Knights in rusty armour

Some sports shorthand: people in charge of drugs campaigns are known as Czars. People who control sports organisations are Supremos. Now then. Yesterday the Czar came to the world Conference on Doping in Lausanne and whipped the Supremos.

When it was done, Barry McCaffrey, the Czar, popped out of the little lift on the media floor of the Palais de Beaulieu, surrounded by a flock of nodding aides and flunkies.

"We did the right thing, didn't we?" he said to the flock as he strode through the media coffee area where sports journalists, unused to the sedentary pace of conference life, were lolling and spoofing.

"And we'll do the right thing in here," he said, heading for the small offices of the news wire outlet Agence France Press, there to sternly reiterate the frost-bitten words with which he had just stung the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

This was payback. Revenge served cold. McCaffrey is a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, the White House Drug Policy Director by title. The tight lip and military bearing suggest that his input into Clinton's drug policy goes a deal further than advising people not to inhale. His presence in Lausanne is an acute symbol of the changing relationship between governments and the IOC. Traditionally, politicians have come to the IOC to implore, cajole and beg. Democratically elected leaders prostrate themselves before self-appointed grandees and simper. No more. Yesterday, with the IOC bent, frail and tortured, McCaffrey came to scold and bully.

McCaffrey's submission to the floor had been broadly similar to those of many of the morning's 22 speakers. He spoke on the drugs issue and his administration's aspirations.

Then, as he buttoned his coat and reached for his hat, he noted almost casually that it would be remiss of him not to make mention of the IOC, a body for whom his administration had great respect.

Composing his face sternly, he urged them, however, to consider institutional reform: open books and financial records, open recorded votes, a published and enforced code of conduct and an elected, accountable membership.

The cool silence which embraced him was such that he might just as well have told the Conference of Religious Superiors to get themselves checked for venereal diseases. Then, just to make sure he his audience was getting the message, he went and said the same things to the wire agencies and then repeated them for a mass press briefing.

When McCaffrey was done speaking, though, he left behind a roomful of umbraged hosts. Juan Antonio Samaranch, who suffers from a sort of princess and the pea sensitivity when it comes to matters of diplomatic protocol, shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tersely introduced the next speaker. But Samaranch's lowered eyes and clasped mouth told the story. His Excellency had just had his backside kicked. Again.

They were queuing up like kids at a fairground as Samaranch's spindly rear end hung in the wind. In media hotels the reception desks were piled with a letter from the IOC denying a long series of corruption charges against Samaranch. Yesterday morning Samaranch's very own drugs Czar, Prince Alexandre de Merode, claimed that Samaranch had set the drugs war back 10 years for the sake of politics and parsimony.

Marie George Buffet, the French sports minister, and Otto Schily, her German counterpart, had little jabs.

It was that sort of morning. Little Tony Banks, the British sports minister, pronounced the Olympic ideal "soured and sullied" and then excused himself from the media circle.

"Gotta go. Having lunch with President Samaranch."

"Whose paying for it Tony?"

"Yeah. Good question. Maybe I won't eat anything at all."

Back in the balm of autumn, when the IOC first mooted the idea for a world conference on doping, the supremos must have enjoyed a fleeting image of themselves as the white knights of sports riding to the rescue. Yesterday at the round table, with their armour rusted and holed by corrosive scandals, the old knights looked more a part of the problem than the solution.