the suspicion generated by his sudden improvement in 2011, Mullings could actually have a point, certainly in the case of his first positive test in 2004. On that occasion, he was tested twice, after the 100 and the 200 metres: only the 100 metres sample came back positive.
Another of Mullings’s gripes is his claim that by 2011, a new orthodoxy existed in Jamaica. He says that US-based athletes, once the golden boys and girls, were now discriminated against. ‘It’s now not Jamaica versus the world; it’s Jamaican athletes who train in Jamaica against those who train in the US,’ he tells me. ‘It wasn’t a surprise to me when I tested positive. I had a feeling they were going to get me; I told Nickel Ashmeade [his Jamaican training partner] that.’ He adds that there was resentment when he took a Jamaican-based athlete’s place in the national team for major championships. ‘The 200 metres was OK, but in 2011, when I got one of the spots in the 100 metres, they didn’t want me taking that.’
When he was positive a second time, he says he had been tested in the US numerous times, including after his 9.80 run in Eugene. ‘Why would I wait till I go to Jamaica to take some drug-blocker? You telling me the US [drug-testing] system isn’t good, but the Jamaican system is the best?’
Mullings maintains he was clean and that he avoided drugs. ‘I wanted to go to the Trevor Graham group and people said, “Man, they all take drugs over there.” You go to the Brauman group and the only thing Coach Brauman recommends is coaching, protein and amino acids. That’s it. I never had drugs around me, never, ever.’ He says he was careful with supplements, sticking to ‘vitamins’. ‘The IAAF makes it clear you’re responsible for what’s in your body, so you have to have supplements tested.’
Besides, he says, drugs don’t make you faster; it’s all about recovery. ‘Some athletes recover like they’re superhuman. Everyone wants to recover; they want to have doctors who know what they’re doing, who give you legal stuff to help you recover.’
His training partner and friend Tyson Gay told him: ‘When you run a 9-second 100 metres or 19-second 200 metres your body is gonna be ripped up. I don’t know how these people recover.’
It’s true,’ Mullings continues. ‘When I ran 9.80, my body was ripped up. I remember when Tyson ran 19.5, we were in New York, and he fell off the chair. In 2009, in a restaurant, he falls off the chair because he was so ripped up. But I’ve seen people run these times and walk away like nothing happened.’
When he tested positive a second time, Mullings says he was offered a deal by the Jamaica Athletic Administrative Association. ‘They had a doctor contact me wanting me to confess. They said they could give me six months if I confessed. But how could I confess to something I didn’t do?’
Instead, having taken a lie detector test (which he passed) and requested a DNA test, he appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. ‘No guilty man asks for a DNA test,’ he says. ‘Jamaica took six weeks to give them the paperwork, then wrote them a letter saying I shouldn’t get a DNA test because no one else has had one, and if everyone asks for one, we can’t afford it.’
Mullings is convinced dark forces were out to get him, ‘to get me off the team’ for Daegu so that his place could be filled by a Jamaica-based athlete instead. Ultimately, he says, ‘I wasn’t big enough. If you don’t have money, you don’t get no justice.’
So if he was set up, by whom? ‘I don’t really want to call anyone’s name out,’ he says. ‘They know themselves. For my hearing, they said, “You have to come to Jamaica.” I know Jamaica; people will tell you about Jamaica. If people want to get rid of you fast they give you a ticket to Jamaica. I feared for my life, but I went there. Then it took them ten minutes to give me a lifetime ban.’
I also wanted to speak to Raymond Stewart. His lifetime ban was based on Heredia’s testimony, and money transfers that Heredia said were for steroids and EPO.
In the USADA arbitration hearing against Stewart, it was claimed that he acquired drugs for his wife, Beverly McDonald – a fellow Jamaican, also an athlete – and that he sent her to be blood-tested by Heredia in Mexico prior to the 2004 Olympic trials. McDonald was a member of the Jamaican 4x100 metres relay teams that won silver in Sydney in 2000 and a memorable gold in Athens in 2004; she was also a bronze medallist in the individual 200 metres in Sydney.
Stewart lives in Texas and works for a life assurance company. He doesn’t return to Jamaica often. ‘When I go I might go to the north coast [the opposite side to Kingston], in and out. My mum is still there, my dad passed away a while back, and I have one brother still there.’
But more than his doping ban, I wanted to speak to Stewart about the young coach who recruited him in the 1970s: Glen Mills. Stewart recalls interest from other schools -Jamaica College, Calabar. ‘But I wasn’t into all-boys stuff.’ He also wanted a couple of friends to go with him, and Mills was willing to accommodate them.
Stewart says that Mills was ‘more like a mentor, a dad’. He would only have been in his mid-thirties at the time, but as Stewart says, father figures were in short supply. ‘You notice in Jamaica there are not too many kids around with a dad that can guide them on the right track. I have to admit I learned a lot from Mills discipline-wise. It helped when I left Camperdown and moved over to the States here. He was good at teaching me not to get too distracted; to take advantage of my scholarship and not waste it.’
