The discovery of a previously untraceable performance-enhancing steroid has exposed the price to be paid for winning at any cost. Sport may never be the same, writes Tom Humphries.
In the New York Times there works a sportswriter, famous among his peers for requesting the right to place a disclaimer at the end of his reports from Olympic athletic events. He wants nothing pompous, just the dignity afforded by an asterisk and a line explaining that the writer does not necessarily believe in the sporting validity of any of the events reported in the text above.
In Athens, it smells. The dustbin men are on strike and members of the organising committee for next year's Olympic Games inhale the fragrance of rotting garbage as they work their way through the clogged arteries of the city traffic system, and pray that everything will be alright.
Every day, the gap between what needs to be done in time for the Olympics, and what has been done for the Olympics, grows bigger. The games are coming home, they say, but in a different state and to a different city.
And on the west coast of America something smells bad too. In the none-too-prepossessing San Franciscan suburb of Burlingame, and in San Francisco itself, events are unfolding which might ease the burden of worry on everyone. No more asterisks. No more big-time track and field.
It's a scandal and it's a mystery. It may yet turn out to be more. The central character is a guy called Victor Conte Junior, who is just colourful enough to have walked in off the pages of a James Ellroy novel. A former musician known as Walkin' Fish, he played base with several bands, most notably an outfit called Tower of Power, before quitting music and committing himself to the vocation of nutrition some 20 years ago.
He was aggressive and he was successful. He went after clients in the world of sport, in much the same way that his clients went after gold medals and money. Taking Conte's supplements could transform you into a tower of power. Everyone wanted that.
Conte lists many big-name clients on his website, but when they make the movie it is Conte himself who will be the central character. Without any formal training in science or nutrition, he established the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), and the people with the muscle and the money gravitated towards him. He was persuasive, convincing and reassuring. Very few people outside the world of elite sport knew who he was.
When BALCO, still run from behind a plain beige little façade in Burlingame, was raided on September 3rd last by agents of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), not too much attention was paid in the real world, but a little tremor will have passed through the world of big-time athletics.
By then word would have got out that perhaps the jig was up. Not long afterwards, the US Anti-Doping Agency announced that it had discovered a new substance, a steroid which had been altered or mutated to enable it to escape detection. BALCO was the source.
The magnitude of it all is just dawning. Conte was as successful in business as the list of names to be hauled into court, this month and next, suggests. The stain of association will splash onto the top tiers of athletics, baseball and gridiron and may go even further. Conte may bring many bigger names down with him.
At the very least, Conte sailed close to the border between nutritional supplements and outright cheating. That, and several other borders, it would seem.
Conte is being investigated for money laundering, healthcare fraud ($1 million in allegedly fake Medicare claims) and trafficking in steroids.
What is worrying the sports world far more than the inquiries of the IRS, are events which took place quietly early last summer. While Victor Conte beavered away in Burlingame, enjoying the seasonal success of several of his clients in different sports and different arenas, he wasn't to know that two trains were hurtling down the tracks towards him from different directions.
As well as having drawn the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, he had stoked the ire of a top track and field coach, who called the US Anti-Doping Agency office in Colorado Springs one night last June. The coach refused to identify himself but sent in a used syringe, and the name of the man who had originally supplied it, by courier. "Victor Conte," he said.
The syringe ended up, inevitably in the lab of Dr Don Catlin, the Elliot Ness of dirty sport. Catlin, who works out of an Olympic-accredited laboratory in UCLA, was left with the task of identifying something which the good guys had never seen before. His eight-person team identified the steroid testosterone as being present, and worked from there to find the molecular structure of the new drug.
That drug is called tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and is a lot simpler than its name suggests, being merely a cleverly-disguised mutation of the traditional, old-fashioned steroid. The science of cheating is such that a mere molecular manipulation of a detectable drug can be enough to keep the testers off for several years. Most of the time scientists in testing labs don't even know what they are looking for.
The process of breaking down THG took until early August, by which time it was just a couple of weeks before the World Track and Field Championships in Paris. For once, timing and circumstance were with the good guys. They kept quiet. The sting was set. The boys and girls went to Paris and competed with the usual safety net. Their chemists were way ahead of the chemists who police the sport. Weren't they?
Then it was announced that a test had been developed which would enable the authorities of sport to re-test 350 samples from the US championships, held in July in Stanford, California. Another 400 samples taken at the World Championships in Paris, plus another 100 random out-of-competition tests would also be re-tested.
Already seven unnamed athletes from the US championships have tested positive. They have yet to be named, pending analysis of their B samples.
It is the concentration of big names which makes the case so intriguing. One BALCO client, the American sprinter Kelli White, has already been tested and stripped of gold and silver US championship medals and $120,000 in prize money for using the stimulant modafinil to battle narcolepsy. Dozing off at the start line was an embarrassment she was eager to avoid.
Several other athletes tested positive for the same drug, suggesting that track and field is now drawing narcoleptics in the same numbers as it previously drew asthmatics.
The stimulant was prescribed for White by BALCO's medical director, Dr Brian Goldman.
Despite denials, White has also been implicated in the present investigation, as is champion US shot- putter, Kevin Toth.
If it is any consolation, they have higher profile company. The golden couple of world sprinting, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, have also been asked (well, subpoenaed) to testify before the Grand Jury examining BALCO.
