Everybody’s against drugs, in every country, until one
of their heroes tests positive.
Paul Wright
‘I put it this way,’ Paul Wright tells me. ‘In the medical profession you have doctors who sign sick leave for people who are not sick. You have bad doctors. And lawyers. And journalists! You have people who take money from housing sales and don’t turn it over. You have people who murder children. You have people who behead women.
‘But in athletics,’ he adds, ‘no bad people in athletics. Everybody in athletics is related to Pope Francis!’
Just as people asked questions about the Jamaican athletes in Beijing and Berlin, so questions were asked about the competence of the Jamaican sports authorities, the athletics federation and, in particular, the national anti-doping agency.
The Jamaican anti-doping agency? It conjured up images of a hut on a beach with the testers lying in hammocks smoking ganja, saying, ‘Yeah, man.’ A patronising stereotype? Of course. But it was reinforced by Victor Conte, who told me of one story that reached him. ‘I heard that Herb Elliott, the guy in charge of Jamaican anti-doping, was in Beijing chest-bumping the Jamaican athletes in the mixed zone!’ So not just too laid-back, as the stereotype has it, but too close, too chummy, to the athletes, and in a country that is no stranger to corruption. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
In fact, when the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission JADCO) was set up in 2008, the island did have one person who had been at the vanguard of drug-testing in sport.
Dr Paul Wright’s interest in the subject went all the way back to the 1970s. But the sport was different then, and so were the drugs. As a student at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Wright was a footballer, a goalkeeper. He finished his medical studies at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and on returning to Jamaica in 1976 was asked by his old coach to go with the national youth team to a tournament in Puerto Rico. They needed a doctor, so off went Wright, fresh out of medical school and not even fully qualified yet, as the official team physician.
These days Wright is a large, white-bearded, avuncular fellow who, in his cluttered office at the Nuttall Hospital in central Kingston, keeps half an eye on the small TV sitting on top of a filing cabinet, showing a football match involving Chelsea. His desk is covered in papers and other surfaces with trophies – he owns two racehorses. The phone rings incessantly – each time it’s the media seeking comment on the cases involving Asafa Powell, Sherone Simpson and Veronica Campbell-Brown. Wright refuses each request. Yet he seems happy to sit chatting to me about the same subject.
‘Where were we?’ he says, returning his phone to the desk after the latest call. The late 1970s, I say – Puerto Rico. ‘Yes! So I went as team physician – and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about sports medicine.’
It was a subject that interested him, so he did some research, discovering ‘a thing called the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Sports Medicine. And that’s what I always wanted to do -orthopaedics.’ He got in touch with this organisation and was invited to Virginia to a conference, where he learned that there was also an American College of Sports Medicine. ‘So I promptly joined. They had courses, team physician courses, the works. So I did those things. As I did more and more, I realised, um, there’s drugs here.’
With his growing experience – including a , two-month stint studying sports medicine at Leipzig University in East Germany -Wright became the doctor to the Jamaican national football team. The Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) then made him vice president of their medical committee. He also chaired the medical committee of the Caribbean Football Union. ‘And there was no drug testing going on,’ he says.
He felt that a few of the players were using drugs. Not performance-enhancing ones, but the drug that is as common as coffee in Jamaica: marijuana, or ganja. In other words, it wasn’t performance-enhancing drugs that concerned Wright, but performance-inhibiting ones.
He contacted a company in the States that manufactured a kit that screened for three substances: amphetamines, cocaine and marijuana. Just a drop of urine would tell you if they were positive,’ Wright says. ‘I bought a set of kits with my own money and told them I was going to start this programme of drug-testing.’ There was only one laboratory in Kingston equipped to test the urine: the police forensic lab. ‘I told them I had absolutely no money. They said they couldn’t do it for free, would I get sponsorship?’
