Trouble Handling The Truth
The Age
Wednesday September 9, 1998
There is a scene in the movie A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson, a snapping doberman of a US marine colonel, is in the witness box defending the violent culture that leads to the murder of one of his men. As Tom Cruise, playing a navy lawyer, probes relentlessly for the truth, Nicholson suddenly explodes. "Truth? You can't handle the truth!".
Nicholson's military character spoke for all those who believe the public doesn't really want to know what it takes to "defend" democracy. They just want their side to win.
The refrain became a familiar one during the course of an Age investigation into the use of drugs in Australian sport. Athletes from a wide range of sports argued that not only did we not understand how elite sport worked, but that we didn't really want to know. We just wanted our athlete or our team to win.
But if drugs have penetrated far into Australian sport, as many contend, how is it we see so little hard evidence? Where are the clean athletes prepared to expose all, or the investigators working to bust it wide open? The answer is as much to do with the athletes' mistrust of those who run sport as it is to do with the cloaked nature of their world.
Bruce Maycock is one who knows how hard it is to get inside this athlete's world. A PhD student at Curtin University, Maycock spent three years researching Western Australia's black market steroid trade. He shaved his head and hung out with dealers, bouncers, bodybuilders and informants. But whenever he tried to follow the trail leading towards elite athletes, it quickly went cold.
"It's easier to get into the dealer network than it is to get into the athlete's," said Maycock. "It's a very closed shop, with a few gatekeepers who exclude you unless you're an athlete yourself."
Few athletes offer to shed any light on this demi-monde. There is sport's unofficial code of silence, for starters. Never rat on one of your own. They also understand the legal complexities - how can you prove someone is using drugs when the evidence is either undetectable or long gone?
Indeed, who is listening anyway? From the athletes' perspective, everywhere they look they see people profiting from the business of sport, people they find it hard to trust.
They don't trust politicians because they know all about bread and circuses. They don't respect the Australian Sports Commission because, as distributors of the $135 million medal incentive scheme, they have applied international performance standards that (some say) steer athletes towards drugs.
They are suspicious of the Australian Sports Drug Agency because, if it is really out to catch people, why is its success measured by reaching targets (more than 98 per cent) for numbers of negatives? They never forget that the Australian Institute of Sport was created solely to bring home medals, and, as a Senate inquiry showed, that led to some strange shenanigans in the 1980s. They look at the International Olympic Committee - which dedicates just $10 million of its quadrennial budget of $3 billion to drugs research and testing - and see an organisation for which positive drug tests are like knives through the heart.
They see sporting organisations under the Olympic banner that need medals to attract funding and sponsorship, and professional organisations that need faster and stronger athletes in order to secure plum television contracts and sponsors.
They see clubs that talk tough about their attitudes to drugs, only to fall back on mateship when it blows up in their face. They see sponsors attracted only to winners, and television executives who give no thought to how their plans for extra programming or viewer-friendly rule changes will impact on the athlete.
They see a media that feasts on images of golden Aussie heroes and indestructible champions in order to sell more papers, snare more listeners or capture more viewers. And, lastly, they see a public that craves to be entertained and thrilled by the escalating exploits of their boys and girls in green and gold or club colors.
With so many interests served, they ask, why would anyone want to risk it all by pursuing drug users? Oh, they hear the posturing about level playing fields and health concerns. But athletes have been taught to judge people by deeds rather than words. They see little of the former and way too much of the latter.
One athlete who knows what it's like to be caught between the rhetoric and the reality is recently retired hammer thrower Sean Carlin. One of the select few everyone agrees is clean, Carlin won Commonwealth Games gold in 1990 and 1994 and was tipped out of the medal round in Barcelona only by an American who subsequently tested positive. But Atlanta was a disappointment and Carlin's funding through the ASC's medal incentive scheme was cut.
"So late last year I asked myself what I needed to do to be better," recalled the muscular Adelaide schoolteacher. "Without funding, it was impossible to train full-time. That left drugs. And morally and ethically I couldn't choose that. So the choice became an easy one."
