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Below please find my response to your request that I substantiate the following statements that were broadcast on National Public Radio on April 29, 2003:

"When one looks at the USOC's conduct vis-à-vis doping control between 1984 and 1988 you see major ethical violations." And: "You see a tolerance of misbehavior that goes way beyond traces of stimulants in urine samples."

What you will find below is a documentation of these statements based on material in the public record of which the USOC leadership should have been aware for many years. It pertains to the USOC's failure to respond either effectively or appropriately to the two serious blood doping scandals that tarnished the reputation of the USOC in 1984 and 1987-1988, respectively. It also presents public statements on the privacy of drug-testing results made by Dr. Don Catlin, who served for a period during the 1980s as the chair of the USOC's Committee on Substance Abuse, Research, and Education. Dr. Catlin's statements from this period help us understand how the USOC was thinking regarding any obligation it might have had to make public the results of positive drug tests. This bears directly on recent public discussion of how the USOC was handling drug positives in 1988.

The reluctance of the USOC to take forceful action against doping is rooted in sportive nationalism, the idea that athletes who are successful in international competition bring glory to the nation and the sports bureaucrats who produce them. This is why the corporate ethos at the USOC has never accommodated adequately forceful disciplinary responses even to the most flagrant doping violations. For example, following the horrific blood-doping scandal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the USOC imposed no sanctions on any of the doctors, officials, or athletes involved, leaving it to the U.S. Cycling Federation to hand out 30-day suspensions.[i]

As Dr. Robert Voy, chief medial officer of the USOC between 1985 and 1989, describes this episode in his memoir of drug-testing policy at the USOC during the 1980s, the USOC "was unprepared and reluctant to handle this obvious and deplorable case of cheating. After the ball was tossed back and forth between the Cycling Federation and the USOC, the USOC finally accepted responsibility and appointed an investigating committee composed of many Sports Medicine Council physicians. Their recommendation to the USOC basically said to take strong disciplinary action.

"Unfortunately, the USOC legal minds, armed with the USOC Constitution, didn't feel it was the USOC's prerogative to do anything. The USOC deferred action to the U.S. Cycling Federation."[ii]

This remarkable display of passivity on the part of a USOC leadership with anti-doping responsibilities demonstrated a fundamental indifference to the ethical implications of doping.

A second incident of this kind was the Kerry Lynch blood doping scandal that erupted at the end of 1987. This scandal involved Jim Page, the chief U.S. Nordic coach, and Doug Petersen, head coach of the U.S. Nordic combined team. Both men knew about and covered up Lynch’s cheating. The response of the International Ski Federation (FIS) was to impose lifetime suspensions on the two Americans. The USOC response was to retain Page in the position into which it had hired him, put him on probation, and to issue a reprimand. As of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games, according to CBSSportsline.com (February 24, 2002), Page was serving as the USOC's managing director of sport performance – fifteen years after he had organized the blood doping of an American athlete. The USOC and the United States Skiing Association (USSA) penalized Lynch by requiring him to return $1200 to the USOC and to serve a suspension that expired six weeks before the opening of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic Games. Lynch stated that he had engaged in blood doping in response to "direct and indirect pressures from the administration, media and the American society on athletes to succeed in top international competitions."[iii] It is unfortunate that the USOC has chosen to intensify these pressures for the purpose of winning medals rather than resist them on behalf of a different sort of elite sport that does not aim to manipulate the physiology of the athlete in questionable ways. This resolve to squeeze the most out of the available human material reached a rhetorical low point in 2000 when Norm Blake, a newly minted chief executive officer of the USOC, referred to athletes as "the available feedstock."[iv]

The USOC's handling of the Page scandal employed the doubletalk that has characterized its handling of the doping issue over many years. On the one hand, USOC president Robert Helmick offered stern words of moral caution. "It is morally wrong," he said, for an athlete to be involved and particularly reprehensible for a physician and coaches to supervise." Helmick's ultimate purpose, however, was to exonerate his subordinate: "Jim Page should have said no, he didn't, and he recognizes that mistake. He has a long history of fighting against the procedure, and there is no need to make him a scapegoat. We think the athletes of the future will be better served by having him [with the USOC] than not having him."[v] Helmick did not substantiate his claim that this disgraced coach had actually opposed the illicit procedure he first expedited and then covered up. (Page had arranged for a New Hampshire doctor to fly to Germany to perform Kerry Lynch's blood transfusion.) More impartial observers saw what Page had done in a different light. "It seemed to be an extremely modest sanction for that degree of an orchestrated, premeditated violation of Olympic ethics," said a Canadian official.[vi] Dr. Bud Little, an American member of the International Skiing Federation (FIS) council, commented: "I felt the recommended position of the U.S. Ski Association was inadequate. The punishment should have been more severe. This was obviously a very premeditated act."[vii] This is the ethical standard the USOC leadership had chosen not to represent. Three years later, USOC president Helmick was forced to resign in disgrace from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on account of his self-serving financial deals. It turned out that the USOC's enforcer of ethical standards appeared to have some ethical deficiencies of his own. Indeed, the rise of Robert Helmick to the presidency of the USOC raises important questions about the upward mobility of many dubious personalities into the upper echelons of sports federations around the world. The presence of self-recruited opportunists in key positions has been a principal obstacle to the formulation and enforcement of effective anti-doping measures by many sports federations.

