TORONTO, Reuter: Ben Johnson’s disgrace over drugs at the Seoul Olympics has done more to focus International action against the use to illegal drugs in sports than any other event, a Government Official testified at a Canadian inquiry.
Lyle Makosky, Canada’s assistant Deputy Minister of fitness and amateur sport, told a royal inquiry into drug use in Amateur sport Johnson’s disqualification from the summer Olympics for steroid use focused worldwide attention on the doping issue.
“It was a singular event that catalysed dramatic change more than perhaps any their incident,” Makosky said on the second day of hearings,
“It raised the issue (of drugs vse) on the worldwide agenda in a rather dramatic fashion. There was a sense of the dramatic that the science of testing was sophisticated and perhaps better than some thought,” Makosky said.
And there was a signal that the international Olympic Committee (IOC) would not protect or conceal in any way a positive (drug test) result,” he said.
The Canadian Government ordered the public inquiry after Johnson, 27, had been stripped of the gold medal he won in the 100meters and had been banned from competition for two years after a drug testa the Olympics showed traces of the banned anabolic steroid, Stanozolol.
Makosky said the Johnson incident helped the fight against the use of performance enhancing drugs, but said there still is a lack of international cooperation and leadership in antidrug efforts.
A week before the Seoul Olympics, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch issued that organization’s strongest edict to date ‘against drugs when he said: “Doping equals death”
But Nakosky told the inquiry that the 1OC’s current role in drug testing is limited. The 1OC is responsible for testing athletes at Olympic competitions and does not conduct any random, out of competition testing,
There are 22 laboratories in the world accredited by the IOC to conduct drug tests for any of the 116 drugs on the IOC’s list of banned substances. IOC labs conducted about 30,000 doping tests in the last two years. About three percent of the tests turned up substances prohibited by the While Accredited labs must report all positive drug tests to the IOC Medical Committee, there is no requirement that these labs must indicate what penalty may have been levied against an athlete found to have used drugs, he said.
Robert Armstrong, the inquiry’s co-counsel, asked Makosky if the three percent figure was an accurate indicator of the scale of drug use in Amateur sports.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 20, 1989
