Unfortunately, the desire to achieve results sometimes prompts athletes into taking shortcuts. In other words, they cheat.
Even as a kid, I knew that was wrong. When I was ten years old, as part of physical education in school, we would periodically do what was called a cross-country run across the fields of our school and around the park. We probably covered a distance of about 800 metres, but at the time it seemed like a long way to me. It probably seemed even longer because I was never able to come in first. Although I’d start out in first place, two of the kids in my class would always turn around before they reached the specified turnaround point. The other kids didn’t care if they were cheating, but I did because I wanted to win. I’d run faster to try to catch them, but the advantage they’d gained by cheating always proved too great to overcome.
That was one of my first experiences with people cheating, and the whole idea that the competition wasn’t fair bothered me. It never once entered my mind to turn around early like they did in order to even out the competition. I just had been taught by my parents to do the right thing.
My parents reinforced the message I’d gotten early on about cheating when I was 14 years old. They had always been very strict when it came to education, and would come down hard on me if I didn’t do well. I did okay in school, but not great. I knew how to do the work and I was certainly capable of doing the work. Somehow, however, I just didn’t consistently get it done – at least not on time. Once, when I got a pretty bad grade as a result, I tried to alter it. My sister, who was seven years older than me, discovered that I had changed the grade and made me tell my parents what I had done.
I was scared to death of what my father would do, since he routinely punished my siblings and me with whippings after a stern talking-to about why what we had done was wrong. My father was a very tough man and very tough on me, but he rarely showed his anger. In fact I can’t remember him ever showing anger. He just wanted to make sure we learned our lesson. But when I told him that I had changed my grade, he simply told me that he was very disappointed in me and said a few things about trust. That was it.
My father is a very smart man and knew exactly the effect this approach would have on me. I never tried to cheat at anything again. I would find out the hard way, however, that too many athletes, even at the Olympic level, don’t share that level of ethics.
When Antonio Pettigrew burst on to the athletics scene at the US championships in 1989 as an unknown 400-metre runner, he won the event in an impressive 44.27 seconds. Antonio had attended a small college not known for athletics, so his performance was a shock to everyone. Two years later at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo he became world champion at 400 metres and I became world champion at 200 metres. We would compete against one another many times over the next ten years.
In Tokyo, Antonio anchored the US 4 x 400m relay and, with a lead when he received the baton, it could be safely assumed that the world champion would not be caught. That was exactly what the US coach, Tom Tellez, assumed at the time he decided not to include me on the 4 x 400m relay team, even though I was ranked number one in the world. Kriss Akabusi of Great Britain, however, caught Antonio at the line. That remains the last time the US finished anything but first in a 4 x 400m relay at a major championship.
Antonio suffered major embarrassment from the defeat in the 4 x 400. The embarrassment continued when I defeated him after he became the world champion and he had to settle for a number two world ranking. He struggled in his career from that point and didn’t make another US team for several years. Despite a reputation as a weak competitor, in 1997 he started to make a comeback. Over the next few years he went on to make US teams, including the 2000 Olympic 4 x 400 team, which I anchored.
In May 2008, eight years after we had won that race, Antonio announced that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. Until then I had held great respect for his mature and serious approach to the sport. I considered him a friend. Although our friendship didn’t extend past the track, we saw one another at competitions and talked often. To find that someone I liked and respected, someone I’d talked with about drugs in the sport, had himself used drugs disappointed me. It also made me feel naïve, since during the years of the Balco drug scandals I had consistently defended the sport, stating that the situation was not as bad as the media were making it out to be.
TAKING A STAND
I have always stood against performance-enhancing drugs. Because of that categorical stance, I made the decision to immediately return the gold medal I had won as a part of that Olympic relay team. Since my retirement in 2001, I had been a five-time Olympic gold medallist. Suddenly, I was downgraded to a four-time Olympic gold medallist. Since then, every time I am introduced as a four-time Olympic gold medallist I feel anger towards Antonio. My anger remains as potent today as it was when I saw him a few months after his admission and two days after I had actually returned the medal. I’m sure he had read about my disappointment and my decision to return the medal, and I felt he should have had something to say to me. But he never did.