The USOC has also been unable to tolerate honest talk about doping in its own ranks. On October 15, 1987, Dr. Robert O. Voy, chief medical officer of the USOC, gave a candid speech on the realities of doping to the General Assembly of International Sports Federations in Colorado Springs.[viii] Almost a year before the Ben Johnson scandal shook the world of Olympic sport, Dr. Voy saw the looming crisis of high-performance sports medicine and tried to alert his colleagues at the USOC. For this act of integrity Dr. Voy was marginalized within the IOC, and he eventually left the USOC in early 1989. For anyone interested in the mentality of the USOC regarding the doping issue during the 1980s, Dr. Voy’s memoir is essential reading. It offers the perspective of an insider who was forced into a position of independence vis-à-vis the USOC bureaucracy he attempted to serve in a principled manner. The fact that his successor, Dr. Wade Exum, found himself in a similar predicament raises obvious questions about the USOC leadership's commitment to pursue a serious anti-doping program and the "educational" project such a program would require.

In October 1989 The New York Times published the following account of anti-doping activism at the USOC: “The executive board of the United States Olympic Committee today approved an aggressive out-of-competition drug-testing program, which includes oversight by an independent auditor and the hiring of an officer to investigate drug-related accusations. It is, by far, the most complete and far-reaching drug program ever attempted by the U.S.O.C., and it is being designed to complement other programs in place or in preparation. Edwin Moses, chairman of the U.S.O.C. substance-abuse committee, said the new program would probably not be ready until next spring because of logistical problems.”[ix] A full seven years later, Baaron Pittenger, co-chairman of the USOC’s antidoping task force, announced that “it is unlikely that no-advance-notice testing will be implemented by Atlanta” – a statement that enraged German athletes and sports officials whose anti-doping measures had been mercilessly scrutinized for years.[x] In September 1998 John Powers of The Boston Globe reported that “roughly half of American athletes picked for random tests by the US Olympic Committee get off because it costs too much to find them.”[xi] As of 1999, the major project of the executive director of the USOC, Richard Schultz, was a $10 million image-building program to recover whatever audience share had been lost to the Olympic corruption scandal.[xii] This allocation of an enormous sum to a public relations campaign demonstrated once again the leadership's view of its mission. In their view, the USOC is first and foremost a medal-winning operation and a branch of the sports entertainment industry. These priorities have precluded the serious campaign against doping that a real commitment to ethics and education might promote.

The ethical failures of the USOC are more typical than exceptional in the world of national and international sports federations. It is the rare federation that will risk a wrenching and public confrontation with its own doping problem. Sports bureaucrats, like other bureaucrats, have vested interests that are served by the appearance of order and integrity. Effective reforms threaten the careers that the bureaucrats identify with the welfare of the entire enterprise.

The USOC's lack of interest in a transparent drug-testing operation during the 1980s was clearly expressed by Dr. Don Catlin, then chair of the USOC Committee on Substance Abuse, Research, and Education in 1986. At this time Dr. Catlin advised caution with regard to the introduction of drug testing into some sports governing bodies where performance-enhancing drugs had been used. As he bluntly put it: "If you go in with a sickle and scythe, you could put all their athletes out of business. In some sports, you could wipe out the whole team.”[xiii] I have seen no evidence that the USOC responded in any meaningful way to this public comment by one of its own insiders.