Wright approached Carreras, the cigarette company who backed Dennis Johnson’s athletics roadshow, and they said yes. Now Wright was up and running: a one-man WADA. It was the early 1980s, when the concept of drugs in sport was a vague, barely acknowledged scourge. Next, the Caribbean Football Union asked him to test all the islands’ teams.
But as Wright says, his concern wasn’t cheating. He was more worried about the ‘corner culture’ that existed in Jamaica. He explains: ‘In a community, the group would gather under a streetlight. And the kingpins were people that sell drugs, the murderers, the hit men and so on. And the kids would be drawn to these things, because these are really big guys. In those days the club football was communities versus communities. I believed that if I could get the community to have an interest in the young men who play for the team, not to use cocaine and marijuana, I would be winning a . . . a bigger picture: keeping the drugs out of the hands of the vulnerable kids, the marginalised kids in the community.’
One Sunday morning, Wright ‘packed my little case and drove to Alligator Pond, out in Manchester’ – a fishing village on the southwestern coast of the island, where the Jamaican football team were training. He told the manager he was there to drug-test the whole team. The manager was ‘uncomfortable’ with this, ‘but I stood my ground’, says Wright, ‘because I was in charge of the medical committee. So I tested the whole team and six people failed the test.’ There wasn’t a punishment, as such. For a first offence the player had to register in an anti-drug programme. A second offence meant they had to actually join the programme. ‘But the third time,’ says Wright, ‘you were gone.’
This was the agreed protocol. But there was a problem: a severe backlog at the forensic lab in Kingston. It meant a six-month delay in confirming those six positives, by which time the football team was at a training camp in Brazil. This is where it got complicated, because the powers-that-be, a sponsor in particular, didn’t want six of the players pulling out of the camp to check into drug rehab. Again Wright tried to stand his ground, but this time he met his match. ‘I was fired publicly on television,’ he says. The tests were ridiculed. ‘They said, “These people have never used drugs in their life!”’ Excuses included that ‘One of them had drunk ganja tea which his grandmother gave him because he had fever.’ Following Wright’s dismissal, it was announced that a new drug-testing programme would start in two weeks, ‘It never restarted and they had no intention of doing that,’ he says.
He turned his attention to racehorses. Or rather the jockeys. Again he was looking for the holy herb, marijuana. ‘I selected them randomly. Same rules: fail one test, you register; fail two, you join the programme; fail three times, you’re out.
‘The number one and number two jockeys tested positive.’ Wright rolls his eyes. It was déjà vu. ‘Big uproar! They have never used drugs in their life; I am the wickedest person that has ever lived; I must have done something to the urine; they don’t know what I did to the urine when they leave it with me . . . and I was fired, boom!’
That wasn’t the end of Wright’s interest or involvement in sport. He is a Wolmer’s old boy (like Stephen Francis) and has always helped out with the school’s sports teams, including the athletics team. Unusually for a drug-tester, his is a prominent voice in Jamaican sport: he writes a regular column for Sport Globe, a weekly paper. It was here, after Champs, that he criticised Calabar for allowing Javon Francis to run the 200 metres a couple of hours after his record-breaking 400 metres. His verdict? ‘Child abuse!’
Wright has also worked at the highest level, acting as doctor to Jamaican athletics teams in international competition. In 1998 he was doctor to the Americas team at the IAAF World Cup – an intercontinental championships now known as the IAAF Continental Cup – in Johannesburg, South Africa. The experience gave him a revealing insight into the mindset of the elite athlete – or at least some of them.
Looking after the Americas team was a big responsibility, though it did not include the USA, who had their own team. ‘I said I would be doctor on one condition – that the team has to go to similar elevation for three weeks before the games,’ Wright says. Johannesburg is at 5.700-feet altitude. ‘They never heard of this, but they agreed. So we went.’ They stayed in a ‘kind of safari place’ for three weeks, during which time one of the Canadian athletes strained his hamstring. A replacement was called up: Obadele Thompson, the 100 and 200 metres specialist from Barbados. But when Thompson got there, he was exhausted. He had travelled to South Africa straight from Moscow, where he finished second in the IAAF Grand Prix final in 10.11 seconds. Wright met him at the airport on the Wednesday evening and could see how tired he was, which was a problem. His race was just forty-eight hours later. ‘He was dead,’ says Wright, ‘so at dinner, everyone’s there, and I say, “When you go upstairs, take this, right?” and I gave him a blue tablet.