I have often wondered what it is like for those athletes who have accomplished great things and made their family and friends and all associated with them very proud, only to be exposed later as drug cheats. How do you move on with your life after suffering such embarrassment and inflicting such grief on all those people who have supported you? I’m sure that it has to be extremely difficult. We will never know what Antonio Pettigrew experienced on that front. We do know, however, that in August 2010 he apparently took his own life, leaving his wife and young son without a husband and father. The fact that, at the time of his death, he appeared to be doing a good job and was making a positive impact on the lives of young people as an assistant coach at the University of North Carolina makes the event even sadder, especially since, due to his choice to use performance-enhancing drugs, most people will only remember him as a drug cheat.
I didn’t really begin to understand what performance-enhancing drugs were all about until Ben Johnson tested positive for drugs in 1988 in Seoul. At the time I was not a big Carl Lewis fan and I liked Ben’s style. In contrast to Carl’s flamboyance, Ben was fairly quiet and confident. I remember watching the big showdown between the two that year. Even at that time I scrutinised athletes’ body language. Ben’s businesslike demeanour stated plainly that he knew he would win. Right then, I knew that Carl would lose.
My college room-mate and I bet on the race. I took Ben, who of course won it running away. Two days later as I was heading out of my apartment to training, the news came over the television that Ben had tested positive. I was as amazed as I was disillusioned.
HOW IT HAPPENS
During all my 11 years as a professional runner and the four years at university before that, not a single person ever approached me about using drugs. That’s due in part to my coach, Clyde Hart, one of the most honest and honourable men I’ve ever known.
There are basically two ways people end up using performance-enhancing drugs. Either they go out on their own and they seek it, or the coach goes out and seeks it for them. I wasn’t going to go out and seek anything like that. I also feel confident that, had I had a different coach – one who suggested something that wasn’t right – I would have run away from there as fast as possible. The fact that Clyde was my coach insulated me even more from steroid use. He would never have suggested anything like that, because he has a strong stance against not just performance-enhancing drugs but anything that’s against the rules. Having grown up with my parents, who were all about doing the right thing and who believed that only hard work would get you where you wanted to go, I moved to being with Clyde who said the exact same thing.
I get asked all the time about whether I was approached about using performance-enhancing drugs. Nobody approaches you about that, unless it’s your coach. No stranger or anyone else comes to you and says, ‘Hey, you know what? You should use this. It’ll make you faster.’ Performance-enhancing drug use happens when athletes dream of being a champion or making it to the Olympics, but despite working super hard it’s just not happening for them. They start wondering, ‘Why am I not having success?’ Then they start thinking, ‘Maybe I can get a little help.’
Most of the time the athletes try to justify using performance-enhancing drugs by saying that everyone else is doing it, so they have to as well in order to level the playing field and survive in the sport. I used to believe this was a lot of crap, but the Balco scandal revealed that many of the athletes using steroids were being supplied by the same source. The last person you can trust to be quiet about something like that is the person helping you to cheat.
Doping has long been an issue in sport, but over the last decade or so it has become a huge problem with various sports and in particular with athletics, the premier sport of the Olympics. As a result, there is a perception among the public that all sports are rife with drug use. But most people don’t take into account that many athletes, in fact the majority, choose not to use performance-enhancing drugs. There are many reasons why. For starters, there is fear of getting caught. Most people don’t know it, but track and field athletes are some of the most tested in the world.
I was tested over 125 times during my university and professional career. Track and field athletes are subject to mandatory testing at championships where most, if not all, of the finalists are tested. In invitational professional competitions around the world, random testing of athletes takes place, so athletes have no idea if they will be tested or not, and are only informed after they finish the race if they have been selected, because which athletes are to be tested is determined by place. So the second and fifth place finishers in the 100 metres may be selected for testing, while the first and seventh place finishers may be selected in the 1500 metres. In addition, every athlete is subject to random out-of-competition drug testing. Under this programme athletes must continuously update what is called a ‘whereabouts’ form, so that they can be subject to surprise testing at any time on any day. That may take place while they are training, relaxing at home, or in a hotel the day before a competition away from home. Under this system, the tester shows up with no advance notice and announces to the athlete that he has been selected for random out-of-competition testing. The tester does not then leave that athlete until the athlete produces a urine sample for testing.
