Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency and global evangelist for the cause of pure sport, is not, technically, a law-enforcement man, but he thinks like one. He is part romantic, part hard-boiled realist. He hopes for the best from people but is not surprised when he doesn’t get it. He believes deeply in the grandeur of sport, less so in the goodness of athletes.
Pound has been WADA’s leader since the International Olympic Committee created it in 1999 to “harmonize” efforts to clean up the murky underworld of performance enhancement. In theory, he could have limited his concerns to the various Olympic sports, but instead he has also sparred with what he likes to call the “North American pro leagues,” including Major League Baseball, whose anti-doping policies he has long characterized as “a joke.” His style is all confrontation, all the time, and the bigger the target — Carl Lewis, Lance Armstrong, the entire U.S. Olympic establishment — the better.
As it happened, the news that the cyclist Floyd Landis had failed a drug test at the Tour de France broke in July, in the midst of a series of interviews I had with Pound in Montreal, where he runs WADA and also holds down more big jobs and positions than would seem humanly possible: partner at a top law firm, chancellor of McGill University, member of the I.O.C. and editor of something called Pound’s Tax Case Notes. He belongs, as well, to that bizarre subset of people who write long books as a hobby, eight of them so far. (One that I picked up in an anteroom of his office, a history of his law firm, ran to a door-stopping 559 pages.)
On this particular day, Pound, who is 64, looked tired. His broad face was drawn, his complexion pasty. He had just returned from China, and his back hurt. Thinking about Landis seemed to enliven him. He spoke of the cyclist as if he were some sleazy perp just collared by the vice squad. “He was 11 minutes behind or something, and all of the sudden there’s this Herculean effort, where he’s going up mountains like he’s on a goddamn Harley,” he said. In the 2006 tour, Landis raced in pain while awaiting a hip replacement, went out to an early lead, lost it, then seemed to miraculously regain it. “It’s a great story,” Pound said. “Wonderful. But if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”
With an annual budget of $22 million, WADA oversees the testing done by the world’s sports federations. The agency finances research, credentials a global network of drug-testing laboratories, conducts some of its own drug-testing of athletes and regularly updates its list of banned substances. It puts out a number of publications, among them a magazine called Play True. Its most important accomplishment has been to persuade 191 nations, including the United States, to sign on to its Anti-Doping Code — which prohibits most of the world’s top athletes from taking anything on WADA’s list of banned substances and, in the event of violations, generally blocks them from appealing to the legal systems in their home countries. (Appeals are heard by the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.)
WADA’s targets — drug-taking athletes and their coaches, handlers and chemists — have plenty of money and science on their side. They invent new compounds or new methods of masking old drugs, and all Pound and his allies can do is try to anticipate their moves and try to catch them. The drugs work remarkably well — see East German women’s track-and-field athletes, circa 1980s, or big-league baseball players, 1990s — and in ways that often surprise anti-doping authorities.
Performance enhancement is like any other kind of underground activity: the participants are the only ones who know for sure what they’re up to. Anabolic steroids were for weight lifters, home-run hitters and sprinters and would never help an athlete in an endurance event like the Tour de France, right? Yet that’s what Landis tested positive for. How that might have helped him climb mountains is unknown — except, if he took them, by Landis and any enablers. Everybody thought pitchers never used steroids because they value flexibility more than strength. Then baseball started checking for steroids, and about half the positive tests came from pitchers. In university laboratories across the world, and in places like the United States Department of Defense, scientists are dreaming up yet new ways to enhance human beings — steps that may very well be taken by elite athletes before they are perfected or even considered safe.
Battling the known and the unknown, and probably outspent and outgunned, Pound has seized the prerogative of the underdog: fight with whatever you’ve got. Fight fair. Or unfair. His best weapon is his brilliance as a formulator of quotes, his ability to make headlines and call attention to his cause. (He takes great pride in this; one of his books is titled “High Impact Quotations.”) Pound is not a stereotypical Canadian, if you think of Canadians as reticent, nor is he very lawyerly: he assembles whatever facts he can gather, but when they’re not attainable, sometimes just makes them up.
