The Salt Lake Organizing Committee will run about 1,000 random, out-of-competition drug tests on athletes before and during the 2002 Winter Games.

"We will catch the cheaters," SLOC President Mitt Romney told members of the White House Task Force on Drug Use in Sports Thursday.

But making the Salt Lake Olympics the cleanest Games ever will require more than just random testing, according to members of the task force.

"Our program is designed to test drug-free athletes," Dr. Douglas Rollins, SLOC's doping-control medical director, said. "It's going to be your efforts in the next few months to see that drug-free athletes come to Salt Lake City."

The task force, chaired by White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey and made up of former Olympic athletes, doctors and representatives from SLOC, the U.S. Olympic Committee and International Olympic Committee, met for the first time Thursday in downtown Salt Lake City.

According to many on the task force, keeping drugs out of national and international competition requires a change in societal values.

"It's not catching cheaters that changes the nature of the game," McCaffrey said.

Canadian Olympic rower Heather Clarke said doping will only end when it becomes socially unacceptable.

"Young athletes do not care about the side effects, they care about the immediate results," Steve Hill of the Davis School District Safe School Staff said.

The focus needs to be returned to doing your best instead of being the best, Clarke said.

According to many on the task force, Sydney was a turning point for anti-doping efforts. But there were still the drug controversies surrounding U.S. shotputter C.J. Hunter and Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan. Hunter tested positive for a banned substance in an out-of-competition test, although he was not on the U.S. Olympic team. Raducan had her gold medal stripped after she tested positive for a banned stimulant contained in cold medicine she took at the advice of a team physician.

"The Sydney experience may indeed be a net negative our public had on having a clean sport," said Canada's federal doping policy director Ole Sorensen. "At the inner levels, we can say we've definitely moved ahead."

Organizations such as the World Anti-Doping Agency and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency have brought together a worldwide coalition to fight against performance-enhancing drugs.

But keeping up with the ever-changing drug market is difficult because of the intense pressure many athletes are under to use drugs.

"They are supported by an incredibly complex underground that could run rings around what we do," said Dr. Don Catlin, director of the UCLA/IOC Lab.

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Drug testing is usually a step or two behind the latest drugs on the market. SLOC and the IOC are working to develop a more accurate test for erythropoietin, commonly called EPO, for the 2002 Winter Games. EPO is a performance-enhancing hormone that boosts production of red blood cells, providing the body with more oxygen for a time. It will likely be the drug of choice for the Winter Games.

The first tests for EPO were conducted in Sydney for the 2000 Summer Games, but many questioned the credibility of those results.

"It's a very complex test and it needs a lot more work to get it online and to be litigation-proof," Catlin said.


E-MAIL: djensen@desnews.com

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