Athletes who test positive suffer embarrassment, the potential loss of sponsors, and the potential ban from participating in the sport they love. Many high-profile athletes have tested positive and suffered all of the above over the last several years. In the men’s 100 metres alone, in addition to Olympic champion Justin Gatlin (who has always professed his innocence) and European champion Dwayne Chambers, Tim Montgomery, the former world record holder, was banned for two years after testifying that he received performance-enhancing drugs from Balco. During that same era, Marion Jones, perhaps the biggest star in the sport until Usain Bolt, was also banned, having admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs after being investigated as part of the Balco scandal. Jones was the 2000 Olympic 100-metre gold medallist and was forced to forfeit that medal. The second place finisher in that race, Greek sprinter Ekaterina Thanou, has not been upgraded to gold, however, because of her own doping-related controversy. She was charged with making false statements during an investigation into an accident in which she was alleged to have been trying to avoid a random out-of-competition drug test on the eve of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.
The athletes found to have taken banned substances serve as examples of what can happen to you if you decide to take the shortcut. Most of these athletes have not only suffered public humiliation and basically an end to their careers, they’ve also endured financial disaster in the shape of lost sponsorship and in many cases a dearth of invitations from the major international invitational competitions around the world. These trials and tribulations, which other athletes are well aware of, serve as a huge deterrent for many young athletes coming up in the sport.
With so many of the stars from 2000 to 2008 involved in drug scandals, it is no surprise that the public have come to believe that the majority of athletes are doping. I blame the media for this misapprehension. An athlete who cheats and is caught provides salacious headlines, and our current society is interested in that type of scandalous news. Unfortunately, the media always spotlight an athlete testing positive, playing up the scandal more than the athletic achievements of clean athletes.
It bothers me that the media will still seek out Ben Johnson, the most high-profile drug cheat in the history of sport, for his comments on today’s drug issues or his conspiracy theories and continued denials about taking steroids in 1988 when he was busted. He obviously has no credibility and should not continue to be given a platform to attempt to gain sympathy, especially considering the damage he caused to the sport of athletics and the Olympic movement by continually saying that pretty much every athlete in Olympic sport uses performance-enhancing drugs and that this is the only way to achieve Olympic success. As a result, the public still believes that most athletes probably use drugs. But as is the case in society, most athletes obey the rules and do the right thing.
Another problem is the confusion and the lack of consistency across the different governing bodies and federations when it comes to defining and regulating banned substances. Each sport in each country has its own federation. In the UK that would be UK Athletics, while in the US it’s USA Track and Field. Each country also has an Olympic Committee – the British Olympic Association (BOA) in Britain and the US Olympic Committee (USOC) in the US. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is the international governing body of athletics, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the global governing body of the Olympic Games and Olympic sports. If all of that wasn’t enough, during the last ten years, in response to the rise in drug cheats, more organisations have become involved in the process of dealing with drug testing and drug cheats. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was founded in 1999, and in the US we have an independent drug testing agency, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). Additionally there is the Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS), an international governing body that hears cases and appeals of cases involving athletes and performance-enhancing drugs.
With that many organisations on the case, you would think there would no longer be a drug problem. But in some ways the involvement of all of these different organisations has caused more problems when it comes to dealing with those athletes who have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs or have been charged with cheating. Inconsistency in the rules and in the interpretation of the rules causes many problems. Take British sprinter Dwayne Chambers, who received a two-year ban in 2003 for testing positive for the substance THG. Chambers’s two-year ban was handed to him by a UK Athletics tribunal that decided that THG was chemically or pharmalogically related to a substance on the IAAF’s banned list of drugs. There was inconsistency from the beginning. Although the IAAF didn’t specifically have THG on its banned list, when UK Athletics banned Chambers for two years the IAAF supported that ban. The BOA banned Chambers for life, citing its rule that if an athlete tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug that athlete can never be part of a British Olympic team ever again. That means that after Chambers served his two years he was free to compete again and represent himself in international invitational competitions, and even represent Great Britain in IAAF World Championship competitions, but he still cannot represent his country in the Olympics. In contrast, American sprinter and 2004 100-metre and 200-metre Olympic champion Justin Gatlin, who received a four-year ban in 2006 after testing positive for a substance believed to be testosterone, is now eligible to compete and represent his country for any team that he can make, because the USOC rules don’t bar athletes for life. In fact, Great Britain is the only country that bans athletes testing positive for life.
