POINT OF CONTENTION.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

As Lolo Jones waits to be escorted to the Bowerman Building so she can relieve herself in a plastic cup - a prize for winning the women's 100-meter hurdles at last month's Road to Eugene '08 track and field meet at Hayward Field - she reveals her feelings about drug testing.

"I love it," she says. "I think it's an opportunity to prove I'm not on drugs."

Jones might not be "doping," as they call it in national and international sports circles, but more of her track and field colleagues, along with prominent athletes in other sports, were tagged as cheaters earlier this year.

And the list of athletes suspected of giving themselves an unfair advantage keeps growing as they compete for fame and fortune on the track, on the road, on the baseball diamond and football field, and wherever else elite athletes strive to be the best.

With Eugene gearing up for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, questions about doping linger over the sport: Why does it keep happening? How many are using? And why do more track athletes get busted than athletes in other sports?

And just exactly how many are not getting caught?

"I think a lot of people get away with it," Jones says. And when a superstar such as sprinter Justin Gatlin gets busted, she adds, others trying to catch up with him must be cheating, too.

More than ever, there's something in the blood of American sport. And it's not just hemoglobin.

"It's a big, bad world out there," says Eugene sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider, author of the 2001 book "Faust's Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine." His book detailed the story of a quarter-century of the former Cold War nation's Olympic dominance through athletes secretly given steroids, designer drugs and other illegal drugs by doctors, chemists and trainers who later found themselves imprisoned.

"It's a never, never-ending battle. It just keeps recycling every year," says Ungerleider, who has served on various United States Olympic Committee commissions since 1984.

"I don't recall anytime when steroids or performance-enhancing drugs have been in the news as much as they have this summer," says Frank Uryasz, founder of the National Center for Drug Free Sport in Kansas City, which administers most of the collegiate sports drug testing for the NCAA.

The headlines implicating athletes have been startling. Sprinters Gatlin, Marion Jones and their former coach Trevor Graham. Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. Baseball star Barry Bonds and the continuing saga of Balco. Rumors that professional golfers might soon be tested.

Even a Eugene massage therapist, Chris Whetstine, found himself thrust into the middle of what UCLA's Dr. Don Catlin, the man Time magazine dubbed the "Steroid Detective," calls "the whole mess."

"Many, many innocent athletes are caught up in (it), and they don't want to compete with drug users," says Catlin, 68, the point man for testing U.S. athletes as director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles, the world's top sports drug-testing lab. "It's a horrible, horrible mess."

Catlin is credited with breaking the code that implicated the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or Balco, the small "high-tech nutrition" company in San Francisco that boasted a number of big-name athletes as clients. Athletes linked to Balco have been Bonds and fellow baseball star Jason Giambi, Jones and sprinter Tim Montgomery (Marion Jones' former boyfriend and the father of her son).

Catlin suggests the "sea change" in battling doping came with the Balco episode, and its difficult-to-detect designer steroids that he helped uncover in 2003. Balco and its fallout continues to be investigated by a federal grand jury in San Francisco.

Gatlin, the co-world record holder in the 100 meters and the 2004 Olympic champion, received an eight-year ban in August, narrowly avoiding a lifetime ban by cooperating with doping authorities. He tested positive in April for testosterone, five years after his first positive test.

Landis may be stripped of his Tour de France cycling title this summer after testing positive for synthetic testosterone.

Marion Jones, who won five medals including three golds at the 2000 Summer Olympics, tested positive for the endurance enhancer EPO in June after winning the women's 100 meters at the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Indianapolis. However, she was exonerated earlier this month when a second sample came up clean.

But Jones is still lampooned in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, under the headline "Foolish Woman, Foolish Choices." The piece chronicles Jones' habit of "running with the wrong crowd."

And then there was the bizarre case of Whetstine, 42, who has worked with both Gatlin and Marion Jones and many Nike-sponsored athletes over the years. After Gatlin tested positive, Graham, his now-former coach, suggested that a disgruntled Whetstine caused the positive test by rubbing a mysterious white cream into Gatlin's groin area and the back of his knees at the Kansas Relays last spring.

Whetstine has denied any wrongdoing and refused to comment for this story. Nike and many in the track and field community have backed Whetstine, saying Graham's allegations are ludicrous. Meanwhile, Whetstine's name resurfaced again in June after he was assaulted outside an Indianapolis hotel, allegedly by a man who happened to be a Nike representative, ex-long jumper and former agent of both Jones and Montgomery. Whetstine suffered a concussion and needed surgery for a dislocated thumb.

`Is it real or not?'

Where does all of this leave track and field, and the larger world of sport?

"I'm completely disgusted by the whole thing," says Vin Lananna, the University of Oregon's director of track and field, who will oversee the trials for the UO and Eugene. "And not just the drug testing," he says, mentioning that some irresponsible athletes often sign up for meets and then pull out at the last minute.

Maybe there's a larger issue here, Uryasz says.

"It's more of a sportsmanship issue, really," he says.

The saddest thing about all of this, say Catlin and others, such as Eugene's Janet Heinonen, who has researched the doping issue for years and is the wife of former UO women's track coach Tom Heinonen, is this: Everyone's a suspect now. Especially those who win.

Look at what's happened to seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, who found himself once again refuting possible doping accusations last week after two of his former teammates admitted in a New York Times' story that they had used illegal drugs despite never having tested positive.

"You watch a performance and you don't know," Heinonen says. "Is it real or not?"

