MONTE CARLO -- With less than 12 months to go before the Olympic flame is lit in the new Australia Stadium, the battle to make Sydney 2000 a drug-free Games looks already lost. Though next year's host nation has led the way in developing new tests and imposing strict punishments on drug users, the mood last week in Monte Carlo at the annual conference of the IAAF, track and field's world governing body, was bleak.
"The whole thing has become a sad joke, and I'm afraid to say it starts at the very top," said Carl Lewis. "It's not just about drugs, it's about lies and federations covering up for people."Lewis, winner of a record total of nine Olympic gold medals, believes that the main problem is that officials of the International Olympic Committee do not really want to discover a solution.
"The commitment to find a solution to the problem of drugs is just not there," he said. "There are much better ways to test than they are doing, but I don't think they truly want to catch anyone in the first place. It's terribly sad."
Lewis' sentiments were echoed by swimmer Mark Spitz, whose seven golds at Munich in 1972 remain a record for a single Games. Spitz said that Sydney would be 100 percent clean if the authorities wanted it to be.
"The IOC has the capacity and the power and the might and the knowledge and the technology to test for a plethora of drugs that they refuse to test for because of pressures from certain countries."
"If, in fact, they considered the whole list of drugs for which they are capable of testing, these countries would not pass the test. It's as pure and simple as that.
"So the problem lies not in the fact that the drug testing is incapable of determining the offense. The question is, are they going to test for everything they can?
"And the answer, as I speak, is no."
If two of the men whom many consider to be the greatest Olympians of all time believe that drug-taking is still rife, then why should anyone else have any faith in the system?
"We have to concede that, if they really know what they are doing, an athlete can go right around the system," said Don Catlin, whose Los Angeles laboratory handled the testing for the Atlanta Olympics.
In February it seemed the IOC was finally getting serious about eradicating the cancer of performance-enhancing drugs that is slowly eating away at the very heart of the Olympics. It pledged to take the lead in creating a multimillion-dollar independent anti-doping agency that would oversee testing worldwide and be in place in time for Sydney.
Scientists also believed they were on the verge of discovering a reliable blood test for human growth hormone and the blood booster erythropoietin, two substances top performers are widely believed to be using but which are currently undetectable by urine analysis.
These two factors, combined with the Australian government's willingness to introduce tough laws in the run-up to the Olympics which include custodial sentences for anyone caught trying to smuggle in performance-enhancing drugs, gave real reason for optimism.
Now, fast-forward nine months and what you discover is that the anti-doping agency has only just been set up amid threats from the leading countries, including Britain, not to support it, and that the scientists' search for a legally binding blood test has run aground for lack of funding.
An international conference on drugs in sports held in Australia last week has only served to deepen fears that nothing is going to change. All 26 nations represented in Sydney agreed to the setting up of an inter-government watchdog to address concerns about the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which itself was set up only a week before by the IOC in Lausanne with one of its own vice-presidents, Dick Pound, as chairman.
Barry McCaffrey, White House drug policy director, has led the concern about WADA. He questioned Pound's ability to enforce anti-doping sanctions against athletes, given the billion-dollar income that the Olympic Games generates for the IOC.
"This isn't an independent agency and I don't think anybody believes it is, either," said McCaffrey.
It is little wonder that the IOC has lost the confidence of the rest of the world when it comes to drug testing. Of nearly 2,000 tests taken during the Atlanta Games in 1996, only two positive results were announced. That was fewer than the five positives in 1992, 10 in 1988 and 12 in 1984.
That decrease offered little satisfaction to athletes suspicious that their rivals were cheating -- especially when it later emerged that five positive drug tests had not been acted upon by the IOC for reasons which were never quite clear.
Although the IOC has committed $3.5 million in recent years to drug research, its medical commission's chief, Prince Alexandre de Merode, said it was unlikely the 2000 Olympics would introduce mandatory blood tests for human growth hormone and erythropoietin because there could be no guarantee the tests would be reliable.
"To be fair, you can't take a medal away from someone who is tested with a method that is still not 100 percent accurate," he said.
However, a panel of scientists maintains that blood testing is still possible for the Games -- but only if the IOC acts immediately and puts in research funding.
Professor Peter Sonksen, whose GH2000 team at St Thomas' Hospital in London claims to have developed an effective method to detect human growth hormone, said funding was lacking to complete the project.
"We have a feasible and appropriate test for the Olympics in 2000," said Sonksen. "We have been twiddling our thumbs since March, the test method is up and ready, but we have seen no movement since then. It's very disappointing."
The IOC could be forgiven for being wary of adding any fresh tests right now, though, given the growing arguments over the spate of positives for nandrolone thrown up by standard urine analysis recently.
The list of athletes to have tested positive for the controversial anabolic steroid, which already included Linford Christie and Merlene Ottey, claimed another elite victim on Friday in the shape of Germany's 1992 Olympic 5,000 meters champion Dieter Baumann, who failed an out-of-competition test. Like Christie and Ottey, both acquitted by their national federations, he is sure to challenge the result.
The only really big name to ever fail an Olympic drug test was the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who at the 1988 Olympics was stripped of his 100 meters gold medal after testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol.
Five years later he failed again and was banned for life. His chances of one final reprieve were almost certainly nixed when it was announced last week that he had failed for a third time. Some things really do never change.
Unfortunately, if the credibility of the testing program is ever to be restored, it will take more than just Ben Johnson being caught every few years.