Take the ruckus he caused when he charged that one-third of players in the National Hockey League, or about seven per team, were using illegal performance enhancers. Sitting in his office, I asked him how he came up with that estimate. He leaned back in his chair and chuckled, completely unabashed to admit that he had just invented it. “It was pick a number,” he said. “So it’s 20 percent. Twenty-five percent. Call me a liar.”
Pound certainly understands that he can be abrasive. What he cannot grasp is how anyone could not comprehend the rightness, the essentiality, of his mission. “How is the sport real if the athletes are not real?” he asks. He has heard himself compared to a sheriff in the Wild West, as if that’s a bad thing. “I don’t get that. Weren’t the sheriffs the good guys?”
Pound grew up, as he likes to say, in a succession of “smelly mill towns” in Canada, wherever his father, an engineer, happened to be working. The last of them, Ocean Falls, 36 hours north of Vancouver, reachable only by boat, had a smaller-than-regulation-size indoor pool and a gifted coach who birthed a succession of great swimmers, the best of them Pound, who by the time he reached McGill University was known as Dick Pound the Swimmer, a man on his way to a sixth-place finish in the 100-meter freestyle at the 1960 Summer Games in Rome and a place of prominence in Montreal and, beyond that, greater Canada.
Pound will mention his athletic exploits, but usually with a hint of self-deprecation. “If you want a pointless statistic,” he said to me at one point, “I am the last Canadian to reach the final of the 100 freestyle.”
He passed up a chance at the 1964 Olympics and set out on his career. He is a tax lawyer by trade. His position as chancellor at McGill is largely ceremonial, although it takes up hundreds of hours a year. He was previously president of McGill’s alumni association and of its board of governors.
Kip Cobbett, the managing partner at Stikeman Elliott, Pound’s law firm, describes his colleague as almost frighteningly efficient: “You ask him for a memo on some complicated topic, it’s on your desk 15 minutes later, and it’s perfect.” It helps that Pound can so quickly access his opinions. “He is willing to draw conclusions before other people are willing to draw conclusions,” Cobbett says. “That’s not a common thing anymore, whether because of caution or political correctness.”
Pound was first elected to the I.O.C. in 1978, and his quarter-century tenure has been marked by several anomalies — the most intriguing one his defense, in 1988, of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the 100-meter dash at the Summer Games in Seoul but then tested positive for the steroid stanozolol. Still a decade away from his incarnation as a crusader against performance-enhancing drugs, Pound represented Johnson before the I.O.C.’s medical commission after Johnson’s positive test — a job Pound says was foisted upon him because there was no other lawyer with the Canadian delegation.
After Johnson assured Pound he was clean, Pound asked him, Could someone have spiked his post-race beer? No, he got his own beer. Anything unusual in the collection of his urine sample? No, nothing. “Give me some bullets,” Pound remembers thinking. “I’ve got nothing to say.” But there wasn’t much of a defense to offer. Johnson was stripped of his medal, and it was awarded to the second-place finisher, the American Carl Lewis.
On my first visit to see Pound in Montreal, I asked him about Lewis, arguably the greatest athlete the United States has ever produced. A long jumper and a sprinter, Lewis won nine gold medals in four Summer Games between 1984 and 1996. “Carl and I are fairly cheery,” Pound said. “I’ve never gone after him, other than to say, ‘Here are some things that did happen.’ “
Pound has argued that Lewis should not have been allowed to run in Seoul should have never been in that 100 final with Ben Johnson because Lewis tested positive for a banned substance at the U.S. Track and Field Trials earlier that summer, a result that American officials disregarded. “USA Track and Field was, of course, the gold medalist at doing that,” Pound told me. What Lewis tested positive for, Pound said, “was a steroid of some sort. A steroid.”
Pound is at his most ferocious, and sometimes most reckless — a one-man truth squad — when looking toward the past. But athletes live in the here and now. They don’t like anyone digging into old files and certainly not into old blood or urine samples.