Whatever the outcome, it is the final rip in the thin veil of Jones's reputation, a garment which began to look inadequate when her former partner, the thrower C.J. Hunter, was frogmarched out of the Sydney Olympics when it was revealed that he had competed throughout Europe in the summer of 2000 with enough drugs in his system to kill an elephant. The drug Hunter repeatedly tested positive for was the steroid nandrolone, supplied to him by BALCO.
Jones had never noticed anything unusual in the medicine cabinet and she pleaded again for the benefit of the doubt when she and Montgomery took the unusual decision earlier this year of employing Charlie Francis, the disgraced former coach of Ben Johnson. Jones and Montgomery initially sought to deny their relationship with Francis. Pressure from sponsors brought an end to that experiment.
The casualties also include baseball and gridiron football. Victor Conte Junior (a name you can trust) has said that five professional baseball players and seven football players are on the list of 40 names called to testify before the Grand Jury. Barry Bonds, perhaps the greatest batter playing baseball today, has been called, as has Jason Giambi, a batter with the New York Yankees. From football, Bill Romanowski, a linebacker with the Oakland Raiders, has also been named.
What will follow will be the usual blank denials followed by claims from athletes that they didn't know what they were taking when they dealt with Conte. Accidental cheating has become the favoured defence of the distressed athlete. The claims are unlikely to find sympathetic ears. BALCO appears to represent a strand of the underground network which the testing community has known to be out there for decades.
Athletes were not only supplied by Conte with supplements, they routinely provided Conte with urine and blood samples for testing. Conte says he was testing for what base nutrients might be lacking in an athlete's diet. It looks to many as if he were providing an early warning system for clients who might test positive for illicit substances.
Big-time sport, track and field in particular, faces a long series of investigations and bans involving its superstars. The credibility of those who run, jump and throw for a living has been eroded over some time. By next summer, when the doves are released and the Olympic oath is recited in Athens, there may not be anybody left who either believes or cares.
And nobody knows where it may all end. Last week, Dr Catlin's laboratory in UCLA distributed samples and testing procedures for THG to 30 Olympic-accredited laboratories. In Cologne, with commendable diligence, they have already begun extensive re-testing.
Dwain Chambers, the European 100 metres champion and a British favourite for glory in Athens, appears to be among the first to fall foul of the test. A sample provided in Saarbrucken on August 1st has come up positive in the A sample. Other laboratories are following Cologne's example.
The process may take months. There will be fresh revelations. Deals done. Then come the examinations of the B Samples. The hearings. The appeals. The landmark events in the death of a sport.
The size of the gathering scandal can be measured in the words of men who are usually circumspect when it comes to describing unfolding cases.
Terry Madden, chief executive officer of the US Anti-Doping Agency, described the issue as a widespread conspiracy involving chemists and athletes and coaches.
Frank Iryasz of the US National Centre for Drug Free Sport suggested that the business could "blow open" the biggest doping scandal in sports history.
The words from the other side of the trenches are equally freighted, with an appreciation of what may be about to happen. Various agents, lawyers, and coaches have denounced the science, the procedures and legality involved in the testing.
They are skating on thin ice. After years of taking their beatings, the testing community armed themselves some time ago with the right to retroactively test samples. The reputation of Dr Don Catlin is unimpeachable too. After decades on the beat he knew what he was dealing with early on.
"Once you see its chemical structure you know it's a steroid," he says.
What we are left with is an intriguing battle between two forces, as unevenly matched as a clean athlete and a dirty athlete. On the one hand you have Dr Catlin, a man who has made it his life's work to spare sport its cheats and its fraudulent moments. On the other, you have the corporatisers and polluters of modern sport, the sponsors and the television executives and the chemists.
When Istvan Gyulai, the general secretary of the IAAF (the International Association of Athletics Federations) announces, "We want a clean sport. This is a great opportunity. We don't want to leave potential cheaters untouched", he sounds a lot less equivocal than men in his position have historically been.
Athletics has been turning a blind eye to its problems for many years. In the US, in particular, administrators have seen no evil and heard no evil for so long that athletes have been able to operate with virtual impunity.
Allegations by Dr Wade Exum, a former head of the US Olympic Committee (USOC), that positive tests had been routinely covered up for decades were heard in court briefly earlier this year, but were largely suppressed. However, just last month, the International Olympic Committee was sufficiently embarrassed as to summons the USOC to Lausanne, Switzerland, for a review of its doping policies of the last 20 years.
The most high-profile case at that stage was that of Jerome Young, an American sprinter who won gold in Sydney despite having tested positive for steroids the previous year. A secret hearing in the US had cleared him to run and American officials had declined to even identify which athlete was involved. The case is up for review.
The scandal of THG is perhaps the last chance which sport has had to recover its lost honesty. The breakthrough came, not in a laboratory where well-funded testers finally got themselves one step ahead of the cheaters, but through a disgruntled coach breaking the law of omertà.
The opportunity may never come again. There is too much money on one side of the battle, too much idealism on the other. If sport is to survive it may first have to raze itself to the ground and begin again from scratch.
Nike won't like it and the networks won't like it. Perhaps the next generation of athletes, spared the obligation of polluting themselves in the pursuit of excellence, will understand though.