The Straight Dope

Enough time has passed, finally, for Kicker Vencill to sound philosophical about the drug-testing nightmare that turned his life upside down. “What goes over the devil’s back comes underneath the devil’s belly,� he says, quoting some folksy wisdom he learned from his grandmother back home in Kentucky. In other words, after suffering more than his share of the devil’s handiwork, he’s ready for a little karmic payback.

On the drug-testing timeline that began with the first Olympic drug tests in 1968 and runs through Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, the 1998 Tour de France, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), and Floyd Landis, Vencill is a minor player, though it surely didn’t feel that way to him. His ordeal began in the winter of 2003, as he was preparing for the most important 18 months of his long swimming career. He came home from a morning workout to find a FedEx package on the doorstep of his home in southern California. In some circumstances, this might mean good news. But when he saw who’d sent the package, Vencill knew that it was anything but: It was from the U.S. Anti- Doping Agency (USADA), the body that oversees drug testing for the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Pan American Games, and the Paralympics.

With a churning stomach and a pounding heart, he opened the package and read the grim news: An out-of-competition urine test he’d taken two weeks earlier had come back positive for something called 19-na, which he soon learned was a steroid metabolite of norandrostendione. Vencill, who had qualified for that summer’s Pan American Games as a freestyler and hoped to make the Olympic team the following year, was facing a four-year suspension and certain disgrace.

At this point, most athletes deny, deny, and then deny some more. Vencill did, too. Mostly, though, he was perplexed by the positive test: Where had the stuff come from? It was a minuscule amount—just four nanograms per milliliter—far less than would provide a performance boost. But under the “strict liability� standard of the drug code, that didn’t matter. He was as guilty as if he’d been mainlining megadoses of the stuff.

Over the next two years, Vencill would spend far less time swimming than fighting the system. “It’s like a twisted version of the legal system,� he says. He had two hearings, one in Indianapolis and one in Denver, which altogether cost his family an estimated $40,000. And when it was all over, he was still suspended for two years—a stretch that would include the U.S. Olympic trials.

For most athletes, that’s it. They’ve got no choice but to serve out their suspensions. But Vencill, who earned his unusual first name for his pugnacity in the womb, would not give up. While swimming for Western Kentucky University, he’d studied agricultural science and worked part-time for a veterinarian. Science had been used to screw him; maybe it could help him now. He gathered up the four supplements he had been taking— flaxseed oil, amino acids, a recovery drink, and a multivitamin called Super Complete—and sent them off to be analyzed by an independent lab. The results shocked him: The multivitamin he’d been taking for four years contained not one but three steroid precursors, none of which was listed as an ingredient.

This probably should not have surprised Vencill as much as it did. In a 2001 study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, 15 percent of the 634 supplements tested were found to contain steroid precursors not listed on the label. “Some of the contamination is just sloppiness on the part of the companies because there’s no oversight,� says Howard Jacobs, the Los Angeles–based lawyer who has represented Vencill along with some 30 other athletes, including Marion Jones and Floyd Landis, on various drug-related charges. “But I also believe
that there are supplement companies out there that intentionally spike their product.�

Vencill went to his second hearing armed with this information, but it did nothing to overturn his suspension. Real-world law may recognize intent as a mitigating factor, but the drug code does not. According to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the body to which USADA reports, if something is in your system, you are responsible for it. This is WADA’s “strict liability� policy, and as Vencill would learn, it is indeed strict. Asked to provide an example of truly exonerating circumstances, WADA chief Dick Pound once said, “If Nazi frogmen kidnap you and inject steroids, that’s probably not going to be two years.�

Vencill sued the manufacturer, Ultimate Nutrition, and was awarded $578,635 by a unanimous jury decision. This was vindication of sorts, though bittersweet. “Some people said to me, ‘That’s way more than you ever would have made swimming,’ which is true,� Vencill says. “But that’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing. They took away a dream from me. And there are still people who look at me funny.�
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This is a story about drug testing, which means that it takes place in a shadow world of suspicion, innuendo, and paranoia. That’s been true of every drug-related story for decades, but the Internet has given rumors powerful new wings. Whatever the real extent of the drugs-in-sports problem—and there is a great difference of opinion about even that—its growth in the 1960s was actively ignored. Sure, the IOC conducted drug tests at the Olympics starting in 1968, and added anabolic steroids to the list of banned substances in 1976. Critics argued that these announced in-competition tests were about as meaningful a deterrent as the speed trap that everyone in town knows about. It was no problem for athletes to curtail their regimens in time to test clean.

The truth was that nobody, apart from a few lonely zealots, wanted to catch anyone. Everyone—meet promoters, athletes’ agents, federation and Olympic officials, TV executives, coaches, the athletes themselves—had way too much invested in pushing performance steadily forward. To the extent that it was a concern at all, doping was more of a PR headache than anything else. There were those who believed that the testing standards and procedures had been made ridiculously complicated on purpose, in order to give procedural loopholes to athletes.

Things changed after the huge doping scandal at the 1998 Tour de France, when the French Festina team was expelled from the race and two others were investigated on drug-related charges. The IOC decided it was time to get serious about testing. In the hopes of imposing uniform
standards and testing procedures, it created the World Anti-Doping Agency and named Dick Pound, a Canadian tax lawyer and IOC vice president, as its chief executive.