‘Next morning he comes down the stairs, I’m at the back of the line for breakfast. He says, “Dr Wright!” and jumps on my back. “What is wrong with you?” I say.
‘“What did you do?” he says. “I have never felt this good in my life! Doc, I cannot wait to race!”’
When it came to the 100 metres, Thompson ran 9.87 seconds, a personal best, to win. Wright was in his hotel room that night. There was a knock at the door and he opened it to another athlete. ‘Doctor, could I have a blue pill, please?’ That was only the start. ‘Everybody’s coming for a blue pill!’ Wright says. ‘These people believed I drugged the guy – they thought I was doping him!’
What was the pill, then? ‘Halcion,’ says Wright. ‘He needed to sleep. That is all this guy needed. I gave him two five-milligram halcion pills. He slept the whole night and he was a new man.’ Halcion contains benzodiazepines, also found in valium. It’s a relaxant and sedative with no performance-enhancing effects (if anything, the opposite).
‘I tell people the best aphrodisiac in life is sleep, you know?’ says Wright. Some remained convinced, however, that he had doped Thompson. Particularly, Wright adds, because ‘Obadele never ran that fast again.’31
A year later, the Jamaican team was rocked on the eve of the world athletics championships in Seville when Merlene Ottey, thirty-nine years old but hoping to compete in her sixth Olympic Games in Sydney, tested positive for nandrolone after a meeting in Lucerne. Ottey was one of a spate of positives for this steroid at the time, along with fellow sprinters Linford Christie, Dennis Mitchell, Javier Sotomayor of Cuba and European 200 metres champion Dougie Walker, as well as dozens of footballers and tennis players. Ottey was outraged. ‘I have lived my personal and athletic life with the utmost honesty and integrity,’ she said. She denied ever using a banned substance.
Jamaica leapt to her defence. Herb Elliott, the chest-bumping doctor in Beijing who would later be at the helm of JADCO, described it as ‘a travesty of justice’. Elliott’s main gripe was that Ottey’s name had been made public before her B sample had been tested. But he seemed in no doubt as to her innocence. ‘This is a shock for all of us,’ he said. ‘I have known her since she was seven. I have never known her to be on any substance.’
Reading press reports from this time, it seemed that there was only one prominent Jamaican who was prepared to believe the worst. ‘We’ve always held Merlene as an icon, a drug-free track queen,’ said Dr Paul Wright. ‘Now that’s all crumbled to dust.’32
*
Before the 2008 Olympic Games, there was an ultimatum from the World Anti-Doping Agency. Jamaica was a signatory to the WADA code, introduced in 2004, but had done little to implement it. ‘WADA told them, “If you don’t implement the thing, nobody is going to the Olympics”,’ Wright recalls. ‘So within two weeks the law was drafted and pushed through parliament. One parliamentarian, Ronald Thwaites, got up and said, “How am I asked today to write something into law that I haven’t read? This is crazy!” The prime minister gets up and says, “We know what’s good for you – sign it, because we’re going to the Olympics.”’
JADCO came into existence later that year.33 They needed people with experience in drug-testing, and there was one obvious candidate: Dr Paul Wright. Despite having been fired twice from previous drugtesting roles, he was, like the ‘eight or nine’ other testers, employed on a freelance basis, paid a modest day rate (around £55, he says) to conduct tests on behalf of JADCO.
