Catch-22 (Part I)

This is the first part of a two-part editorial on a taboo topic: swimmers who test positive on drug tests despite, apparently, not having taken any illegal substance.

Just about ten years ago, Swimming World launched a campaign to alert the world of international sport to the fact that China was systematically doping its swimmers. It was an uphill battle, but eventually severe penalties for doping were imposed and the integrity of our sport was preserved.

It was a proud chapter in the proud history of this magazine, and it led directly to the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and a serious attempt at fighting the scourge of drugs in sport. But it's not always a good thing when a moral impulse is transformed into a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have a universal tendency to abandon their creative spirit.

Recently, we began to notice a disturbing pattern: several swimmers from countries around the worldÑincluding Kicker Vencill from the U.S.Ñhave tested positive for 19-norandrostenedione, a precursor to the powerful steroid nandrolone. But, strangely, with only miniscule amounts of the drug: four or six parts per billion.

In every case, these athletes have insisted they were innocent, that they had meticulously avoided any substance that appeared on the IOC's and WADA's extensive list of prohibited substances.

Now, from time immemorial, just about every athlete accused of doping has sworn that he or she was innocent. However, in the cases of the athletes testing positive for these tiny amounts of 19-norandrostenedione, their protestations had the ring of truthÑin part because such microscopic quantities have absolutely no effect on performance, and in part because the pattern of their performances, by and large, are inconsistent with drug-taking. (This is in stark contrast with the pattern we observed among Chinese and East German swimmers.)

So we decided to investigate.

Turns out, we were beaten to the punch. More than a year ago, the IOC and WADA conducted a broad study of the manufacturers and distributors of legal supplements.

They found that about 18 percent of the companies were selling legal supplements that were tainted with illegal, performance-enhancing substances. That's about one in five!

This doesn't mean that every fifth pill sold by Company A was tainted. It means that one in five companies sold some legal pills, powder, liquids or capsules that were contaminated. These legal products, taken by an athlete, could lead to a positive test.

Amazingly, the IOC and WADA have never made this list of companies public. Athletes are still told only to avoid illegal substances and admonished to "be careful."

Why hasn't the list been made public? Our guess is that these august organizations do not want to risk costly lawsuits. If so, they are abdicating their primary responsibility to the athletes in order to safeguard their bureaucratic butts. Another possibility is that such a list might imply that the other 82 percent of companies have products that are clean, and that is not necessarily the case.