In 2003, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s former director of drug control turned over documents to Sports Illustrated and The Orange County Register that showed Lewis had tested positive in 1988 for banned stimulants found in cold medicine — not anabolic steroids. Many would consider that a distinction without a difference: testing positive, for whatever banned substance, often brings harsh disciplinary action. But while ephedrine and two other cold-medicine ingredients found in Lewis’s system might improve performance at high-enough doses, the U.S.O.C. accepted his explanation that he took them to fight a cold.
In a telephone interview, Lewis summed up the situation for me: “The only thing they have on me is Sudafed. A cold medicine. … If he had any more, it would be provided.”
At one point, Pound claimed he had documents relating to Lewis’s failed tests. “I have them somewhere,” he said. “I wouldn’t throw them away.” But when I asked him before my second visit if he could dig them out, he said he couldn’t find them. It didn’t seem to bother him any more than acknowledging that his estimate on the percentage of chemically enhanced N.H.L. players was pretty much a wild guess. Pound’s words are sort of like darts: he lets them go, accumulates points, then throws some more.
Pound has also kept up a running battle with another American sports icon, Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner who has fought a seemingly endless series of allegations that he used erythropoietin, or EPO, which increases red-blood-cell production and enhances the flow of oxygen to muscles. Pound has piled on by pointing out what he calls certain “problematic statistics” — including the fact that the next three men who finished behind Armstrong in the 2005 tour, his crowning victory, were all investigated for suspected EPO use and banned from last year’s tour.
Pound leaves it at that. But the implication is clear: Armstrong was riding with a bad crowd, so how could he be clean and win? Pound told me he likes Armstrong, or at least he likes the mythic Lance: “I like the idea of sports heroes. Nothing I like better.”
They even talked on the telephone about two years ago, according to Pound, when Armstrong called to defend cycling. Pound recounted their conversation: ” ‘Hello, it’s Lance Armstrong. I just want to tell you I love my sport.’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Lance, but sometimes there’s gotta be tough love.’ It was fairly inconsequential, and we left it just short of the Hollywood producer thing — we’ll do lunch.”
On matters involving Armstrong, Pound adopts a tone of insinuation often mixed with sarcasm. When I asked if he thought Armstrong cheated, Pound replied: “You’ve got to be kidding. Why would I get into a lawsuit with Lance? Let him deal with the problems he’s created.”
Armstrong told me he telephoned Pound twice to confront him over his public comments. He also wrote the I.O.C. demanding that Pound — whom he referred to as “the quotemeister” and “a showboat” when we spoke — resign or be removed. Armstrong says he believes Pound and WADA have run roughshod over his and other athletes’ rights, and he is not alone in that criticism. An investigative article by The Los Angeles Times in December concluded that the agency is “a closed, quasi-judicial system without American-style checks and balances.”
It is not always clear whether critics are objecting to WADA or Pound. The organization’s Anti-Doping Code, with its limits on athletes’ appeals, can certainly be construed as heavy-handed. But without it, WADA might well be tied up in an array of legal systems, from federal courts in the United States to regional courts in China to, conceivably, courts in small towns in Mongolia or Uzbekistan or wherever some athlete happened to fail a drug test.
Pound’s tendency to go off like a loose cannon is less defensible. Athletes and their representatives are beginning to challenge the legitimacy of WADA itself, rather than just the particulars of the charges against them, and Pound may be fueling that reaction. John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas who writes extensively on issues of athletic doping, credits Pound for aggressively raising the profile of his cause but says that he has been “fast and loose with historical fact, and with what you can and cannot say with regard to the verifiable level of drug use among elite athletes.”
Because Pound engages big targets — and the biggest ones are in the United States — he has repeatedly had to fend off charges that he is somehow anti-American. “How could I be?” he responded when I asked him about this. He pointed out that his wife is from Chicago and that three of their five children attended college in the U.S.
Then, typically, he fired off another salvo. “There aren’t too many people who are prepared to point the finger at America and say: ‘Hey, take off the [expletive] halo. You’re just like everybody else.’ That’s a problem in America. America has a singular ability to delude itself.”