It doesn’t stop there. The IOC instituted a rule stipulating that any athlete who tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs and is banned for over six months will miss an Olympics. Since the Olympics take place every four years, this can mean that an athlete who receives a two-year ban from his federation will miss competing in an Olympics even if the Games take place after the ban is over. That ruling is being challenged by athletes, and so far the Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS) has indicated that it agrees with the athletes due to the IOC’s rule effectively being double jeopardy.
Of course, for every champion who has tested positive, there are several who have had long and successful careers without any positive tests or scandal. Allison Felix, two-time 200-metre world champion, Veronica Campbell, two-time Olympic 200-metre champion, Tyson Gay, the former 100-and 200-metre world champion, and Jeremy Wariner, the former 400-metre world and Olympic champion, among many others comprise the current group of great athletes who over the last seven years have had no drug scandals associated with their names while winning championship medals and challenging the times of the previous generation who almost destroyed the sport.
THE FUTURE OF PERFORMANCE-
ENHANCING DRUG USE
As much as the IOC’s doping policy and the creation of WADA are good efforts in the fight against drug cheats, there is still cause for concern about the future of cheating in sports. Steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs have been used by athletes for a very long time. Over the last few decades before the creation of organisations like WADA and USADA, drug cheats had gotten ahead of the testers and anti-doping organisations. The whole Balco scandal was discovered only after a coach sent a syringe to the USADA, which uncovered a doping regimen created for many athletes across athletics, baseball and American football based on two designer steroids called ‘the cream’ and ‘the clear’, which had been created specifically to be undetectable to the testers. In fact, two of the biggest Olympic sports athletes to be banned as a result of the Balco scandal, Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, never actually tested positive even though they were both tested many times. They were both banned after admitting under evidence-inducing pressure to taking the drugs.
The future of drug cheating could take on many forms, from other designer steroids and performance enhancers created specifically to be undetectable, to existing drugs intended for medical use that may be discovered to aid in athletic performance before they’re identified by the anti-doping agencies and placed on the banned list as performance enhancers.
You have to wonder about who sits around and invents the drugs for athletic performance enhancement and why. Most people automatically assume that because of the money and glory associated with sporting success it’s a no-brainer that people spend time, money and energy developing these drugs. But the drug cheat athlete market is very small and the cost to develop some of these drugs is enormous. So that’s not the typical scenario. What actually happens is that most of these drugs are not invented for the purpose of aiding athlete performance. They are invented by pharmaceutical companies either to cure patients suffering from disease or other medical issues or else to improve their quality of life.
It costs millions and millions of dollars to develop these drugs, test them and get them approved by the national drug agencies like the Federal Drug Administration, or FDA, in America before they can finally be manufactured and taken to the market. But those drugs, which are intended to be sold only through doctors’ prescriptions, are often identified early on by rogue scientists, perhaps even those involved in the process of testing and developing these drugs and procedures, as potential athletic performance enhancers.
One such process that has recently been identified as a potentially huge problem in the future fight against drug cheats in sport is gene doping. The ethical and primary purpose of gene therapy, which was discovered in the 1970s, is to treat disease by manipulating the underlying genes. The idea of gene doping in athletes comes from research done to treat muscle-wasting diseases with gene therapy in order to re-grow or enhance those muscles. The fear is that athletes could also be treated to grow already healthy muscles to be bigger and stronger. WADA has already asked scientists to help find ways to prevent gene therapy from becoming the next big thing in doping.
