TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capoly.1

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                                                                              October 10, 1988

OLYMPICS

Shame Of the Games


Ben Johnson is stripped of his gold in the Olympics' worst drug
scandal


The Final Count

Winners came from all over the globe, as a record 52 nations
sent athletes onto the victory stand. Soviet athletes won 132
medals, 55 of them gold, while East Germany came in second with
102 medals. The U.S. finished third, taking 36 golds and 94
medals overall.


The ugliest story of the 22nd Olympics began in a bathroom in
the basement of Seoul's track-and-field stadium. There, on
Sept. 24, a smallish man with a fabulously muscled body and
rage-filled eyes had to perform the indignity of champions. A
master of explosive, almost inexplicable starts, he had already
propelled his body down the 100- meter track faster than anyone
before. Now his legs had ceased churning, he had relinquished
the flag of his adopted Canada, which he had waved around the
stadium, and the applause for the seemingly guileless sprinter
who had dethroned the all-too-sleek Carl Lewis had died. Only
a urine sample stood between Ben Johnson and a nightlong
celebration for the happiest day of his 26 years.

It took just 9.79 sec. to run the 100, but it took Johnson
nearly an hour and six cans of low-alcohol beer to fulfill his
requirement. At the Doping Control Center of the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology, it took twelve hours more
to assay the day's samples, to run them through the mazy innards
of the lab's instruments. When the last sample left the
hair-thin glass tubes of the gas chromatograph and the mass
spectrometer, where all molecules have their fingerprints taken,
just one positive result had turned up.

The result was reported to Prince Alexandre de Merode, the
Belgian chief of the International Olympic Committee's Medical
Commission, and he then checked to determine whose sample it
was, for it was identified only by number. Frantic meetings
ensued, and a second portion of the original sample, which had
been stored in a locked refrigerator, was tested. The results
were the same:  Ben Johnson, the fastest man on earth, had
cheated.

After Canadian officials were notified that he had tested
positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol, a substance that
is supposed to help build lean muscle mass, they hustled the
Jamaican-born sprinter out of Olympic Village, the cockpit of
his glory, and checked him into a Seoul hotel under an
ignominious pseudonym. There, at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Carol
Anne Letheren, chief de mission of the Canadian delegation,
stripped Johnson of the medal he had already given to his
mother. "He was in a state of shock," said Letheren. "He still
did not comprehend the situation."  A few hours later he was
bound for New York, a runner who had stumbled into a future
stained with disgrace.

Positive drug tests, stripped medals and two-year suspensions
from play are the familiar furniture of contemporary sports
competitions. In the 1983 Pan American Games, 19 athletes, two
of them medalists, were ejected from the Games for drug abuses.
Before the Seoul Games began, several Americans, including '84
cycling gold medalist Steve Hegg and national swimming champion
Angel Myers, were bounced for banned substances. But no
disqualification has ever rocked the sporting world the way the
Ben Johnson scandal has.

Part of the reason is that disqualifications have primarily
been confined to other, less popular sports--especially weight
lifting and field events, like the hammer throw and shot put.
But much of the shock is a by-product of the fascination with
the 100-meter dash. That most elemental, primordial event is
run, at least in the mind, by almost every child on earth, and
its Olympic champion occupies a place of honor as the fastest
man alive. He is the heir of Harold Abrahams of Chariots of
Fire fame, of Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes and Carl Lewis. What other
betrayal could mean as much?

It is hard to recall any that has been so passionately
denounced. In Canada, a country that was delighting in its
first gold medal of the Games, outrage abounded. Canadian
Sports Minister Jean Charest announced the draconian penalty of
banning Johnson from ever representing Canada on a national team
again, calling the incident a "national embarrassment."  Many
saw the sprinter as pitiable, and some, like I.O.C. vice
president Richard Pound, believed he had been duped as well as
doped, saying, "Johnson probably wouldn't know what a steroid
is."  But across Canada spread a sense of bewilderment and
anger.

Around the world, Johnson's disqualification suddenly riveted
public attention on the decades-old problem of
performance-enhancing drug use with an altogether new intensity.
By week's end the total of ten drug-related disqualifications
in Seoul was close to the 1984 figure. But many thought:  If
this world-record holder would risk detection, everyone must be
doing it. Spectators felt deceived and non-using athletes felt
gypped. Overnight the Olympics became clouded, suspected of
being an unholy chemistry competition rather than the glorious
alchemy of will, talent and training that is its ideal.

