People rarely hear about amateur athletes taking steroids but this impressionable group could be at the highest risk, anti-doping crusader Dick Pound said in Winnipeg on Thursday.
The former vice-president of the International Olympic Committee took a luncheon crowd at the Fort Garry Hotel on a tour of the evolution of performance-enhancing drugs and spoke candidly about the potentially tragic consequences at the grassroots level.
He described steroid users as a pyramid, with professional athletes at the top and their amateur counterparts on the bottom.
"If you had 1,000 pros at the top, you've got hundreds of thousands of amateur athletes below them. If they see what the pros are doing, the danger is these young athletes will follow them and they won't know what they're taking. Sometimes the effects can be fatal," he told nearly 200 Canadian Club members and guests.
Pound, a Montreal-based lawyer, is the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (1999-2007). He spoke candidly about the devastating trickle-down effect that doping in sport can have on young athletes at the grasroots level.
"Why should your child, or anybody's child, become a chemical stockpile in order to be successful in sport simply because there's some sociopath out there that pays no attention to his or her promise of doping-free sport," said Pound.
"That's what our kids are facing. We as members of the public at large have what I believe is a responsibility to help bring sport back to what it should be. We should, we must, insist that athletes, coaches, sports organizations and professional leagues deliver what they promise -- healthy sport played by the rules."
Pound noted substance abuse in sports can be fatal because users don't know the quality of the drug they've accessed or how much to take.
Pound, an Olympic swimmer in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, has been involved in the IOC for 30 years. His work in marketing for the Olympics has made it a multibillion dollar enterprise and he was a key figure in exposing the corruption among IOC members linked to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Pound called for continued education and stiffer penalties through all levels of sport to deter athletes from making the "reckless and dangerous" choice to use drugs.
"The real aim is to prevent doping in the first place, not sanction people for getting caught," he said.
Pound pointed out that, despite what some athletes say who have been caught using, "doping in sport is very, very seldom accidental."
"It is almost always planned and deliberate, engaged in knowing it is contrary to the rules agreed upon by all the participants," Pound said. "It is done for the express purpose of gaining an unfair advantage over other competitors and is aided and abetted by professionals and others in positions of influence.
"Taking an anabolic steroid is not an accident. Blood transfusions are not an accident.
"Human growth hormone treatments are not accidents. Inserting a balloon into your anus or vagina and filling it with somebody else's urine so that when you provide a sample it's not your urine, is not an accident."
ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca
Dick Pound speaks out on...
The political demonstrations that have interfered with the Olympic torch's tour:
"I can understand why somebody would want to appropriate the Olympics to get publicity for their issue, and I'm not commenting on the importance of the issue, but if you turn it into violence where you're attacking torch runners and you're trying to extinguish this universal symbol of peace, you give up all of the moral high ground that you thought you were occupying. You become a thug. You're not a credible protester. If you'd lined the route with all kinds of signs and flags and people looking sad, you'd have had at least the same impact without behaving in a violent way."
The possibility of a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, considering reports some political figures are considering taking a pass on the opening ceremonies:
"I have no issue with the politicians, they know if they're not attending, it's a political statement... I think for athletes and teams who go there, you're not going there as politicians. You're going there as athletes. You're participating in the Games. One of our (IOC) rules is it's not political, you don't make demonstrations."
"Boycotts don't work... I don't understand how our synchronized swimmers (for example) not being in Beijing would make a difference. I don't think there's any impact... Athletes would come away feeling bitter and used in a publicity stunt."
The 2000 Olympics relay teammates of disgraced American sprinter Marion Jones being ordered to return their medals in the wake of Jones admitting her use of performance-enhancing substances and being stripped of her five Olympic medals:
"She (Jones) admitted to being doped, she's part of the relay team and the relay team pays the price. I think that's unfortunate for the other three, but that's the right result...Their Olympic committee will give them back. They broke a rule, somebody on their team cheated. In the Pan American Games in 1995 when (Canadian rower) Silken Laumann had taken a cold tablet and it had a banned substance in it. Her doctor wasn't paying enough attention to what she was taking, and their boat lost the (gold) medal. But that's the deal. If your performance has been improved by the use of this drug, you're toast."
His Olympic beginnings:
"Forty-eight years ago this year, the (Canadian) Olympic swimming trials were held here and I managed to qualify for the 1960 games in Rome. They turned out to be a magical experience for me, one that I have never forgotten and one that has led me to number of subsequent activities...to try and make it possible for other athletes to have the same wonderful experience. But for me, it all comes back to Winnipeg."
Why doping has become a massive problem at all levels of sport:
"The drug problem in sport today has reached the crisis it has become precisely because there is too much compromise, too much unwillingness to confront the problem when it first appeared, too much institutional denial on the part of those who should have known better and too much uncritical acceptance of platitudes that brushed aside what was really going on."
Drugs in the Canadian Football League:
"The CFL, believe it or not, has no drug policy. They've always taken the view that in professional football, there's no drug use and therefore, why would we test anyone for drugs? I think that's got to change."
The direction sport should go:
"You need to get everybody involved in sport to say, look, if we don't solve this problem, what's going to happen is responsible parents aren't going to let their children get into organized, competitive sport. You're going to end up with this diminishing circle of professional gladiators in sports that become increasingly violent and increasingly meaningless. Real people won't do it."
On the cost of testing for performance-enhancing substances and the random-testing policy in Canadian amateur sport:
"It is expensive for grassroots stuff, it's not expensive for the organized and professional sports. What's more important is the possibility that you might get tested. Just the risk that you could be tested, even if it's only one in every thousand athletes as opposed to one in every 10, the thought that it might happen to you is a deterrent."
On the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics scandal, which he called the "dark side" of sports administration:
"We learned very much the hard way that we could not call upon athletes and sports officials to behave ethically when the IOC itself was unable to demonstrate that it lived within the same high standards we demanded of others."
On early abuse of anabolic steroids, tongue-in-cheek, as athletes used to talk freely among each other until widespread drug use in sport came to light in the 1960s:
"Yes, I have terminal acne, my testicals have shrunk to the size of jellybeans and I'm in a constant rage but boy can I throw the shot put."
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