The 30-year-old says the ASC is disingenuous if it thinks that the funding can be seen only as an incentive and a support for athletes to train more. By first linking funding to world standards, when many of those world standards are drug-assisted, Carlin says the clean athlete is put in an immediate bind.
"Why not support me as the best in the country? Instead, they put pressure on you to match world standards and tell you your funding is in danger."
As though such inconsistencies aren't enough to discourage whistleblowers, there's the case of our most "celebrated" tell-all, Sue Howland. The hulking javelin thrower's experience during the Senate's drug in sport inquiry is still proferred as a reason why no one wants to follow in her footsteps. And she says she didn't even tell it all.
What she did say on television and then before the inquiry was enough to make some lifetime enemies. It began when Howland - a gold and silver medallist from the previous two Commonwealth Games, then serving an 18-month ban for steroids - went on the ABC's Four Corners program in 1987 and said that she was offered drugs at the AIS when she was a scholarship holder. Drug-taking was common in Australian track and field, she said.
The following year, after pentathlete Alex Watson's positive test for caffeine at the Seoul Olympics, the Government was sufficiently concerned to establish a Senate inquiry into drugs in sport, under chairman Senator John Black. Howland got things started by repeating her claims and giving evidence of AIS doctors conducting tests to ensure she would pass drug tests.
The inquiry ran for two years, during which Black and his men exhausted themselves chasing phantoms. Solid evidence was virtually impossible to obtain. Howland, isolated and vilified, was later to say that the truth appeared to be the last thing anyone wanted to hear.
Today, Howland works as a security guard at Canberra's National Gallery. She wishes she'd lobbed a few more grenades at the Senate inquiry, but she's done as much as she can to expose hypocrisy in Australia. "It's a hidden world," she says. "And it's going to stay hidden, because the drugs are undetectable."
She might also have added that it will stay hidden because so many athletes believe that, rather than cheating the system, they are merely conforming to it. For these athletes, with their assumption that everybody else is doing it, drugs are simply a way of restoring the level playing field. From the moment the first drug-taker won a gold medal, the die was cast. It's been catch-up ever since, as Sydney steroids researcher Paul Dillon found in speaking to more than two dozen elite athletes.
"Most felt forced into action because others were squeezing them out," said Dillon.
These athletes argue they are no different to anybody else who's out to win at their job. Granted, greed and overblown ambition are part of the equation, too. But what do you expect if you dangle a big enough carrot - a gold medal or a $300,000 contract - in front of people? For those to whom winning is the only thing, drugs are a powerful lure. One they don't expect us to understand.
It's not just the public that struggles with the equation. Sprinter Raelene Boyle, robbed of Olympic gold by drug-taking East Germans in the 1970s, says she is repulsed by what she sees in Australia now.
"I see sportspeople hiding behind lawyers and Justin Charles getting a hero's welcome back. I can't believe how it's gone. It's a huge sewer."
Paradoxically, Boyle counts Howland among her friends. To her mind, at least she had the courage to tell the truth once she was caught.
But do we have the courage to listen to it? Do some sums. We are all agreed the rest of the world sits down to steroids and growth hormone each morning. And yet somehow, on nothing more than sweat and Sustain, our small country leaves Atlanta with the fifth-highest medal tally, behind the United States, Russia, Germany and China. It was enough to spur opinion leaders like Sydney's John Laws to write that "no matter how we worked it out, Australia is the best sporting country in the world".
Lee Naylor, the athlete's representative on the Athletics Australia board, agrees that "it doesn't stand up to statistical analysis". But it's what we want to hear. Just as we want to hear athletes explain how it took a misunderstanding, ignorance or a conspiracy for them to test positive. Naylor thinks we deserve a gold medal for gullibility.
Says Naylor: "The information is so in-your-face, there's really no excuse. And it's not as though there aren't any alternatives, that your health is compromised. There are."
For her part, Howland just shrugs. She knows better than anyone how much truth we can handle.
TOMORROW: Where it comes from and what we're doing about it.
© 1998 The Age
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