Pound’s biggest role in sport, before joining WADA, is one that can be seen as having helped create the very thing he is now fighting. Pound was the I.O.C. money man. He recognized that Olympic organizers were undervaluing their product and, as chairman of the I.O.C.’s television and marketing committee from 1983 to 2001, he dragged the games into the big-money era by negotiating richer deals with multinationals like Visa, McDonald’s, Kodak and Coca-Cola. In 1980, the I.O.C. got about $100 million for its TV rights; for the Beijing Games in 2008, the total will be nearly $2 billion.
Pound was, as well, a trusted adviser to and protégé of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former I.O.C. president who personally chose him for the WADA post. Samaranch, a minor official in the Fascist regime of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a canny politician within the Olympic movement, appointed Pound in 1999 to lead an internal investigation into bribe-taking and the awarding of the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City. That task almost certainly ended any realistic chance Pound had of succeeding his mentor as president; Pound finished third in the election for the post in 2001.
Andrew Jennings, a British investigative journalist who has written three books on the International Olympic Committee, told me he believes Pound so valued his place within the I.O.C.’s inner circle that he abided the group’s questionable ways of doing business until Samaranch cast him in the role of reformer. “He’s not corrupt,” Jennings says. “He’s not seedy. He’s too classy for that. But Dick sat very happily with this ragbag of European princes and second-rate royalty.”
Jennings says Pound “did very well at giving sports away to commercial interests” and, by making the games vastly bigger and the money available to athletes more plentiful, thereby increased temptation and cheating. “The sponsor money brought the doping,” he claims, adding that it also financed the lavish travels and perks of I.O.C. members. Craig Masback, C.E.O. of USA Track and Field and a frequent target of Pound’s, says that “it seems logical that with more money, there is more temptation to make the tragic decision to cheat.” But he adds that it may be too pat to equate the money and drugs. “There was plenty of doping before there was a big financial incentive,” Masback says.
Pound, not surprisingly, disputes that more money begat more doping. He argues that increased revenues made sport more inclusive by enabling the I.O.C. to make grants to athletic federations in poorer nations. And if the I.O.C. is a jet-setting social club, underwritten by sponsorship money, Pound, by his own and other accounts, has never been a big part of it. While other I.O.C. members hobnobbed at Olympic venues, he says he spent “18 hours a day in a tent, baby-sitting sponsors.”
For all his quotability, Pound is not particularly gregarious and can even be socially awkward. “He’s warm,” says Cobbett, his law partner. “He’s pleasant. He’s not aloof. But he’s not going to work a room.”
Pound says that by leading the Salt Lake City probe, he “saved” Samaranch and, by extension, preserved the Olympic brand. “The reason the sponsors didn’t bail is because I said we would fix the problem.”
WADA, of course, is also very much about preserving the Olympic brand. Sponsors want to associate with an idealized, “Chariots of Fire” view of sport, not the doped version. Even when Olympic athletes test positive, Pound says, “it oddly enough adds to the luster of the Olympic brand. Even though we don’t always get it right” — by this he means the fight for drug-free sport — “people understand and respect that we are trying, and that’s what separates us from the N.F.L. and N.B.A. and others.”
WADA is a bureaucratic dynamo — an organization that in a very short time has extended its tentacles across the globe, spawned regional anti-doping organizations, created the anti-doping code and, mainly through Pound himself, broadcast a strong message that doping is risky. Violators do stand a chance of being discovered and disciplined. The Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids case, which led to the suspension of the elite sprinters Tim Montgomery and Kelli White — and cast further suspicion on the slugger Barry Bonds — was first cracked open at a WADA-accredited lab in Los Angeles.
In the previous era of doping, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, cheating tended to be sponsored by governments and inspired by nationalism — most notably in the systemic doping of the East Germans. Current doping is driven more by economics and organized on the Balco model: a loose confederation of athletes and coaches, sometimes representing various nations and sports. Anti-doping officials, Pound among them, assume there are other Balcos out there, hidden from view.