Among the new organisation’s responsibilities was to run a ‘whereabouts’ programme. This meant that athletes had to nominate a daily one-hour window when they would be available for testing. They had to submit this information three months in advance, though changes were allowed if the athlete informed the agency. A lot of athletes nominate their home as the place and early in the morning as the time. Wright says that he tended to turn up early. ‘If the athlete said 7-8 a.m. and I turned up at 5.30, it created panic. I thought, This is very suspicious. They would refuse to pass urine until seven o’clock.’
I am not sure that it is necessarily suspicious to react with alarm if somebody appears at your home at 5.30 a.m. But Wright says it would be the same in the evening: he thought one or two athletes’ panic was due to the fact that he appeared at all. ‘Sometimes they would switch to nine o’clock at night and I would turn up. One athlete couldn’t believe that I would really come at nine o’clock at night. I said, “But you put nine on the programme.” “Yes, but I never knew you would really come!”’ Wright shakes his head. ‘They would be extremely angry if I came, even though I would point out to them that “You said that this is the time I could come.”
‘So I was an outcast, really. They just didn’t like me.’
Wright says he tried hard in his testing role with JADCO, at least initially, not to create an ‘us and them’ mentality. He didn’t want to be seen by the athletes as the enemy – and besides, why on earth would he be? Surely a clean athlete would regard him as a friend. In a spirit of solidarity, he tried to help with advice. When he turned up to test some of the MVP athletes, he noticed that during training, their drinking bottles, each with the athlete’s name on it, would be left on a shelf out of sight of the athletes and coaches. ‘You can’t leave these unattended,’ he told the club, ‘because these are the biggest sprinters in the world, and there are people can watch them train. What if it suits somebody to come and put something in the bottle?’
Wright was enterprising and came up with a novel solution for testing for EPO. To do that, he had to send the urine overseas, to a lab with testing equipment for the blood-boosting drug, but the problem came with storing the urine at a cold enough temperature. ‘I would take the urine to the local ice cream factory, pack it in dry ice and ship it to the lab,’ he says. ‘I found ways to do these things.’
Another hurdle he had to overcome was an unexpected one – at least to me. One of WADA’s rules is that the tester must observe the athlete giving the sample: in other words, watch him pee (for obvious reasons, female testers collect samples from female athletes). This is to prevent any sabotage or swapping of samples – it is not unknown for athletes to have bulbs or condoms of ‘clean’ urine hidden on (or even in) their person. (An apocryphal tale has a Belgian cyclist being informed that he hadn’t tested positive but that his sample indicated he was pregnant. He had used his wife’s urine.)
‘Some people thought I was helping but the athletes got the impression that, number one, I was a pervert,’ says Wright. ‘That I just wanted to look at men’s penises, that was my biggest aim in life, I got a sexual kick out of that.’
Really? ‘Yeah! I was a batty man, I was a pervert. They would say all these things but it don’t bother me.’
Homophobia in Jamaica seems deeply ingrained, though I was told that virulent anti-gay attitudes are a fairly recent phenomenon. Dancehall music, which exploded in the early 1990s, has contributed to it. ‘It’s like boom bye bye/Inna batty boy head,’ sang Buju Banton, urging that gay men be shot in the head. Casual homophobia can be found in mainstream media too. In a 2006 Jamaica Observer article about a male prostitute, the (female) reporter asserted: ‘We are led to believe that people are born with gay tendencies . . . the subject will continue to aggravate many heterosexuals who think that it is downright nasty. And to be labelled as a “b . . . [batty] man” while in the wrong crowd may almost certainly lead to death.’
There are various theories about the roots of such attitudes, from the hold of religion to perceptions of masculinity. But any attempts to deconstruct homophobia would not have got Dr Wright very far with athletes reluctant to pee in front of him. ‘They say that when they’re tested abroad they turn their back and the guy doesn’t stay and watch them pee,’ Wright says. ‘I say, “No, no, no, no. I have to see where that urine comes from.”
‘And they say, “Boss, you must be a pervert. All those children that you say are yours, they really yours?”’