Mills was not, says Stewart, a great technician – at least not when he worked with him. Before he went to Camperdown, Stewart worked with another coach who ‘had me doing high knees, high knees, high knees, every day. I said, “Hey, man, when am I going to actually run?” It was all technique. That played a big role in how I ended up as a sprinter.’ At Camperdown, ‘Mills polished what I already had.’
Perhaps Mills also learned from Stewart, who was clearly a phenomenal talent. After Stewart left school and went to college in the US, their paths kept crossing when Stewart was selected for the national team. ‘Mills was always travelling with the national team – he was one of the coaches on every national team I was on.’ Stewart bursts out laughing. ‘In Jamaica, nothing changes; every championship they think those are the only guys who can get the job done.’
You get the impression, talking to Stewart, that his respect for Mills is limited. When I ask him if he is surprised at what his old coach has achieved, that seems to be an overstatement. ‘His success comes through not just Bolt, right,’ Stewart says. ‘If I hadn’t come through track and field back then, there wouldn’t be no Glen Mills.
‘One of the reasons for him to be where he’s at right now, it’s my name that kept him floating. He will not admit that to a lot of people.’ Not that Stewart bears a grudge. He says he and Mills are no longer in contact, but if he spoke to him now he’d say: ‘Hey, great job, big respect to you and all that stuff.’
Stewart continues: ‘He’s at the point right now where he’s got the fastest man in the world and he’s producing a few behind him as well, so he’s learned the game. He can actually keep continuing to repeat.’ Like a production line at a factory? ‘Right. That’s what they used to call Camperdown: the sprint factory.’
On the case against him, Stewart can talk and talk. He feels he was stitched up by the US authorities, that it was political, anti-Jamaican (‘They tend to go after foreigners; their own people got a slap on the wrist’) and that in any case, the charges against him were false. ‘I don’t care about track and field any more. It has nothing to offer me, not a damn thing. Those guys can kiss my ass. I’m outta here.’ Even if the accusations were true, Stewart says he was harshly treated. ‘They paint you as if you blew up the Twin Towers!’
Then there’s Heredia, his former friend. ‘Man, that kid . . . that guy lies so much people just don’t understand.’ He can’t believe that it was Heredia’s testimony that led to his punishment. ‘They take the guy who is a drug dealer, make him make phone calls, set people up on the phone.’ Stewart claims – improbably, I feel – that when he was recorded asking Heredia questions about drugs, he was simply curious.
‘If a guy is picking your brains, asking you questions, is there a crime to that? Does it mean I’m going to do what you tell me to do?’
Stewart is, far from stupid (‘Some people want to achieve something in life, and others think they want it’ is one of several profound observations), and his perspective on the current state of Jamaican athletics is fascinating. He has watched from afar as they have risen to the top by staying at home – something that was never an option for him, because he wanted to gain an education, to earn money and have ‘a better life’.
‘We were drinking water out of a little pond,’ he says. ‘Now they have companies going in there – companies are going down, sponsoring athletes. Nutrition companies. These guys have nutrition – we didn’t even know where the next meal was coming from.’
There are dearly advantages to the new orthodoxy. It has worked spectacularly for Bolt, Fraser-Pryce, Blake, Powell and others. But it isn’t all milk and honey. Stewart thinks there are dangers in the new system, where every kid thinks they can be Bolt or Blake when, clearly, they can’t. ‘A lot of kids who are there can come here [to the US] and further their education and still perform on the track, but the coaches in Jamaica are telling them, “Don’t go, stay home.” But if they don’t do anything within another two, three years their career goes sour; they go to the countryside where no one talks about them, you know what I mean?’ .
The coaches are to blame, he says. Not Mills and Stephen Francis, but those who aspire to be Mills or Francis. ‘They figure, “OK, I’ve got a superstar, I can become the next Glen Mills coaching this guy.” The kid is brainwashed and the coach doesn’t think about what’s best for the kid.
‘They don’t let him go and do something for himself, you know what I mean? That’s the problem plaguing Jamaica now.’
29 In 2013, a paper by Aaron Herman and Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide titled ‘The Doping Myth: 100m sprint results are not improved by doping’ was published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. After studying performances by top sprinters from 1980-2011, including known doped ones, they found that ‘No significant differences . . . between dopers and non-dopers were found in their average results,’ and concluded that either ‘(1) “Doping” as used by athletes so detected does not improve results, or (2) “doping” is widespread and only sometimes detected. Since there was no improvement in overall results during the last quarter of the century, the first conclusion is more likely.’ Victor Conte and others might argue nevertheless that (2) is more likely.
30 When I asked the IAAF about this, I was told; ‘The IAAF is working on another prevalence study based on the analytical data collected at the IAAF World Champs in Daegu 2011 and in Moscow 2013. The IAAF is the only sports federation to have conducted such a prevalence study.’