Three years after this interview, Marion Jones became the last, and biggest, victim of the BALCO scandal, and handed back her five medals from Sydney. There were many others from those Games, which were the most tainted in history to that time.

When the World Anti-doping Agency was formed just ahead of the Sydney Games, it was met with some cynicism. Given the scope of the drugs-in-sport problem, revelations that certain sporting federations were actively condoning the use of drugs, the immensity of the sport-business complex, and the lack of action by those who were in a position to do something about doping, what was centralisation going to do? There would be one body to corrupt instead of many. How easy would that be? One authoritative body to assure us that everything was OK, while everyone got on with their doping programs. The problem seemed far too entrenched for us to believe anything else.

But the choice of Dick Pound as WADA’s head may have been inspired. Pound always was the smartest operator, most articulate speaker and clearest thinker among a greedy and ambitious lot at the IOC.

At first, the problems faced by Pound seemed insurmountable. Athletics had a secret history of doping its stars that stretched back at least 35 years. Cynical use of the legal profession ensured that even athletes with proven performance-enhancing levels of a drug in their system could not only successfully appeal, but were capable of bringing down those sporting organisations that dared to uncover them. Entire sports in the USA seemed to be powered by artificial muscle. Other sports – yes, even in Australia – have been quieter about drug use, yet one only had to poke the surface – if he was game – to discover an underworld of use and supply. Then there were new genetic breakthroughs. The definitions of cheating have become decidedly woolly.

But Pound has proved to be up to the challenge. Last year, he irked Australians by publicly ridiculing Shane Warne’s “dog ate my lunch” defence when a diuretic was discovered in his system. Most Australians – even Warne’s detractors – were prepared to believe that there was at least a possibility that it was a genuine, albeit stupid, mistake. Then he publicly excoriated Sir Alec Ferguson – even making a show of forgetting his name – for supporting Rio Ferdinand after the player had failed to provide a urine sample.

But there was nothing irrational about Pound’s observations. They were driven by a relentless logic. And, in ways, it was thrilling to hear someone name behaviour for what it was on the issue of performance enhancement – especially someone at that level.

Since Pound’s been on board, a rigorous world anti-doping code has been agreed on by the world’s sporting federations. Most remarkably, in a couple of short months, the USA seems to have made the decision that it no longer wants to be the Great Satan of sport, and has decided to comply. No doubt Pound was able to convince them that the world can do without them, after all.

Suddenly, structures seem to be in place. Athens might not be entirely drug-free, but it will be the most heavily-monitored Olympic Games of all time.  This will mean fewer records, but at least we’ll be spared the ordeal of another fortnight of suspended disbelief.

Is WADA involved in any way in prevention, or just detection?

Both. Prevention in the sense of making clear what the rules are and holding education programs and outreach programs.

So, WADA’s actively protecting sport from the next wave of artificial performance-enhancement techniques?

It is. It’s financing research, encouraging whistle blowers to come forward and conducting outreach programs to alert people to the fact that there are things out there like THG.

Have any of those whistleblowers come forward yet?

The whole THG thing was whistleblowers.

But wasn’t that just a disgruntled trainer who first came out? WADA wasn’t involved, was it?

It was done through one of the national anti-doping agencies, sort of like your ASDA. It was USADA. The sample was provided to the USOC, which turned it over to the anti-doping agency. It was then analysed and the information was spread to the other accredited labs so they’d know how to spot it.

What about genetic discoveries? Is there anything WADA can do to monitor their intrusion into sport?

We regard that as doping as well. We’ve already had meetings with some of the leading genetic scientists just to say, “Listen. As you go on with your work which is terrific for curing things like muscular dystrophy and so on, be aware of the fact that there will be people trying to use it for nothing but performance enhancement, and help us to first of all get a regulatory framework that allows this stuff to be only used for therapeutic purposes. And secondly as you move from laboratory benches into clinical trials, part of the protocols should be that you also develop a means to detect whether this gene transfer therapy is being used or not, so that we can test afterwards.”

OK, let’s take advancements in GM food technology. As this proceeds, it’s likely that it will further blur the distinction between natural and “unnatural” performance enhancement. Is WADA equipped to deal with this?

