Taking It Higher

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It's been this way for a while: before we see the athletes soar we must first watch them squirm. This time, Australia's pre-Olympics scandal centered on whether five of its male cyclists had injected themselves with banned substances in room 121 at the Australian Institute of Sport cycling facility in Adelaide last year. The five were cleared last month by an investigation headed by a former judge. One of them, Sean Eadie, faced a separate charge of importing human growth hormone (hGH) from the U.S. in the late '90s. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled there was insufficient evidence to make it stick. Weeks of tension - the sport has also been tarnished by selection squabbles - poisoned relations within the cycling team. For a couple of days last week at its base in Buttgen, Germany, some members weren't speaking to one another.

The riders argued their case and won. For the rest of the country, the patriotic course is presumably to forget they were ever in strife and cheer for them in Athens. But there's an alternative, which is to stop stifling those pangs of disillusionment. Justice may have been done, but coming on the eve of the festival's return home, this episode makes cherishing the Olympics a little harder. For devotees, it's time to immolate the fantasy and see the Games as they are: not wholly rotten, but deeply flawed.

It hurts, yes. My Olympic memories begin in 1972, with black-and-white images of Shane Gould and Beverley Whitfield, Australian champions of the pool, and snippets of overwrought Norman May commentary. Right up to early adulthood, each Games fired imaginings absurdly beyond my reach. So I settled for sports writing, which I did exclusively for 11 years. It was during that time, interviewing hundreds of athletes and observing in many of them the same traits - tunnel vision, self-absorption, extreme determination - that I realized how far from purity sport had traveled. Most disturbing were the attitudes of some coaches. One, voice thick with contempt, told me I was "pathetic" for investigating steroid use by athletes under his care, that all steroids do is "make you more of a man," and that it's the "responsibility" of some athletes to use them.

The wrecking ball of drug abuse has pounded the noble message of the Olympic Creed - "the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well" - to the brink of collapse. It was tempting to believe that Ben Johnson and Linford Christie were villains of a darker past. But great athletes keep turning out to be cheats. American sprinter Kelli White, the reigning 100-m and 200-m world champion, was suspended in May for two years after admitting to using banned drugs since 2000. White was a training partner of Dwain Chambers, a British sprinter of interest to Australians. In the lead-up to the Sydney Games, in an interview with Time, Australia's great 100-m hope, Matt Shirvington, admitted he felt frustrated by his inability to break 10 sec. He said he'd received "a kick in the bum" from Chambers, who's the same age as Shirvington (25) and had once had the same best time of 10.03. In June 2000, Chambers broke 10 sec. and eventually went as low as 9.87. He was a favorite for gold in Athens until he was banned from the Olympics for life after testing positive last year to the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone. And Shirvington? He won't be in Athens either, having made himself sick trying to achieve a time that appears to be beyond his body's natural limits.

"I don't care if the (Olympic) 100 m is won in 14 sec.," Dick Pound, founding chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said recently. "I just want every athlete in Athens to be clean." They won't be. "We believe the gap between the sophisticated cheats and the testers is closing," says Australian Sports Drug Agency spokesman Shaun Winnett, "but you can never give 100% guarantees." That's because the pattern hasn't changed: as scientists develop new tests for banned drugs, the cheats switch to substances authorities haven't heard of yet.

There's good news: bodies from the International Olympic Committee down are more committed than ever to a clean-up. But there are still signs that many in power don't know what they're up against. Fifty-eight athletes have failed drug tests during Olympic competition since 1972, but almost everyone acquainted with sport believes those 58 are a tiny fraction of the guilty. Anonymous polling has shown consistently that, as long as they think they won't be caught, most athletes would use drugs even with a high risk of side effects. In the lead-up to the Sydney Games, I studied the results of a poll of some 600 Australian Year 11 students. Any hope that the next generation of athletes would universally shun drugs was dashed: more than half wouldn't rule out using them if they were safe and undetectable; 3% of boys said they'd be prepared to die at 40 in return for a gold medal.

Ian Thorpe said recently that only the "naïve" would think there'll be no dirty athletes in Athens; the International Swimming Federation rapped his knuckles. Enjoy the next two weeks, by all means. But don't be played for a fool.