Track Athletes Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Late one night some time ago, a woman with fright in her voice called me. She was a world-class athlete with Olympic dreams. She said the Gestapo had come to her house at 3 in the morning. A hateful label, the Gestapo, and she applied it to men who woke her and demanded she supply urine for a drug test.

Outrageous.

Unbelievable.

In America, that can happens?

It was only the beginning. She later was told she had tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance. She was suspended from competition. She asked me how such a thing could be done with a knock at her door at 3 in the morning. She said she had no way of knowing if the sample tested had been hers; there was no documented chain of custody for it. There was no way to know if the testing had been done reliably.

Yet her dreams, her career, all but her life had been taken.

The next day, I learned an amazing thing that is relevant in today’s track and field drug scandal that threatens the United States presence in this summer’s Olympics at Athens, Greece.

I learned that world-class track and field athletes must agree to submit to random, unannounced testing in and out of season anywhere in the world at any time -- or they cannot compete. In essence, they agree to be presumed guilty until proven innocent. It’s the high price in civil liberties that they pay for participating in a sport that has been despoiled by the suspicion and reality that drugs have as much to do with achievement as ability and training.

Having been educated, I no longer thought my caller’s complaint was so righteous. No longer did the men arriving in the night seem so hateful.

If the athlete had agreed to such controls, she should have expected the visit, not been shocked by it. (As for due process, that’s another column.)

And now we are embroiled in another of track and field’s endless efforts to get ahead of dopers. It’s about the non-analytical positive.

Here, one might say, “Huh?” A non-analytical positive is a finding that enables the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to suspend an athlete without a positive drug test. What’s necessary is documentary evidence suggesting the athlete has used banned substances. (According to one USADA official, the sanction has been applied maybe a dozen times, usually when athletes have refused to be tested.)

Still, a non-analytical positive?

It’s a finding that can be made on the basis of documents that could include suggested drugs, schedules for use, checks written in payment, e-mails, even shipping labels.

Confronted with USADA evidence recently, world champion sprinter Kelli White, who had never tested positive, confessed to using banned drugs since 2000. She was suspended for two years, punishment perhaps softened by her promise to cooperate on investigations.

Even the prospect of a non-analytical positive set off alarms in U.S. sprint darling Marion Jones, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist and mother of a child fathered by her companion, 100-meter world record holder Tim Montgomery.

Before White’s suspension was made public, Jones cried out loud about the possibility of sanctions against her. One respected commentator, Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post, leaped to my old outrageous/unbelievable position. She called the non-analytical positive the “USADA’s way of dealing with athletes they suspect but can’t catch red-handed.” It is “an evil little something.”

Well, now. To call that “evil little something” by its proper American name is to call it circumstantial evidence; that is, it’s evidence from which a reasonable conclusion can be made. As it happens, of course, most criminal prosecutions are built on that kind of evidence. Martha Stewart could bake you a cake out of the circumstantial evidence used against her.

So Jones ought to be worried. An investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative produced indictments of four men for distributing steroids to a reported 27 athletes -- 12 in baseball and football, 15 in track and field. White was one of the 15, as was Jones, who testified to a grand jury investigating BALCO.

Defiant in advance, Jones has said that if she’s kept out of the Olympics “because of something that somebody thought, you can pretty much bet there will be a lawsuit. I’m not going to sit down and let someone or a group of people or an organization take away my livelihood because of a hunch, because of a thought, because somebody is trying to show their power.” Why anyone in the United States would choose to “show their power” by banning the nation’s most popular sprinter from the Olympic Games is a mystery, though no more a mystery than why Jones thinks that this is all about “something that somebody thought.” What it’s about is a paper trail suggesting deceit in the pursuit of gold.

When she cooled off, Jones and her lawyer, Joseph Burton, did a good thing, seeking to clear her name. The New York Times reported that Burton wrote a letter to USADA chief executive Terry Madden and U.S. Olympic Committee president Bill Martin. The lawyer requested re-testing of the existing Jones samples taken in and out of competition.

That would be good.