"His suggestion," according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, was "to announce testing well in advance of the implementation of a program and to encourage the sport’s governing body to educate its athletes."[xiv] The likely results of such a plan were (1) to allow athletes more than sufficient time to evade positive test results, and (2) to put unwarranted faith in an "educational" process that conflicts with the ambitions and the ethical standards of many elite athletes as well as those of the USOC itself. In 1989 Dr. Catlin stated: “I think that, when the sports organization identifies a drug user through a test and imposes a sanction, that’s the penalty. I don’t see the necessity of making a public announcement. The public has a right to know, but not necessarily to know instantaneously.” This view contrasts strongly with that expressed by Dr. Voy at this time. “I am one," said Dr. Voy, "who thinks that if we are going to solve the problem of drug use in sports we have to expose those who cheat. I don’t go along with aggregate figures. If an athlete has cheated the process, we need to make that public.”[xv] This is the fundamental disagreement about ethics and procedure that has prompted conflicts between the USOC and physicians like Dr. Voy and Dr. Exum. As Dr. Catlin pointed out in 1986, real doping control could put some sports federations out of business.

Serious anti-doping reform requires the participation of principled sports officials who are willing to challenge their own bureaucracies. Dr. Helmut Digel, president of the German Track and Field Federation (DLV), was a real reformer once he assumed the presidency in 1993. He openly challenged both the political integrity and the doping policies of his international federation (IAAF) and proposed reforms that would reduce the pressures that prompt elite athletes to engage in doping. Alessandro Donati, head of research at the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), persuaded the Italian government to ban blood doping in 1985. In recent years he has waged a fearless and effective anti-doping campaign that has made him powerful enemies in the Italian sports establishment.[xvi] In October 2000 a Norwegian government official, Hans B. Skaset, was forced to resign after he warned that government funding for elite sport in Norway might be cut if sports officials continued to demonstrate "direct approval of experimentation that borders on doping."[xvii] Mr. Skaset's warning about sport science's entry into an ethically dubious "gray zone" is comparable to Dr. Exum's objections to "fringe performance-enhancing" techniques that appear on p. 6 of his complaint against the USOC.

In summary, the USOC forfeited its credibility on the doping issue during the 1980s. Since that time there has been no honest reckoning with the historical record. On the contrary, the USOC clearly believes that it has already adjusted, more or less effortlessly, to a new anti-doping order that in reality is only now taking shape.

Finally, regarding the e-mail messages between Dr. Exum and myself that you attached, I was interested in what Dr. Exum knew about how the USOC had been conducting its drug-testing program. At no time, however, did Dr. Exum convey to me, either orally or in the form of documents, any proprietary information whatsoever. If I had received such information, I would have handled it in conformity with the law.

[i] See, for example, Bjarne Rostaing and Robert Sullivan, “Triumphs Tainted With Blood,” Sports Illustrated (January 21, 1985): 12-17; Richard Ben Cramer, “Olympic Cheating: The inside story of illicit doping and the U.S. cycling team,” Rolling Stone (February 14, 1985): 25, 26, 30; Harvey G. Klein, “Blood Transfusion and Athletics,” The New England Journal of Medicine 312 (March 28, 1985): 854-856; Robert O. Voy, Drugs, Sport, and Politics (Champaign: Leisure Press, 1991): 70-72.

[ii] Drugs, Sport, and Politics, 71.

[iii] "U.S. Nordic Medalist Admits to Blood Packing," Chicago Tribune (December 29, 1987).

[iv] "Olympian Pronouncements," Sports Illustrated (April 24, 2000): 27.

[v] "U.S. Nordic Medalist Admits to Blood Packing," Chicago Tribune (December 29, 1987).

[vi] "Ban Is Almost Certain for U.S. Skier Lynch," Chicago Tribune (January 13, 1988).

[vii] "Skier Lynch Voted Out of Games," Chicago Tribune (January 20, 1988).

[viii] This speech was published as “Education As a Means Against Doping,” The Olympian (December 1987): 43-46.

[ix] “U.S. Committee Adopts Drug Plan,” New York Times (October 23, 1989).

[x] Associated Press (AP Sports) (April 3, 1996).

[xi] “Supplement user striking out,” Boston Globe (September 6, 1998). [JF 620]

[xii] “Ads to help polish image, USOC says,” USA Today (April 30-May 2, 1999).

[xiii] Virginia Cowart, “State-of-Art Drug Identification Laboratories Play Increasing Role in Major Athletic Events,” JAMA 256 (December 12, 1986): 3069.

[xiv] Virginia Cowart, “State-of-Art Drug Identification Laboratories Play Increasing Role in Major Athletic Events,” JAMA 256 (December 12, 1986): 3073.

[xv] Virginia S. Cowart, “Athlete Drug Testing Receiving More Attention Than Ever Before in History of Competition,” JAMA 261 (June 23/30, 1989): 3511.

[xvi] David Walsh, "New Crisis Facing Sport, The Sunday Times [London] (November 19, 2000.

[xvii] "Truer med å trekke offentlig støtte," Aftenposten [Oslo] (October 27, 2000).