It’s unrealistic to think that some day we won’t have drug cheats. To me sport is just a small microcosm of society. You have good and bad people in sport as you do in society. There are always people in society who will take the shortcut. That is why we will always have law enforcement. The same is true in sport. There will always be people who will take the shortcut, and so we will always need to police athletics with the help of anti-doping agencies and rules. As a result, unfortunately, certain levels of achievement – and certain athletes – automatically come under suspicion.
In no sport is that truer than in sprinting, which requires strength and power – qualities that can be enhanced by taking drugs like anabolic steroids and human growth hormone that increase muscle growth. Because of that, the sport has been blighted by cheats. Too many times, the fastest man and woman in the world have let us all down. And the cheating has become more sophisticated, with scientists developing designer drugs – drugs specifically designed to improve physical performance and be undetectable. Had Ben Johnson been taking the designer drug THG, and not a drug developed to treat anaemia, he would probably never have been caught.
The World Anti-Doping Agency is trying to keep pace with the drug cheats. Testing is now more widespread, high-tech, done both in and out of competition, and random. Still, people who no longer believe what they see are quick to question Usain Bolt’s recent achievements. That Usain has shown a steady upward progression since his young days is a good sign. Like me, he has always been very fast and has just gotten faster. Of course, that never stopped people from saying that I took drugs. He has suffered the same accusations.
‘How do you answer those people who say, “Why should we believe that you’re clean when you’re running so fast?”’ I asked him.
‘That doesn’t bother me because I understand where it’s coming from,’ he said. ‘People have done so much over the years – breaking records, and then, all of the sudden, they’re on drugs. It’s a shame for the sport. I can’t do nothing. All I got to do is keep on running fast, keep on getting tested. I just got to keep doing what I do.’
Those assumptions are exactly what Ian Thorpe hates about performance-enhancing drug use. ‘When you see an extraordinary performance, the first thing that you should think of is what an extraordinary performance,’ he told me. ‘You shouldn’t come to a conclusion where you go, “Oh, they must be taking something.” That is the biggest risk that we have to the sport in maintaining its integrity. Whatever costs we may have in the short term is far outweighed by the benefit of being completely transparent about it in the long term.’
This is especially true in the Olympics, where the media and fans become especially outraged by athletes testing positive for banned substances. ‘I love this,’ Ian added. ‘We hold Olympic athletes to a higher standard than any other athlete in society. We value Olympic sport so much that our level of expectation of those athletes who participate is higher than in other sports. If we look at the professional sports, especially in the US – we shouldn’t just tie in the US – but looking at baseball and the NFL, I think what’s happened is we look at these sports as entertainment. Entertainment in the sense of it’s a programme that we watch at a certain time each week or when it’s on if it’s only available at a certain time of the year, and we watch it religiously. We watch it to be entertained. We are entertained not by the spectacle of the sport but what it means to us for our team and for us to feel like we’re a part of that. We value our teams and we want to see them do well. We kind of overlook some indiscretions that we shouldn’t, just because we feel like we’re a part of it. Whereas an Olympic athlete becomes very unrelatable. It’s from such a select bunch that you’re actually an Olympian or Olympic champion that the performance comes from a purity in sport that people appreciate and value. But … how it impacts when they lie, they don’t see themselves as being that person. It’s outside the realm of possibility for them. Whereas these local teams that you support, you feel like you’re a part of them, like you know them. I think this is where we’ve kind of blurred this.’
‘The Olympics is in such a strong position,’ continues Ian, ‘not only as a brand but for what it offers to people around the world in being able to say there’s a different way. There’s a moral way. And basically, we’re doing the right thing. We’re not perfect. We’re doing the right thing. There’s a lot that other sports could learn from us.’
As Ian says, ‘Most people, when they win, they have done it the right way and they’re clean.’ The extreme minority of athletes who don’t should stop and consider a few points.
There is a huge risk with using the drugs. There are potential known and unknown health problems that could occur as a result of using these drugs.
Despite the name, performance-enhancing drugs aren’t guaranteed to make you perform better. Marion Jones ran faster and jumped further before she used drugs. Why? Because drugs can’t deliver the self-belief that comes from training to the point where you know you’re ready. If I did the work and became the best that I could be, the race was as good as won. I didn’t worry about the competition.