WADA says out-of-competition testing for Athens already under way

WADA says out-of-competition testing for Athens already under way{mosimage}Out-of-competition testing for the Athens Olympics is already under way, including two new tests to catch drug cheats who thought they could avoid detection, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

With the fight against drugs in sports in the spotlight after British sprinter Dwain Chambers was banned for testing positive for THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), top WADA officials on Wednesday outlined steps to make Athens drug-free to a meeting of the world’s national Olympic committees.

“Pre-Games out of competition testing has already started,” WADA president Dick Pound told the gathering of 500 delegates from 202 national Olympic committees.

“We can respond very quickly once we know what we are looking for so in order to deal with cheating we have to have the means of testing.”

WADA Director General David Howman said the means had been found and testing now included new detection measures.

“Two new tests will be in place by Athens so that those who think they could get away with it can be caught,” Howman said. He gave no other details.

COMMON RULES

Pound said the Athens Games would be the first with a common set of rules for all countries and all sports.

“FIFA will sign on to the code in May ahead of the Games,” Pound said easing concern that footballers might compete under different doping rules.

However U.S. Olympic Committee president Bill Martin said while there was a new world commitment and progress in stamping out doping, drug cheats were still out there. “The USOC and the U.S. government are committed to a doping free culture in sport. But we are not there yet,” Maarten said.

Pound told Reuters the two year ban on Chambers on Tuesday would mean other nations, including the United States, would also want to show they had no tolerance for doping offenders.

“The United States are determined to get out from under the suggestion that they are not strong on doping,” Pound said.

International athletics officials have accused USA Track & Field of failing to punish athletes who had tested positive.

The International Association of Athletics Federations last week sent a 1999 doping case involving world 400 metres champion Jerome Young to arbitration. Young won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. 4×400 relay team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

FIRST BAN

Chambers, 25, the European 100-meter champion, is the first athlete to be banned for testing positive for THG.

Pound said while some national athletics federations were seen as dragging their feet on issues of doping, it was now the time to act.

“Is this (drug) something we take inadvertently? There needs to be punishment for the offenders,” he said.

Four American track and field athletes have also tested positive for the steroid, which was discovered in a Los Angeles laboratory last year.

THG was discovered by scientists at the Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles last year after a syringe containing the new substance was handed to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) by an unidentified man claiming to be a well known athletics coach.

The USADA said it believed the drug was developed in the California-based BALCO laboratory, raided last September by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service criminal investigations unit and the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force.

Forty athletes were subpoenaed to appear before a federal jury which this month indicted BALCO owner Victor Conte, his vice-president Jim Valente, Chambers’s coach Remi Korchchemny and Greg Anderson, personal trainer for baseballer Barry Bonds.

U.S. shotput champion Kevin Toth, hammer thrower John McEwen, American women’s hammer champion Melissa Price and middle-distance runner Regina Jacobs are the four Americans who have tested positive. Their cases will be considered by USADA.