Yes, but the world deals with these definitional problems every day, and they evolve. It may be that, a hundred years from now, something considered “unnatural” will be available to the entire world and people live to age 110 and are all eight feet tall – if that happens, then it may not be doping any more. Now you might say, “What about some poor little guy in Vietnam who lives on rice and here you are in Australia living on these healthy meats and so on?” Are you doping because that’s unnatural as far as the Vietnamese is concerned? You can’t solve all those issues.

Has it come to your notice that this is already occurring? What do you know?

I don’t think we’re there yet. I guess it will be a number of years before anything might conceivably happen. What we’re trying to do in genetic areas is to be there at the start rather than – as in the case of drugs – having it get out of hand and trying to play catch up. Meanwhile there are going to be a lot of rumours around about EPO producing genes etc., and it will be difficult to separate fact from fiction. But if you get really elevated levels of hematocrit in the blood which is what EPO does, you can keep people out of the competition because the danger of stroke or heart attack is just enormous. That’s why cycling and cross-country skiing don’t take on the burden of saying it was application of EPO; they just say, “Sorry, it’s too dangerous for you to take part. Bugger off. And by the way, every time you enter a competition from now on, we’re going to test you. We just don’t believe this level of hematocrit can be achieved naturally.”

Although athletes from many countries cheat, the USA  – particularly the USOC, US Track and Field and many professional sports seem to have actively obfuscated, obstructed, denied and ignored. What is WADA’s relationship with America and its sporting bodies? 

Well, it was very low for a while, but there’s been a turnaround since the end of last year. They’ve changed their representative on our board, and he is really interested in it now. The President, Mr Bush, has elevated the whole question to the level of a state of the Union address. The USOC has clamped down on US Track and Field. So there’s a lot of fairly recent progress, and most of it has come about as a result of WADA being on their case.

Since the time you actually pointed the finger at the White House, claiming that some of the problems emanated from there, things have improved?

Yep.

Is it more difficult to police doping in sports that are not international, such as NFL or NBL or NBA? Are you tempted to just let them stew in their own juices?

We do have a general interest in protecting athletes and the integrity of sport, so once we get the Olympic movement sorted out, which will be done by the time of Athens, we can move on to other professional leagues and other sports such as…the one in which Shane Warne competes. You probably thought I wouldn’t mention that.

I reckon I would have! He made his comeback a couple of days ago. What do you think, generally, of some of the penalties meted out by the various sporting bodies to guys like Warne, who took a banned substance, and Rio Ferdinand, of Manchester United, who failed to attend a drug test?

The view I expressed at the time when Shane got a year and was making loud noises about an appeal, I simply said that, with an appeal against a sentence, a sentence can go up, as well as down. And all of a sudden, he stopped any noise about that. There was no reason in his case to cut the sentence in half, because it was quite clear that the hearing panel simply didn’t believe him, as to the story he gave. Rio Ferdinand is a different thing. He was certainly subject to a two-year penalty. I’ve never seen the basis on which the hearing panel recommended only eight months. But that’s working through the football system. It’s a football sanction that has to be imposed. Once they’ve completed the process and reached their conclusion, that would be the time to comment.

You had a bit to say when it was tossed around that Warne might train with the national team or his State team. You really didn’t believe Warne’s defence, did you?

No. And you don’t put someone in the clink and then let them out again so they can practice to do things better, while they’re supposed to be serving a sentence. I think Australian cricket reached the right conclusion. They didn’t allow him to do that. They didn’t allow him to compete in charity matches and so forth. I mean, if you’re suspended, you’re suspended.

You were vehement that the presence of the diuretic meant he was a cheat. Is it ever possible that there might be another reason?

Name one.

Let’s just say that, being vain, Shane Warne did take a diuretic to look better on TV. Is that possible?

Is it possible? What’s possible?

Is it plausible?

Well, I don’t want to enter into that, because his explanation was not believed by the panel that heard him, and the reason that diuretics are on the banned list is because they are regularly used to mask other drugs. So you know, as a cricketer, you don’t take diuretics.

You’re a lawyer. Are there actually more explosive revelations about very high-profile drug cheats – especially retired ones – that can never come out now because of the law?

Because of the law? (laughs). So, you take that great former athlete, Robert Drane, takes legal action against WADA saying, “I want a court injunction to prevent you from ever disclosing that I took drugs” (Laughs). ‘Scuse me? Why would you take an action like that? Either you took the drugs and you’re worried about it, so you identify yourself as a cheat by taking that action, or you didn’t take them and so you don’t give a shit.

