Krieger: Shorter's longing is a drug-free sports world

Published May 27, 2006 at midnight

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Last spring, the boobs of baseball were getting all the attention in the national debate over performance-enhancing drugs in sports.

A sad parade of players appeared before Congress - Rafael Palmeiro pointing his finger and denying steroid use a few months before testing positive, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both quite suddenly losing their facility with the English language.

Commissioner Bud Selig and union chief Donald Fehr were all too familiar with the language - and willing to use it and use it and use it some more in a strategy apparently designed to drive their critics into catatonia.

But Congress heard other testimony on the subject in the spring of 2005, testimony you probably never saw on ESPN, testimony you probably never heard about.

It came from a world-class athlete who had been working for six years behind the scenes to wipe out the blight of doping from the world of athletics that made him famous.

It came from an athlete who does not believe the campaign against performance-enhancing drugs in sports is inevitably a lost cause; quite the contrary, an athlete who believes fervently the campaign can be won.

You know him as the friendly face of the Bolder Boulder. He'll provide television commentary for the race again Monday.

The nation knows him as a running icon, maybe the best American marathoner ever.

But last spring, as Frank Shorter sat before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, he was the voice of elite, drug-free athletes everywhere, pleading for a level playing field. More than that, he was the former chairman of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, a Yale- educated entrepreneur who believed then and believes now that the model exists for cleaning up sports, if only sports will adopt it.

Shorter's interest in the subject is not academic. In the summer of 1972, in the city of his birth, he won the Olympic men's marathon by pulling away from the pack early and reeling off a series of 4-minute, 30-second miles that left the world in his dust.

It had been only 18 years since Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4-minute mile, and he was running just the one. Here was Shorter piling one 4:30 on top of another to the German horizon. He finished in 2 hours, 12 minutes, 19.8 seconds, more than 2 minutes ahead of silver medalist Karel Lismont of Belgium. The world record in the marathon has fallen beneath 2:05 in the 34 years since, but at the time, Shorter's was a breathtaking performance.

It was largely overshadowed, as were many of the 1972 performances, by the terrorist assault on the Israeli athletes' quarters that came to define the Munich Games.

Four years later, Shorter was ready to repeat his feat in the more tranquil setting of Montreal. He was in better shape than he had been in Munich, if such a thing was possible, cutting more than a minute and a half off his time. Once again, he outlasted Belgium's Lismont.

But this time, Shorter could not shake an East German runner named Waldemar Cierpinski. In the years since, he has returned to the Montreal course and retraced his steps to the spot where Cierpinski pulled away from him to win in 2:09:55, an Olympic record at the time. Fifty seconds back, Shorter took silver.

Suspicions about East German drug use were rampant but mostly focused on the female swimmers, who looked and sounded a lot like the male swimmers. American Shirley Babashoff publicly accused her East German counterparts of using anabolic steroids, noting their musculature and deep voices. An East German official famously replied, "They came to swim, not to sing."

At the time, there was no World Anti-Doping Agency. The Olympics had banned steroids, but they left it up to the national federations to enforce the ban. Needless to say, the East Germans were somewhat less than vigilant.

For years afterward, the race haunted Shorter. What could he have done? Where had he gone wrong?

Then came the fall of the Iron Curtain. Then came the flood of previously classified documents, some of them detailing East Germany's sports doping program of the 1970s. Shorter eventually came into possession of a list of East German athletes in the drug program. Cierpinski was among them.

"His code number on the program was 62, because I have a document that shows that," Shorter told me the other day.

"The whole point of the program was you most likely could not be on the Olympic team unless you were on the program. They actually used some of the data collected to privately publish Ph.D. theses because they were experimenting in order to cheat better.

"Did you know that androstenedione, the Mark McGwire drug, was developed by the East Germans as the most efficient way to get steroids into the swimmers? Andro is an East German drug. The home run record was set on an East German drug."

And so it was that Shorter found himself on Capitol Hill a year ago, a stark contrast to the disgraced stars of America's pastime, and getting far less attention, too.

"We value sport in our society because it builds character and promotes teamwork, dedication and commitment," Shorter testified that day.