Craig Masback, the CEO of USA Track and Field, the sport's governing body in America, says track needs to improve the message it's sending.

"Even if one athlete is cheating, (then) we have a problem with drugs," he says.

Masback says sports is a reflection of society today, naming famous cheaters such as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was caught fabricating stories, and homemaking mogul Martha Stewart, who went to prison on insider trading charges.

"Regrettably, it's human nature," Masback says. "People use drugs."

While Masback says track and field shouldn't bear the brunt of the criticism, his sport is far and away in the lead when it comes to charges of using performance-enhancing drugs, according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

According to its Web site, the USADA has warned, suspended or banned track and field athletes 54 times out of a total of 158 violations in 32 sports since it began handing out violations in 2001, a year after its inception. That's more than a third of all violations during that five-year period. Cycling is second with 29 violations.

Despite the controversy surrounding track and field, Lananna and others say the timing of those being caught this summer might bode well for the 2008 Trials, as long as the problem does not escalate from here.

"It's painful right now, but I think two years from now, my hope is we'll have a cleaner sport," Lananna says.

`Take back the sport'

Sports drug testing on a global level was administered for years by the International Olympic Committee, and by separate sports' national governing bodies, such as the

USATF for track and field.

That all changed in the late 1990s with WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and

USADA. WADA, based in Montreal, was created in 1999 by the IOC after a doping scandal during the 1998 Tour de France. Today, its uniform drug code has been adopted by all 202 countries in the Olympic movement, and more than 40 countries have their own antidoping agencies.

USADA was created a year after WADA by the United States Olympic Committee. A report commissioned by the USOC in 1998 said national governing bodies like the USATF had "an emotional attachment to and dependence on athletes and are reluctant to discipline their own," according to a 2003 investigation by The Orange County Register.

That might indicate why The Register's award-winning report was able to show that the USOC and other American sports federations, for more than a decade, allowed athletes who failed drug tests in qualifying events to compete in the Olympic Games.

When Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson's then-world record in the 100 meters was wiped out at the Summer games in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988, his gold medal went to the runner up, the United States' Carl Lewis. But it was later discovered that Lewis had tested positive for banned stimulants during that year's trials in Indianapolis, yet the USOC let him and others who had tested positive compete in the Olympics under a stipulation that they couldn't prove that they intended to cheat.

Of course, the major professional sports such as football, basketball, hockey and baseball have their own drug-testing systems, and they often take much criticism for what is perceived as lax drug-testing policies.

Major League Baseball was criticized for years as being too lenient before its recent steroid scandal. A new plan was put in place last year and Congress called several big names, from former home-run king Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa to Jose Canseco, to testify in 2005.

But then, drugs and sports have been linked through history.

"It's never stopped happening," says Charles Yesalis, a Penn State University professor and one of the nation's leading steroid experts. "Doping has been epidemic since 1875. There's never been a clean Olympic games."

Ancient Greek athletes were known to have used special diets and stimulating potions to fortify themselves. Strychnine, caffeine, cocaine and alcohol were often used by cyclists and other athletes in 19th century. Thomas Hicks ran to victory in the Olympic marathon of 1904 in St. Louis with the help of raw egg, injections of strychnine and doses of brandy.

It's gone from strychnine injections a century ago, to today's use of human growth hormone, EPO and designer drugs such as THG - the drug allegedly created at Balco that Catlin discovered in the urine of four athletes - to Tour de France cyclists ripping testosterone patches off their scrotums.

"People down there are just shaking their heads," Ungerleider says of the UCLA lab.

What's the answer? In the short run, Yesalis says "more drug testing."

"If only we had the stomach for highly focused sting operations against our elite Olympic athletes," he says, something he notes has had relative success in Europe.

For track and field, it is the athletes who "need to take back the sport," Lananna says. They have been influenced by agents, coaches, trainers and lawyers for too long, telling them "it's OK not to follow the rules because the end justifies the means," he says.

BANNED SUBSTANCES

The World Anti-Doping Agency lists about 100 substances under its "prohibited list," recognized by the anti-doping agencies of most nations, including the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Some of the banned substances include, but are not limited to, the following:

Anabolic steroids: Androstendiol, bolandiol, danazol, drostanolone, furazabol, nandrolone, oxabalone, stanozolol, 1-testosterone, trenbolone

Hormones and related substances: Erythropoietin, human growth hormone, insulinlike growth factors, mechano growth factors, gonadotrophins, insulin, corticotrophins

Agents with anti-estrogenic activity: Aromatase inhibitors including anastrozole, letrozole, aminoglutethimide, exemestane, formestane, testolactone; selective estrogen receptor modulators including raloxifene, tamoxifen, toremifene

Diuretics and other masking agents: Epitestosterone, probenecid, alpha-reductase inhibitors, plasma expanders

Stimulants: Amphetamine, cocaine, ephedrine, methamphetamine, modafinal, nikethamide, strychnine

Narcotics: Buprenorphine, diamorphine (heroin), methadone, morphine, oxycodone, pethidine 

Cannabinoids: Marijuana, hashish 

Note: Alcohol and beta-blockers are prohibited in competition only in some sports

DRUGS IN SPORTS

Here are the numbers of violations for sports with five or more violations since U.S. Anti-Doping Agency took over drug testing in 2001:

Track and field: 54 Cycling: 29 Swimming: 10 Weightlifting: 8 Bobsled and skeleton: 8 Boxing: 5

INSIDE

Drug testing: Should the current system be scrapped? / A16