OK, so is it possible to test samples going all the way back to Sydney? If so, why hasn’t it been done? There are a lot of stories going around that a few heavily-sponsored legends would be sunk if that was the case, and it hasn’t happened. The THG and Modafinil scandals only seem to reach back to the last world champs.

Well, I think you should maybe check with ASDA, but one of the things we wanted to do with THG and so forth was to see if we could not find a starting date. I know we went back to Salt Lake city and I thought there were still some samples ASDA had from Sydney that they analysed. You could speak with (ASDA Chief Executive John) Mendoza and he’ll probably tell you.

But there are a couple of problems with that. One is that you’ve gotta make sure you’ve stored the samples in conditions that don’t allow them to deteriorate. What’s likely to happen even if they do deteriorate is that something that was there will not be found at the later tests. It’s impossible for something to appear in urine that wasn’t there in Sydney. So the athlete, even if he or she has cheated, gets a little bit of an advantage if you haven’t, for example, frozen the urine to keep it from deteriorating.

But I recall people calling for samples to be frozen from Sydney at the time, in anticipation of precisely this situation. I was one of them. It obviously hasn’t happened. Now we haven’t heard anything else from Sydney, and are never likely to.

Well, other than the tests that were reported on at the time. We did an independent observer mission there and didn’t see anything that was out of the ordinary.

WADA was very young then. It was only formed earlier that year. Is it possible you guys didn’t fully have the act together?

No. It took a while for everybody to figure out what information an independent observer had to have. But once that was sorted out between the IOC and SOCOG, that was no problem. No…we got everything we wanted.

That’s interesting. Without compromising the rigour of drug testing, is it possible to judge an athlete’s intent from the amount in their system, and penalise accordingly?

In a subjective sense, no. Probably not. But you have, for certain drugs on the list, a certain minimum that needs to be there. In some of the stimulants, for example, there’s kind of a grey area. Below X, you don’t report it as a positive. Between X and Y, it’s reported as a positive, but depending on the circumstances, after interviewing the athlete and so on, you may or may not decide that the quantity is consistent with doping or something else. I don’t know if you remember in Seoul in 1988, when the rumours came out that someone had tested positive, the Poms held a press conference and confessed that it was Linford Christie. He’d tested positive for some ginseng-related thing and the quantities were small enough that they said, “Ok, we don’t think this was an intention of doping.” But if it’s over the Y threshold, then it is doping. Same is true with salbutamol. If you get a concentration of over 1,000, there is a presumption that you’ve taken it for the steroid effect.

So there are degrees of penalty to reflect that?

Well, there are thresholds, below which you do nothing, above which you make an inquiry, and once you get over that there’s a presumption of doping. Used to happen with caffeine and things like that.

What I mean is, we get cynical about all these “inadvertent” positives, especially in athletics. But at the same time, we felt for people like Andreea Raducan in Sydney. Wouldn’t the amount of, say, nandrolone or pseudoephedrine tell you whether it was deliberately ingested for the sake of performance enhancement, or whether it really was in a headache tablet or a food supplement, and whether a penalty of a lesser degree should therefore be applied in those cases? I mean, pseudoephedrine has even been removed now from the banned list, hasn’t it?

Yeah, I forget. A couple of things got taken off. In Raducan’s case, the explanation was something reckless. A doctor gave her two big cold tablets. So when she tested positive, she had to lose the result. But we didn’t do what we subsequently did with Lazutina and Daniilova (Russian Skiers), which was to say ‘Oh, your Olympic results are to be removed.’ Because it was completely inadvertent.

But couldn’t most inadvertents be construed as reckless? Shouldn’t her medal be reinstated?

No, because no matter how it got there, if it’s in your system in an in-competition event, you have to lose the result of that event. Because, whether you knew it or not, you may have had an advantage. It’s tough. It’s the old thing of hard cases make for bad law. But it’s the only way you can operate an anti-drug policy.

What do you think of pre-WADA anti-doping strategies when you look at subsequent revelations about the protagonists at Seoul 1988?

Generally-speaking, most of the in-competition was good – it was pretty much state of the art, and we were good at picking up the so-called race-day drugs. You could get fooled by the people using steroids if they’d cleared them out of their system by game day. That’s why you need unannounced, out-of-competition testing, which is an important part of our strategy.