The image unjustly diminished too many great performances. But
fears about a widespread drug problem are entirely justified:
the use of performance-enhancing agents is far more common than
the number of disqualifications would imply. Dr. Robert Voy,
chief medical officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee, reports
that no-penalty testing in 1983-84 found that 20% to 50% of U.S.
athletes were doping. Current formal testing in the U.S. turns
up positives at a rate of 2% to 3%. Athletes' understanding of
how to beat the tests by using either extra drugs that mask the
performance-enhancing ones or by getting off the stuff in time
to clear their systems accounts for the difference. Says Dr.
Bertram Zarins, a team physician for the New England Patriots
and Boston Bruins:  "Athletes are always a step ahead of any
testing program."

For almost every sport, there are some pills and potions that
promise black-magic results. To fire their systems up, many
competitors have turned to stimulants, using amphetamines or
even caffeine enemas and suppositories, because rectal
administration puts the chemical into the bloodstream without
causing an upset stomach. Testing for "uppers" by sports
federations is highly reliable, but use of this class of drugs
is not confined to competitions like the Olympics. Some of the
most famous cases of stimulant usage have occurred in
professional baseball and football, which have lax testing for
the substances.

Diuretics are yet another group of forbidden drugs. The
Bulgarian weight-lifting team was withdrawn from Seoul after two
of its medalists tested positive for the diuretic furosemide.
By flushing water from the body, these drugs help athletes
reduce weight to compete in a particular class. They are also
useful as masking agents, since along with the water, evidence
of other drug use is eliminated.

There are rumors of other, still unpublicized, masking agents.
At least one nondiuretic that achieves the desired effect is
known: probenecid, a gout drug, has been banned by the I.O.C.
It became instantly infamous during this summer's Tour de
France. Spain's Pedro Delgado, the eventual winner, tested
positive for the drug. But probenecid did not become prohibited
in international cycling until August, so Delgado got away with
it.

The index of the athletic pharmacopoeia is long and gets
longer. Rare and expensive human-growth hormone can, some say,
turn children into massive competitive machines and aid muscle
growth in adults. Stories circulate about puberty suppressants
that allow gymnasts to keep their finely balanced girlish
bodies. But no drugs pose as much of a threat to the fairness
and legitimacy of athletic competition as anabolic steroids do.
And as the Johnson scandal shows, nothing has so obscured the
efforts of honest athletes or has contributed as much shame to
the Games.

They are the class of drugs that mimic the effect of
testosterone in the body, and they are by far the most widely
used performance- enhancing agents in sports. Among other
things, testosterone causes the development of male secondary
sexual characteristics--facial hair, deep voice and muscle
building--and it is to promote the last that the use of steroids
has become popular and, in such sports as weight lifting and
field events, ubiquitous.

Steroids provide legitimate treatment for certain hormonal and
blood disorders, among others, but they have also been put to
other ends for decades. Developed in the 1930s, they had their
first known non- medicinal use not long after--by Nazi doctors
who gave them to soldiers in the hope of enhancing their
aggressiveness in battle. After World War II, Soviet sports
officials reportedly noted the Nazis' use, and in the 1950s
began giving steroids to athletes. U.S. doctors found out about
this and introduced them to American athletes, initiating a kind
of chemical cold war.

Steroids do not build muscles directly but rather allow the body
to bulk up with training beyond the degree possible with natural
levels of testosterone. Or so it is thought. Their actual
value is hotly disputed, in part because there are few
large-scale studies. Athletes take the steroids in doses much
larger than those used for therapeutic purposes, and doctors
have been reluctant to conduct research that would in any way
condone a practice they consider unhealthy. Athletes have fewer
doubts. Dr. Forest Tennant, a California researcher, estimated
in the New England Journal of Medicine that "as many as 1
million athletes" in the U.S. alone are using anabolic steroids.
Sprinters like Johnson, who rely on large muscles for bursts
of power, are believed to be turning more and more to steroids.
In football, the remarkable rise in the size and strength of
linemen is often attributed to extensive steroid use. In weight
lifting and bodybuilding, steroid consumption is pandemic.