What constitutes unfair enhancement for the purpose of athletic achievement — as opposed to, say, the latest kinds of training — is clearer to Pound than it is to some others. He says he can discern (if not always exactly define) what violates “the spirit of sport.” He told me at one point: “It’s like they used to say about pornography. You know it when you see it.” He says “artificial” methods should not be introduced into training, and he expresses a deep concern for health: no one, he says, should have to be “a chemical stockpile” in order to compete.
The specificity of WADA’s list of banned substances — hundreds of steroids, stimulants, beta blockers, masking agents and other compounds — tends to make the whole anti-doping endeavor look tidier than it really is. Weight and endurance training, strictly speaking, enhance performance, yet nearly everyone would agree that they fall within the spirit of sport. But what about scientific approaches to nutrition? And all those vitamins and nutritional supplements that athletes gobble by the handful — believing (or hoping) that they are performance enhancers?
Or to consider an example that WADA has recently struggled with — what about simulated high-altitude training that boosts the production of red blood cells? Some athletes are lucky enough to live at altitude; for years, others with the means to do so have traveled to train at altitude; and lately, a small number have taken to living and sleeping in hermetically sealed tents or rooms that simulate high-altitude conditions, what WADA calls “artificially induced hypoxic chambers.” Pound has been troubled by them, considering them, at best, “tacky.” The WADA executive board declined for now to bar them at its most recent meeting last fall, deciding instead to circulate a letter warning of possible health hazards associated with the chambers.
Pound, though, only rarely gets bogged down in the loftier questions. He’s a man who identifies a challenge and puts his head down and works. There’s a tax code. There can be a drug code.
“Who is not braced for the first renegade human clone?” Joel Garreau asks in his book “Radical Evolution.” Garreau argues that the next frontier of technology will be aimed inward, toward human enhancement. This is Pound’s real challenge: The future. Pound’s wife, Julie Keith, a well-regarded short-story writer, says that her husband likes to “fix things” — but you can’t fix what is not yet clearly in view, least of all with bluster and high-impact quotes.
Garreau’s book sounds like really far-out science fiction, but lots of cutting-edge medicine — from cochlear implants that allow the deaf to hear to retinal implants that allow the blind to see to nervous-system hookups that allow people to directly control their artificial limbs — would have seemed just as far-fetched a few decades ago. Given such advances, a current Defense Department research project to build “the metabolically dominant soldier,” a warrior who can “run at Olympic sprint speeds for 15 minutes on one breath of air,” hardly seems preposterous. The same goes for a “pain vaccine” that will block pain and inflammation for 30 days or drugs that will allow soldiers to fight for a week without sleep and still make good decisions.
Much of the research Garreau uncovered is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a longtime incubator of innovation, including a precursor of the Internet. One Darpa researcher refers to himself as a “combat zoologist.” Another, the leader of the metabolically enhanced soldier project, told Garreau, “My measure of success for this is that the I.O.C. bans everything that we do.”
The references to athletics and the I.O.C. are telling. The ultimate in physical enhancement is to go beyond known current limits. Elite athletes are acutely aware of those limits, because they bump up against them daily. At some point no amount of training makes them stronger, faster or better able to endure long distances.
The most advanced medical research, including gene therapy, exists to help severely compromised people, those with Parkinson’s, diabetes, various muscle-wasting diseases; but the physical elites, those trying to push beyond the upper limits, often seem as desperate for them. Still, it’s hard to disagree with Ramez Naam, who argues in “More Than Human” that researchers should not put brakes on their work because some might misuse it. “Scientists cannot draw a clear line between healing and enhancing,” Naam writes.
About four years ago, Pound became aware that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, H. Lee Sweeney, was changing the genetic structure of mice to create supermice with greatly enhanced musculature, which is not lost as they age. The research is intended to help those with muscular dystrophy, but Sweeney has received e-mail messages and calls from weight lifters, bodybuilders and other athletes and coaches — in one case, from the coach of a high-school wrestling team — wanting to know how to adapt the technology for performance enhancement.