So, I wouldn’t be the only one who would be cynical about sporting performances over the last, say, thirty years at least.

Well, it was spotty. Athletics, to give credit where it’s due, have had a reasonably good anti-doping policy, where they haven’t been able to do as much testing as they want, because it’s an expensive business or requiring their national federations to do more testing. And by requiring federations like US Track and field to provide them with information of positive cases, US Track and Field would just say “I’m sorry, we’re not going to give you the information.” And so, these athletes would almost certainly have been suspended for some period of time because they tested positive, but the IAAF didn’t know better.

The accord you recently struck with FIFA – do you intend to do similar things with worldwide peak organisations?

Well, FINA and others have already adopted the code. We’ve got all the Olympic federations on board except four, I think. They are yet to have their meetings. Cycling has said it will adopt the code. So the Olympic movement is set to be in pretty good shape. Then we just have to roll it out further to some of the other leagues. Not just America. There are all sorts of leagues in your part of the world, Asia, Africa, Europe that are not governed under the international federation structure.

Has your relationship with the Olympic movement been a bit stormy since WADA was formed?

The IOC has always been supportive of this. I wear my IOC hat here. It was our idea to create WADA. We’ve put it in the charter that following the code is obligatory for the entire Olympic movement.  In order for a sport to be on the program or remain on the program, it must adopt the world anti-doping code. The IOC has been powerful in support of all this.

So this is good for the IOC’s image?

We did this deliberately because there was some question about whether the IOC was serious, there was some question about whether the international federations were serious and the national Olympic committees. So we set up this structure that would be independent of all of them. None of these organisations is in a position to control the agency, and 50% of the voting control rests with governments, so it is really an arm’s length operation willingly established by the IOC.

You mentioned using FIFA’s existing network of doping control officers – how will they be accountable to WADA and its charter? 

They would act as doping control officers for the purpose of taking samples, ensuring that the samples will be taken, sealed, all that sort of stuff. Their job would be to get that sample to one of the accredited laboratories. The advantage of that network, if you have them in 120 countries, is that we don’t have to send somebody who has to fight their way through customs and that sort of stuff. You’ve got them on the spot and with the kits, and it will be cheaper and more effective for us.

Tell us about the world code that will be in place before Athens.

That was what we negotiated and arranged to have approved by a conference at Copenhagen last March. We gave all sporting organisations up to the Olympics in 2004 to get it ready. And the governments will have up to the winter Olympics in 2006 to do their thing.

Have any sports been recalcitrant?

Everybody’s in favour of doping-free sport –

Is that right?

Oh yeah. Where you get the reluctance is where you have sanctions for non-compliance. Where you have money involved and the idea of suspending someone for two years for a doping offence creates some difficulties. It’s actually the penalties that are the problem.

In many subtle ways, the way has become open for the gradual acceptance of artificial means of performance enhancement in sport. What can WADA do about general complacency?

Everybody is entitled to take drugs for therapeutic reasons, even athletes. We try to make sure that where there’s a general medical reason for it, that we provide a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE). If we give one, it’s on sensible ground and it’s a standard that’s applied to everyone. There are athletes the world over with asthma and they’re all taking salbutamol. We’ve said, “Fine, let’s just see how much of this is genuine and how much is phoney.” Now we have a system where you have to apply to take it and play sport at the same time. You supply your medical record to an independent committee and they say, “Ok, we agree.” Or, “Sorry, we’re not persuaded. This is performance-enhancing.”

OK, so do WADA have any enemies left, or has it eliminated them all?

I would say the greatest enemy is probably the fact that there are a lot of people still out there who don’t understand that it’s not only wrong but it’s potentially dangerous to be taking some of the stuff. They think it really doesn’t matter. You’ve got rules about being offside, you’ve got rules about equipment – all of sport consists of rules that are essentially arbitrary: how much a cricket ball weighs, the size of bats – this is just another one of those rules. If you’re offside, you pay a price for it, if you’re LBW, you pay a price for it, if you punch out a competitor, you pay a price for it, if you take drugs, you pay a price for it. The rules are arbitrary. You play it for fun. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.  But if you do, here are the rules. You’re actually freer in sport than you are in society. There are some laws you cannot avoid if you live in Australia or Canada. But if you want to pump your body full of steroids and do weightlifting, go ahead. But you’re just not going to compete against people who don’t do it.

Published in Inside Sport, March 2004