Swimming Hero Spitz Says IOC Must Test for All Drugs
LONDON — Mark Spitz accused Olympic authorities on Saturday of deliberately not testing for all banned substances.
‘They [the International Olympic Committee] are totally aware of all of the drugs that are out there, that are being taken,’ Spitz, the American swimmer who won a record seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, told BBC radio.
‘And they do have tests for all of them but they refuse to test for all of them.’
Spitz pinned some of the blame on the demands of television and certain countries.
‘There is tremendous pressure from the television networks and also from the nations that know their athletes wouldn’t pass those tests,’ he said.
‘They want the television to have athletic competitions with the world record holders there for the finals. It’s all about ratings and commercial selling of time and about money … There is a tremendous conflict of interest in what they should do and what they are doing.’
Spitz, speaking some seven weeks before the Sydney Olympic Games, said that declarations about tests and athletes being drugs free should be qualified. ‘I believe the tests are accurate but with a little bit of an underlying note,’ he said.
‘They are accurate for what they are testing for but they are deliberately not testing for everything.’
Embarrassing attempts
Spitz has been a regular critic of both swimming’s world body FINA and the IOC in their respective battles to keep drugs out of sport.
In 1998 he slammed FINA for its ’embarrassing’ attempts to stamp out drugs abuse, urging them to test for all known drugs.
Last September he said the IOC had the technology to test for a plethora of drugs but was refusing to do so because of the pressures from eastern bloc nations and China.
In particular he called on the IOC to introduce blood-testing at the Sydney Games to catch athletes using human growth hormones and erythropoietin (EPO), which has not in the past been detected by conventional urine tests.
Spitz accused the authorities on Saturday of ‘pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes’.
‘Any drug that’s made to enhance supposedly either human growth or performance … the drug company that makes it has to have a devised test to make sure the drug is doing what it is supposed to do in the first place.
‘I think the IOC has to make simple phone calls to the major drug companies that will supply all that information to them immediately,’ he said.
The IOC last year set up the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) with a $25 million budget to take it to the end of 2001.
Jacques Rogge, vice-chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, said in May that new tests to detect EPO had only a 50-50 chance of winning approval in time for the Sydney Olympic games but has sounded more hopeful recently.
World cycling chief Hein Verbruggen also said this month that the IOC was ‘doing its utmost’ to have a new test to detect EPO validated before the Games.
The respected science journal Nature last month published research data by French scientists into a new urine test to detect the use of synthetic EPO.
Alan Baldwin Reuters
Source: SOCOG