How does he respond to that? ‘I laugh. I laugh, because in Jamaica if you get upset it’s because it’s true.’
Although he encountered some obstacles, Wright does not subscribe to the view that the only explanation can be that Jamaica’s athletes are all part of a sophisticated, systematic doping programme. He is neither a cynic nor a conspiracy theorist. But that doesn’t mean he assumes they are all clean. That would be foolish, he says, as he reels off his list of doctors, lawyers and, yes, journalists, who give their colleagues a bad name. Whereas ‘everyone in athletics is related to Pope Francis!’ ‘You got to be kidding me,’ he adds.
Wright recognises the responsibility of Jamaicans themselves to have an anti-doping programme that the rest of the world believes in and trusts. ‘Dick Pound [the former WADA president] has said, publicly, that we make sure that when our athletes leave Jamaica they are drug-free.’ In other words, Pound has alleged that the athletes are screened before they leave the island, to ensure they pass drugs tests when they compete abroad. ‘He has said it,’ Wright continues. ‘And the chairman of JADCO, Herb Elliott, called him a racist. And I wrote to him, I said, “You can’t call the man a racist, because we’re not doing the job, Herb.” If we don’t do the job, these people are going to say these things. All we have to do is do the job. Do the job. We have to have people who understand drug testing and who cannot be bought and don’t worry about doing this for Jamaica – you’re not doing it for Jamaica, you’re doing it for track and field.’
A claim that has often been made is that if a big-name athlete tested positive in Jamaica, they would be ostracised, banished from the island. Glen Mills said as much in 2008. He stated that Jamaicans were proud of their clean record: ‘It is something that we guard dearly, and it is something that [if an athlete tested positive] the country would turn on you. They would turn on you so strong. It’s something they would never forgive. And athletes are aware of that and try to walk the tightrope.’
Does this claim stand up to scrutiny? I am not sure. When Yohan Blake and the other four athletes tested positive at the national championships, the athletes were not ostracised.
Wright dismisses the idea that Jamaica would turn on a drugs cheat with a wave of his hand. He knows that in the event of a positive test, the anger is often directed not at the athlete, but at the testers. There can be a sinister dimension to this, he claims ‘People test positive, right? Big people test positive. The phone rings. “I am such and such” – a big person – “how can we help?”’
Wright’s response: ‘We? We?! You’re on your own, boss.’
He continues: ‘I knew that the moment a prominent athlete tests positive – they coming for me. They’re not coming for the athlete.’
He has first-hand experience of this? ‘Yeah, twice.’ The parallels with his experiences with football and horse racing are uncanny. Wearily he trots out the old lines: ‘I was the one who put something in the urine; I was the one who did all these things; I was the one who gave them the drugs.’
In his years as a drug-tester Wright says he has received threatening phone calls, and worse. On one occasion he returned home, entered the living room, turned on the light switch – and nothing happened. ‘They broke into my house and stole one light bulb. One light bulb.’ It’s a popular tactic of intimidation, he says. ‘I got the message. I got the message.’
It isn’t that people are against drug-testing, he adds. On the contrary: everybody with a stake in sport – fans, media, politicians, athletes, coaches – is anti-drugs and firmly in favour of robust testing. It isn’t testing that people object to. It’s positive tests. This is not unique to Jamaica.
As Wright puts it, ‘Everybody’s against drugs, in every country, until one of their heroes tests positive.’
31 Obadele Thompson later married Marion Jones.
32 Ottey was initially cleared of a doping offence by the JAAA, though the IAAF appealed that decision. Eventually she was exonerated. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the retesting of her sample was not completed in time.
33 Not only did Jamaica not have its own agency, it had also opted out of the WADA-approved Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organisation (RADO). RADO’s head, ‘Dr Adrian Lorde of Barbados, when asked if testing was sufficient in Jamaica, said: 1 don’t get that impression. I would like to think they do that testing there but I really don’t know . . . We really don’t know what is going on in Jamaica.’