Three out of four athletes taking drugs

MORE than three out of four track and field athletes about to take part in the centennial Olympics in Atlanta have used performance enhancing drugs in their preparations, a British Olympic doctor has claimed.

Dr Michael Turner also believes the new high tech testing equipment installed in Atlanta to detect drug misuse is "a waste of time". "If you're talking about track and field, you're talking about a situation where the percentage may be 75 or above of Olympic athletes in Atlanta who will have taken some kind of performance enhancing drug," Turner tells BBC's Panorama programme tonight.

The International Olympic Committee claim their super sensitive detector the high resolution mass spectrometer can detect the illicit use of drugs such as testosterone, growth hormone and the synthetic hormone EPO as far back as eight weeks.

But Turner, who is travelling to the Games with the British team, has labelled the IOC's efforts "a more cosmetic arrangement ... than effective at eradicating cheating in sport."

"Testing urine in competition, by and large, is a waste of time. People are using growth hormone, they're using blood doping, both of which are undetectable in competition urine testing," he says.

"Athletes who cheat are using anabolic steroids out of competition in the off season, in the winter when they're training and they shouldn't be detected in competition. It's only the stupid or totally naive who are going to get caught in Atlanta.

John Cantwell, chief medical officer at the Games, admits the detectors cannot discover if an athlete has used growth hormone or EPO, but says. "I wouldn't say it's ineffective. I mean it is very effective at detecting what it can detect."

It has also been suggested that the high profile nature of the Olympics has led to pressure to cover up the real scale of drug misuse in athletics. Panorama reveals an incident in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when nine positive drug tests showed up on finalists in the last two days of the Games.

The results of these tests were sent to the chairman of the IOC's Medical Commission, Prince de Merode, but no action was taken. Dr Craig Kammerer, the associate director of the drugs testing laboratory for the 1984 Games, says. "We were totally puzzled initially and figured that something must be going on, politically or a cover up.

Professor Arnold Beckett, a member of the International Olympic Doping Committee at the Los Angeles Olympics, recalls how de Merode later explained that the results of the tests were destroyed, apparently without his knowledge.

Beckett admits. "We took the responsibility of not revealing this publicly," and says he now believes the results could have been destroyed to save the reputation of the Games.