ESTUDIO BIOMECANICO DE LA MARCHA

My team's accomplishments brought me no special cachet among my peers in Canada. At a seminar I gave in the fall of 1983, one coach walked out in the middle. "Charlie's just got results because he has a bunch of niggers," he muttered. The sentiment was typical, if rarely expressed out loud.

On the matter of drugs there was little more enlightenment. Mike Mercer, now a shot and discus coach, forced the issue at the annual symposium of the Coaching Association of Canada. He stated that steroids were used extensively

throughout the world and had inflated the Olympic qualifying standards that Canadian athletes were being pushed to meet. If Sport Canada didn't want people to use drugs, when would it adjust its standards to reflect reality? At that Richard Campion, director of the Canadian Weightlifting Federation, stood up and flatly declared that the Eastern Bloc athletes were "winning on the basis of superior training programs, not steroids." (This assertion would become all the more absurd in light of the 15 official positives that Canadian weightlifters would generate from 1983 to 1989.)

That ended the discussion. Mercer left the meeting shaking his head, and I saw no point in getting involved.

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The psychology buffs were out in force at that conference. Everywhere I looked, a shrink was holding forth about "mental readiness" or some such blather. It occurred to me that Sport Canada knew that its athletes weren't prepared to win at that level and so it needed scapegoats-the athletes themselves. It wasn't our fault, the officials would say, after the fact. God knows

we did everything for them, but they just weren't psychologically tough enough.

At the time, the Soviets and East Germans were mounting a no-holds-barred war in bobsledding technology. Both countries were spending up to a quarter- million dollars apiece for their sleds, while the Canadians were bumbling along in $12,000 used models that the Swiss team had discarded. The toughest minds in the world would be hopelessly outclassed in those junkers. "Look, this is ridiculous," I finally told the symposium. "If you want to win Le Mans, you go out and buy a Porsche 956. You don't get a soapbox derby car with rope steering and put a psychologist in the back to tell you how to drive the damn thing."

I wasn't always at odds with officialdom. One afternoon in 1983, Senator Ray Perrault of Vancouver, Canada's newly designated minister for fitness and amateur sport, showed up at our track unannounced. "They said you're the guy producing the results in amateur sport," he told me, "so I thought I should talk to you." We spent the rest of the day together before he asked me for a ride-to catch a subway. Perrault was my kind of minister-no-nonsense, unpretentious, eager to learn. Unfortunately, he was shuffled out of office a few months later and lost his chance to make an impact.

I also liked the hard-working Otto Jelinek, one of Perrault's successors. But I found that even the best politicians couldn't get past the permanent government- the technocrat advisers with a vested interest in the status quo.

As we pointed toward the 1984 season, we needed a doctor-someone who could treat problems like Angella's sciatica and also oversee the drug protocols. As it stood, the athletes were visiting

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various physicians for blood tests, a scattershot system at best. I wanted more control and more reliable feedback; any mistake could be terribly costly, even irrevocable. I didn't want to repeat the lesson of Alexis Paul-MacDonald, an Optimist sprinter (though not in my group) who had been suspended in 1981 after testing positive for anabolics. To the end, Alexis insisted that she had never touched steroids, and that the positive had been triggered by her use of the Pill, which had a similar molecular structure. (Although the IAAF denied her appeal, it took the problem seriously enough to attempt to ban certain birth control pills.)

In October 1983, on a referral from a chiropractor we used, I accompanied Angella to see Dr. Jamie Astaphan, a St. Kitts native who'd received his medical degree from the University of Toronto and was known for his skillful treatment of sports injuries. Astaphan was refreshingly jovial and easy-going, and he impressed me by spending 90 minutes on Angella's medical history and current difficulties. While he knew little about track per se, his diagnostic skills were immediately apparent. He examined Angella before being told anything about her sciatica-and quickly confirmed the conclusions of two prominent doctors she'd seen previously that summer.

