VANCOUVER — Years before the competition for the 2010 Olympic Games began, organizers were working to make sure these would be the "cleanest" Games in history.
"There will be more testing done at these Games than any previous Winter Games," said Mark Adams, chief press officer for the International Olympic Committee. "There will be 2,000 tests for 2,600 athletes." In Beijing, it was 5,000 for 10,500.
While drug testing has been an increasingly urgent issue for organizers, technology often aids the cheaters as much as it assists those trying to catch them.
"Every Games it's an absolute priority," said Adams. "It's a war we're never going to win, but we feel it's a battle worth fighting. The samples are kept for eight years, so we've got eight years for technology to catch up with the cheaters."
Positive drug tests that show an athlete has used a banned, performance-enhancing substance can mar a Games unlike anything else, but Adams said they'd rather deal with the bad press than the bad precedent.
"It's never good," he said of positive drug tests. "But clearly, it would be more than remiss of us not to try and catch them. … The sophistication of what we're able to test for gets better all the time."
In addition to random tests and testing the winners of events, officials are also acting on "intelligence" in deciding whom they will check.
"The drug tests are not completely random," he said. "We do act on information that comes to us."
As of Saturday, 882 athletes had been tested prior to competition. Of those, 634 were urine tests and 248 were blood tests. The number of athletes tested after competition is 629, with 530 of those being urine tests and 99 being blood tests. Halfway through the 2010 Games, no athlete has been caught cheating.
Most of the athletes don't mind the testing, although one Utah athlete had an issue four years ago. Zach Lund, who finished fifth in the skeleton competition two days ago, was prevented from participating in the 2006 Torino Games because he tested positive for finasteride, which was an ingredient in a hair restoration product he was taking. The World Anti-Doping Federation considered it a steroid-masking agent, but now it is no longer on the banned list.
"I know I got a raw deal, but you know, that's life," Lund said before heading to the 2010 Games. "It's just how you handle it. I think a lot of people can attest to that. My raw deal happened to be in sports. A lot of people go through a lot rougher things than me in life. I saw my mom get a lot worse card with skin cancer; that's a bad card. So I got a raw deal, but in the big scheme of things, it's not that big a deal."
He is no longer bitter about the incident, although he still has issues with the way the bureaucracy treats individual athletes.
"I've moved on," he said. "I've forgiven them. I realized it's a broken system. That's one thing that's good, too, is what I've gone through is it's given me a voice that people actually listen to now and I'm trying to do my part in helping change the system. I believe in anti-doping, I believe it's a good thing, but the system is broken right now, and I feel if like if my story can help keep what happened to me from happening to another athlete, in the future, if I can do that, it would be amazing. They've already made changes because of me."
Most of the athletes and coaches are grateful that officials are trying to catch cheaters.
In the 2010 Games, millions are being spent on drug testing. The Vancouver Organizing Committee built a state-of-the-art facility in Richmond, British Columbia, that cost $8.9 million. Nearly 500 trained volunteers are collecting blood and urine samples from all of the venues that are then processed at the facility, which is unlike any other at an Olympic Games.
VANOC's commitment to build and run the facility during the Games is part of what won Vancouver the right to host the Olympics.
"We cannot say pure sport, pure Games," Dr. Christiane Ayotte, director of the state-of-the-art lab told the Canadian Press in October. "We sure put in the best energy. I'm 100 percent confident that nobody can do better than what we are doing now, what we will be doing."
It will cost an estimated $7.5 million to conduct the tests during the pre-competition and competition period of the Winter Games. The effort marks a 70 percent increase in testing over four years ago in Torino.
In addition to traditional athlete testing, Adams said the IOC has formed a committee that will also look into ways of scrutinizing the "entourage" of an athlete who tests positive.
"We want to look into the people surrounding the athlete — the coaches, doctors, technical officials, and so on," said Adams of the commission just formed a few months ago to come up with a logistical plan.
"Simply because, clearly, an athlete who is caught doping will very often not be acting by his or herself; they'll have the help of doctors and trainers and so on. … I think we felt we really do need to check up on those people who are surrounding the athletes and very often making a good living out of that as well."
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