Even those who regard the creation of WADA as a step forward believe that Pound has been the wrong man for the job. For a lawyer, he seems to have little regard for due process. Last August, when word leaked that sprinter Marion Jones’s initial A sample from the U.S. national championships had tested positive for the blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO), Pound’s response should have been one of outrage—that WADA’s own rules, which promise confidentiality until the B sample has been tested, had been flouted. Instead, he seemed scarcely able to contain his glee, crowing, “If the results [of the A test] remain as announced, it is a sign the system works to give athletes the benefit of the doubt.�

Of course, those results weren’t confirmed: Jones’s B sample was negative, just as miler and twotime Olympic medalist Bernard Lagat’s B sample had been negative three years earlier—after news of his positive A sample had been leaked. But the stigma endures. This is punishment by smearing athletes who, according to the agency’s rules at least, have done nothing wrong. Instead of leading the premature charge against them, Pound ought to have been apologizing and promising a thorough investigation into how the A-sample results were leaked.

“WADA is out to get as many positive tests as it possibly can to justify its existence,� says Dr. Brent Rushall, a retired professor of exercise and nutritional sciences at San Diego State University. “The testosterone and EPO tests are absolutely crummy. They should be thrown out. They are so unreliable.�

Not only does the EPO test require the subtlest diagnostic skills—some familiar with the testing of Jones’s A sample insist it was borderline at best—but there are also two forms of the hormone, one of which occurs naturally (EPO) and one that is made in the lab (rHuEPO). The problem with the test that WADA introduced with great fanfare at the 2004 Sydney Olympics is that it cannot necessarily distinguish between the two. Because testosterone occurs naturally in the body, the test for it looks at an athlete’s ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. The assumption is that most people’s ratio will be close to 1:1. After setting the allowable limit at 6:1, WADA recently dropped it to 4:1. Even then, for a not-insignificant chunk of the population, their naturally occurring ratio is much higher. At the 1984 Games, Japanese volleyball player Eiji Shimomura failed the test and was sent home in disgrace. He was essentially locked up by his country’s mortified Olympic committee and extensively retested. Those results revealed that his naturally occurring testosterone ratio was 11:1. Such “outliers� are uncommon, but occur frequently enough that it seems certain the tests will, from time to time, penalize innocent athletes.
***
Vencill is hardly the only athlete to have tested positive for substances that seem to have been taken in complete innocence. Another is Zach Lund, the U.S.’s top hope for a gold medal in skeleton at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. Lund tested positive for something called finasteride, which apparently he’d been taking in a hair-loss treatment. For the six years he’d been using the stuff, Lund had been dutifully checking for finasteride on the banned-substance list. But alas, when it counted most—in the months leading up to the biggest competition of his

life—Lund failed to notice that finasteride had just been added. Finasteride, by the way, doesn’t even qualify as a performance enhancer, but it can be used to mask the presence of other drugs by creating “white noise� in the lab test, so it is banned. The Court of Arbitration for Sport announced its decision to suspend Lund “with a heavy heart,� but he missed the Olympics anyway.

“That poor guy got screwed worse than I did,� says Vencill. “It was a joke that they took him out of the Olympics.�

Cases like Vencill’s and Lund’s leave WADA’s critics sputtering with indignation. “The cure is worse than the disease,� says Dr. Rushall, who offers a laundry list of WADA’s shortcomings, including a confusion of recreational drugs with performance enhancing substances; questionable or nonexistent science; and a willingness to trample basic civil liberties and due process. “To be an athlete today, you give up all sorts of rights that the U.S. and the U.N. decry when other nations restrict them,� Rushall says. “It’s damn hypocritical.�

WADA lab technicians work under a gag order at 34 labs around the world, and the lack of transparency only invites suspicion. When drug testing was conducted by the national federations and the IOC, there were obvious conflict-of-interest issues. Now, because of WADA’s closed-door policies, there are serious questions about procedure.

Duke law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a national caliber 800-meter runner in the 1980s and an advocate for athletes to this day, is fairly optimistic about WADA’s potential but sees areas that clearly need work. “A lot of the science is good, but some of it is questionable,� says Coleman. “They will tacitly admit that some of the science is questionable, but it’s the best that they have. In those circumstances especially, attention to justice issues is really important.�

“Justice issues� include whether someone who’s inadvertently ingested a banned substance should be dealt with in the same manner as a deliberate cheater. Surely there is a middle ground, and WADA seemed to acknowledge one in January when, after several months of internal debate, it circulated a draft of revisions to its code. The key change was the acknowledgment that the strict-liability standard under which Vencill was punished should be eased. There is also talk of creating longer lab profiles of athletes in order to identify outliers, like the Japanese volleyball player, before their cases become doping issues.

Vencill, meanwhile, returned to swimming in the summer of 2005. He is able to see the irony in what was once a maddening situation: Had he made the Olympic team in 2004 and competed in Athens, he probably would be retired now. Instead, he’s back swimming with real enthusiasm at the advanced age of 28.

Recently, Vencill moved. As he patiently walked yet another reporter through the details of his case, he was unpacking box after box. In one, he came upon the very bottle of multivitamins that caused him so much trouble. He’d kept it for four years, like a talisman. “When I’m ready to throw it away, I will,� he muses, adding that there couldn’t be a better time and place to do so than next August, at the Olympics in Beijing.

By Merrell Noden