No agreement on universal sanctions

As with virtually all argument on the topic, the Olympic-sponsored World Conference on Doping reached an impasse yesterday. Plans to establish a uniform doping sanctions scheme throughout the sporting world ran into difficulties with professional sports federations and into conflict with civic law in many countries.

Delegates who had expected to wrestle with complex medical and scientific definitions during this week found themselves unable to agree on the prospect of uniform sanctioning of athletes caught cheating.

Ironically, given the role of the sport in creating the need for this week's conference, it was cycling which effectively put a spoke in the wheels of harmony yesterday.

Hein Verbruggen, head of the international cycling federation, bucked the trend of a conference which was talking a hard line on the issue of drugs by questioning the effect of sanctions.

Verbruggen, who has personally presided over cycling's disintegration while scoffing for many years at suggestions that his sport had a problem, conceded that cycling had acute difficulties, but suggested that in the long term bans would not be a solution.

"Longer sanctions will cause a rush from athletes to the civil courts and action for compensation that we can't afford. How are we to pay the wages of an athlete who is restored to competition?"

Similar arguments have been made on behalf of football, tennis and major American sports, where the fear of having to compensate for loss of high earnings if the athlete wins a case in the civil courts has effectively paralysed doping control efforts.

Sepp Blatter, president of the international soccer federation, FIFA, expressed his own reservations about imposing standard bans. He told the conference that he was concerned about a fixed penalty and said governing bodies should have more flexibility to deal with cases within their own sport.

However, most of the contributions to the debate, particularly by Europeans, stressed a desire to have strict sanctions, including a minimum ban of two years for first offenders. Helmut Digel, of the German athletics federation, who has suggested scrapping all world athletics records at the turn of the century because some of them are drugs-tainted, was among those who requested that those ignoring the new bans be thrown out of the Olympics. There was impatience, too, from members of the IOC athletes' commission, who suggested that if sports like football and tennis didn't wish to get in line with others, they should simply be excluded from the Olympic movement and future Olympic celebrations.

Verbruggen also touched briefly on the other submerged issue of the debate, the fact that many of the drugs being used in top-level sport at the moment are undetectable.

"What do sanctions do against undetectable drugs? They are 90 per cent of estimated doping cases."

The reclassification of the banned list is a sore subject here, with the IOC sending out mixed messages about its plans since president Samaranch suggested vastly reducing the list of banned substances last year. On a couple of occasions, suspicious delegates have asked senior IOC members to clarify if they wish the list to include merely drugs that will damage an athlete's health or all performance-enhancing drugs.

It was suggested by several speakers that it would be a matter of time and additional resources for detection to catch up with drugs cheats, but the gap between the two sides shouldn't force sport to give up chasing.

The fall-out from the bribery scandal continued to contaminate the bracing Swiss air. Juan Antonio Samaranch, increasingly beleaguered and weakened by attacks from both outside and within his organisation, met early in the day with a large contingent of IOC members who expressed concern at proposed reforms to the system of selecting host venues for the Olympics. The members expressed the view that taking their votes away from them suggested that they were not to be trusted.

Their case was not helped by news arriving from Japan that the Mainichi newspaper was reporting that hard evidence had been found proving bid officials spent millions of dollars on entertaining IOC members during Nagano's successful 1998 Winter Games bid.

Nagano officials had stated earlier that all financial records relating to the bid had been destroyed when the Games ended.

Later in the day, Olympic watchers interpreted a series of briefings by senior officials as Samaranch's way of letting it be known that he was reluctantly willing to grant real independence to the new world anti-doping agency.

Last November, at a preparatory meeting for Lausanne, the IOC agreed Samaranch should head the new anti-doping agency. But this week, under pressure from leading sports officials and politicians, that wish has become unsustainable. Delegates were agreed yesterday that it was most likely that the UN would be asked to formulate the new body.

The IOC was attacked from several quarters on the opening day of the conference for its plans to install Samaranch as head of the anti-doping agency and to include a representative of Olympic sponsors on the agency executive.

And Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, re-stressed the view yesterday that the independence of the agency was vital to its success.

Schily was speaking on behalf of the European sports ministers during his country's six-month EU presidency.

The conference concludes today.