The rage for steroids has persisted despite growing indications
that the drugs can have harmful and even disastrous side
effects. In men, balding, acne, shrinkage of the testicles and
infertility are among the most immediate consequences, though
all of those except balding may be reversible. In women, who
normally produce very low levels of testosterone and therefore
gain relatively much more from steroids, prolonged use can cause
irreversible effects like facial hair, deepening of the voice
and an abnormally enlarged clitoris. Injuries among users can
be more serious than usual, since they often involve connective
tissues like tendons that have not grown strong enough to
support the increased muscle mass.

Although the research is again skimpy, liver, prostate and
testicular cancers have been linked to steroid use, as has the
hastened onset of atherosclerosis--obstructed arteries. "In my
opinion," says Dr. Tennant, "young athletes who take heavy doses
of anabolic steroids for 60 to 90 days should expect to die in
their 30s or 40s."

Growing evidence also points to the conclusion that steroids,
which appear to be addictive, can harm the mind. Dr. Harrison
Pope, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., has
documented such effects--popularly called "'roid rage"--as
mania, wild aggression and delusions in some steroid users. One
of his subjects had a friend videotape him as he deliberately
drove a car into a tree at 35 m.p.h. Says Pope, ominously:  "It
appears the serious psychiatric effects are far more common than
the serious medical ones."

Despite the possible harm, the use of steroids shows no sign of
abating. It is illegal to obtain them without a prescription,
but whether they are stolen from pharmaceutical manufacturers
of imported from Mexico, a major producer, they are widely
available. Some users receive them from willing doctors. The
great majority rely on dealers, who frequent university gyms and
health clubs. Some athletes have a hand in distribution:
Alexander Kurlovich, the Soviet super heavyweight who won the
gold medal just last week in Seoul, was convicted in Canada in
1984 of importing steroids with an intent to sell and was
suspended from international competition for two years.

Urinalysis, expensive at about $100 a test, is common only in
topflight sporting competition, but even there, as Ben Johnson
showed, abuse persists. The only surefire approach, sports
officials say, is random testing during the year--a course that
many object to as an infringement on civil liberties. Advocates
see the Johnson case as supporting their call:  the surprise,
after all, is not that he used them, but that he got caught.

He apparently did so because of ignorance about advances in
testing. According to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, the doctor who
allegedly gave him the steroids, George M. Astaphan, did not
realize that stanozolol can now be detected. Until last year,
stanozolol was hard to observe--a fact that may explain why
three of the Seoul disqualifications were for that particular
steroid. There was no question about the veracity of the test:
in Johnson's sample, said Jong-Sei Park, chief of the Olympic
drug testing lab, "we saw the stanozolol itself and the
breakdown products" it leaves in the body.

Confirmation that Johnson had been using the drug for some time,
at least several months, came from the very low levels of
natural testosterone in his urine sample; the glands that
produce the hormone shut down when the system is flooded with
the synthetic chemical. Apparently Johnson made it to the Games
because of a stroke of luck in the Canadian Olympic trials:  two
of the top three finishers are tested after each event, and
Johnson drew the lucky straw that exempted him.

With the results of Johnson's test widely accepted, attention
focused on how he had been doped. At the center of the
controversy was Dr. Astaphan, a general practitioner on the
Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Astaphan has been associated
with Johnson for more than five years, and the sprinter spent
several weeks this summer on St. Kitts, purportedly being
treated for a hamstring pull. Astaphan denied the reports that
he gave Johnson stanozolol but did say he gave him therapeutic
corticosteroids and subsequently notified the I.O.C. The doctor
also became the subject of intense scrutiny. York University
officials, according to a Toronto newspaper, were looking into
claims that athletes training at the university had bought
steroids from Astaphan. The College of Physicians and Surgeons
of Ontario announced it would investigate Astaphan's medical
practice.

But Ben Johnson was not talking. Before leaving Seoul, he
denied knowingly taking steroids. On the flight back he wept,
and when he finally arrived in Canada, he retreated to his
mother's suburban Toronto home, where he lives. The well-built
edifice of endorsements that had been erected for him collapsed
overnight; he stands to lose an estimated $8.2 million. The
only light in his personal tunnel, and a lurid one at that, came
when Canadian and American football teams announced their
interest in his services. The Canadian government promised an
inquiry. Nothing less, it seemed, would explain the story of
the man who, advertently or not, brought the 1988 Olympics to
their highest and lowest moments.

--By Daniel Benjamin.  Reported by Jay Branegan/Seoul and James
Willwerth/Los Angeles