While Astaphan acknowledged his inexperience with performance-enhancing drugs, he was willing to learn more and to steer us through the pharmaceutical shoals. The state of steroid use had grown far more complex than it had been even five years before, when Dianabol was still predominant. Athletes were now trying a wide range of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances. By using frontier drugs, they were able to stay ahead of the tests; the IAAF's computerized equipment could flag a suspect metabolite only if specifically programmed to do so. With this new generation of pharmaceuticals, it was no longer possible to tell who was "on" by simply gauging their muscularity; a user could as easily be lean as bulging. We had entered a brave new world of designer drugs, and there was no turning back.

Shortly after seeing Astaphan, Angella visited Dr. Robert Kerr, a Los Angeles sports physician who was famous for his ministrations

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to a sizeable portion of the U.S. Olympic team. Kerr believed that Anavar worked more effectively for women than Dianabol, and directed Angella to take five milligrams per day. He also prescribed an injectable drug that had become the rage in elite track circles: human growth hormone, a pituitary extract which was used therapeutically in cases of dwarfism. Where steroids acted primarily on muscles, growth hormone strengthened bones and tendons as well.

When I first read the monograph insert, I got excited: Growth hormone would begin to break down fat in the body within 20 minutes of admimstration; it would enhance protein synthesis and increase the proportion of lean body mass; it had no known side effects. Best of all, the drug was not on the banned list. (Though banned today, it still cannot be detected, since no test can distinguish between the hormone made by the athlete's body and that introduced by syringe.) Despite the hormone's high price-$150 for a one-week's supply-it seemed to hold spectacular promise.

As a further supplement, Kerr also recommended two amino acids, arginine and ornithine, and a synthetic amino acid called L-dopa, which is used to treat Parkinson's disease. All three substances increased the body's secretion of growth hormone, and none was banned.

When this protocol was laid before Astaphan in Toronto, he deferred to Kerr's expertise while pledging to continue his own research. He later advised that we delete L-dopa (which caused stiffness) and substitute Dixarit, a drug used therapeutically to treat high blood pressure. In the spring of 1984, Astaphan advised us to include an injectable mix of vitamin B12 and inosine (a non- steroidal anabolic), neither of them banned, and occasional small doses of aqueous testosterone. He obtained all of these for us and never billed us in full, as he knew that our means were limited.

After detailed consultations with Astaphan, Angella, Ben, and Tony employed this expanded protocol (with the two men staying on Dianabol rather than Anavar) at their training camp that March in Guadeloupe. The athletes injected one another, as I was squeamish about needles and hoped to avoid them if I could.

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Despite the complexity of our new drug program, it remained conservative by U.S. standards. I would later learn that one group of American women was using three times as much growth hormone as Kerr had suggested, in addition to 15

milligrams per day of Dianabol, another 15 milligrams of Anavar, large amounts of testosterone, and thyroxine, the synthetic thyroid hormone used by athletes to speed the metabolism and keep people lean. (While research has yet to prove that "stacking" several steroids provides any greater anabolic effect than using a single drug, anecdotal evidence suggests that it may.) The group was additionally taking a variety of stimulants, including amphetamines and strychnine.

The Americans also surpassed us at the federation level. Sport Canada and the Canadian Olympic Association issued stern anti-drug admonitions on the one hand, then set forbidding Olympic qualifying standards on the other-standards that were impossible to reach without drugs. (Heading into the 1980 Olympics, the initially proposed COA standard for the women's 1,500 metres was faster than the world record at the time-a wildly optimistic projection.) The U.S. Olympic Committee was considerably more helpful to its athletes. Beginning early in 1984, the USOC sponsored an "educational," non-punitive testing program at the IOC-accredited lab at UCLA. Officially, the program was designed to familiarize Americans with dope-testing procedures. In effect, it allowed U.S. athletes to cut their clearance times to the bone-a huge home-court advantage. (As might be expected from such trial-and-error experimentation, up to 50 percent of these tests reportedly came up positive.)

The accepted clearance time for oral steroids, for example, was 21 days. But one male thrower found he could pass a test seven days after his last daily dose of 85 milligrams of oral Dianabol. And American women discovered they could pass only three days after their last dose of Anavar (an elusive steroid to test for) or Winstrol. In Los Angeles, American athletes would come into the Olympic Games at their drug-supported best.