When Sweeney and other scientists told Pound it was possible — although not demonstrably safe — for an enterprising chemist to appropriate the published research for athletic purposes, Pound challenged the researchers to create a test that would detect this particular form of gene doping. I heard Pound, in a speech at Princeton last fall, tell an audience that such a test was “close.” Sweeney, who consults for WADA’s gene-doping panel, agrees that progress is being made but says that Pound may be overstating matters.
“They’re giving out grants, and those doing the work are making progress on showing what kind of changes would occur,” Sweeney explains. “But none of this convinced me that these changes are not what you would see with training. All of the tests have been done on sedentary animals. That’s not the right study. You need an animal that is in training.”
The scientists Pound expects to devise tests for any new enhancements are, generally, the same ones doing the research on them — for purposes of curing the sick. They’re pretty busy. Pound is never going to have more than a small part of their attention.
And even as WADA tries to figure out how to detect whether athletes are using the latest methods of performance enhancement, ever newer research is coming on line — not off-in-the-future stuff from Darpa, but knowledge and techniques that can be applied now. For example, Sweeney says he is currently experimenting with a myostatin inhibitor in dogs; because myostatin puts the brakes on IGF-1, a protein that promotes muscle growth, when you inhibit or turn off the myostatin, the IGF-1 continues to do its work, and dogs get bigger.
Sweeney says he hopes this science might one day help those with muscle-wasting diseases, but it is not close to being considered safe for human use. Still, it could probably be adapted for athletic enhancement even more easily than the experiments that created the supermice. And the research has all been published. “I don’t think WADA considers that anyone could be doing this yet, but they sell the scientific community short if they assume that,” Sweeney told me. “There are serious heart risks associated with this, but athletes, as far as I can tell, don’t care.”
Sport everywhere is broken down into divisions: you play in the big leagues or Triple A. With Manchester United in the English Premier League or three rungs down with Notts County. John Hoberman, the University of Texas professor and the author of “Testosterone Dreams,” is among a growing number of thinkers who envision, at some point, another way of dividing up sport: the doped and the undoped. He’s not looking forward to it; he just says it’s inevitable.
“The whole reality of elite sport is that it’s vulnerable to doping,” Hoberman says. “The N.F.L. is a ticking time bomb. That’s been a Pound topic. He’s been a scold to Selig,” meaning Bud Selig, Major League Baseball’s commissioner. “Good for him. We need that. But I would say to him: the people who you want to idealize are not cooperating in very large numbers. And you know what? When you look at the historical record, they were never terribly interested in the first place.”
What Hoberman, who calls himself a doping historian, means is that athletes have always looked for any edge — going back to the ancient Greeks, who ate mushrooms and dried figs to gain a perceived energy boost before competition. Cyclists, as recently as a half-century ago, were using strychnine, which is a stimulant as well as a poison. Victor Conte, the Balco mastermind, has said that the sprinter Tim Montgomery told him that if he could win an Olympic gold medal, “it wouldn’t matter if I died right on the other side of the finish line.”
Pound knows that some people believe he is naïvely engaged in an unwinnable fight; he’s just not sure what they expect him to do. “What do you say?” he responds. “It’s too complicated, too big, so let’s just give up?” To simply permit unfettered doping, he says, is not a solution. “You could look at them as just gladiators, these big cartoon characters, but that’s somebody’s kid out there. What if your kid had to do that just to play high-school ball?”
Pound told a freshman seminar at Princeton that WADA was “created under Swiss law.” I don’t think the students cared too much about that, but it is the sort of thing that’s important to Pound: rules, and a structure that encodes them. Maybe what Pound has put in place — WADA, the anti-doping code, the long list of banned substances — will hold for only another decade or two. But he is determined to keep up the fight for as long as possible.
“Here’s the deal,” he says. “The shot-put weighs this much. The race is so many laps long. You can’t hollow out your shot-put and make it 12 pounds instead of 16. You don’t start before the gun. Run 11 laps instead of 12. And part of the deal is don’t use these drugs. It’s kind of an affirmation when you show up at the starting line. You are making an affirmation that you are playing the game the way it is supposed to be played.”
Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for the magazine, is working on a book about women’s sports after Title IX and the high rate of injuries among young female athletes.