"Sport requires honesty and respect for the rules and fellow competitors. It leaves a legacy of health that can last a lifetime. Sport brings communities together, it creates role models for our kids and it inspires dreams. These are all reasons why sport occupies a special place in our schools and in our society at large.

"When athletes enhance their performance by doping, it is cheating of the worst kind and it undermines all of these important values of sport. When an athlete is successful through doping it sends a clear message to all athletes - the new price of achieving your dreams is compromising your integrity and risking your health. Athletes who perform outstanding physical feats through doping make sport nothing more than another circus act unworthy of any place in our schools or our social fabric."

The cause has been Shorter's since at least 1976, but his opportunity to make a difference came in 1998, when he happened to read that Gen. Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton's drug czar, had committed $1 million to try to find a test for erythropoietin, the use of which is better known as "blood doping" in endurance sports.

"I was one of those athletes who always knew it was out there and I also knew that there had to be some reason why none of the testing agencies were ever trying to come up with a test for it - you can draw your own conclusion," Shorter said.

"So I wrote to both McCaffrey and the president and said, 'Thank you very much for doing this.' The next thing I knew, McCaffrey's office is on the phone with me saying, 'How would you like to write something for the general?'

"Finally, for the clean athletes, here was a window. I didn't know how wide it was, but my feeling was, if someone in the president's Cabinet is interested in this, it's worth finding out what's going on."

The result was the creation of USADA, based in part on memorandums furnished by Shorter, who, after graduating from Yale, had gotten a law degree from the University of Florida while training for Montreal.

About the same time, the International Olympic Committee was creating the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Both represented the same conclusion: A drug-testing regimen could not have credibility unless it was conducted by an agency independent of the sport itself.

Shorter explained the thesis during a commentary on National Public Radio 15 months ago:

"People who promote sports should never police them at the same time," he said. "The executives in charge of promoting baseball should never have been allowed to monitor the players for drug use. Every American sport needs a truly independent, transparent testing agency at its top level, an agency that's accountable to an equally independent higher authority.

"Baseball needs that now. They shouldn't wait until the stars currently juicing up on steroids are allowed to retire or until baseball is able to educate fans to appreciate the quality of play as much as home runs.

"It's truly a health issue for our children. They're emulating stars who choose to be dirty with apparent impunity. Some children may even feel they have no choice but to take performance- enhancing drugs now. If talk of steroids, EPO and human growth hormone makes your eyes glaze over, just ask your teenage children. They'll explain it to you."

I am a runner. I admit this with some trepidation, because I know how annoying runners can be. And I want you to know I'm not the kind of runner who goes around constantly rattling off his best marathon time (3:20:54, which I used to call 3:20, but, since Barry Bonds, I call 3:21).

I should say I used to be a runner. At some point, I morphed into a jogger. At another point, quite recently, I morphed again, into a limper. You know those old guys who "run" with such bitsy, painful steps you want to tell them just to walk because it would be faster?

That's me now.

Everything hurts. And if it doesn't hurt right now, it will in a minute. If I limp through 30 miles in a week, it's a good week. At the moment, I'm on the shelf because of something in my lower leg. I don't know what it is. Not the injury. The part.

Shorter is 58. I assumed he would be in approximately the same boat. I mean, age hits us all, right?

"I run 50-60 miles a week," Shorter said. "It's too much."

Then he laughed.

"Now that I'm on the other side of the bell curve, I'm just running for the same reasons I was when I was going up the slope," he said. "You have the goals and you see what you can do, except the goal now is to slow down more slowly."

He trains at about an 8-minute pace these days. He had back surgery eight years ago, but clearly, the man was born to run. His popularity back in the '70s had a lot to do with the running boom at the time, as did that of Joan Benoit Samuelson, winner of the first Olympic women's marathon in 1984.

"It's so great that it's demystified now," Shorter said. "When I started out, marathon runners were these strange guys with long hair who held out that they could do something that other people couldn't really do because they were different. Now you have women, especially, running for charity, going through 12- week programs to run a marathon, and we've found that anyone who really wants to put in the effort in training can do it.

"So the broadening out of the pool of people who participate, I think that's the huge difference. And it's become a part of the social structure. You're not different if you run. Running is just something you do."

Running as fashion may have disappeared a long time ago, but big-city marathons are routinely oversubscribed and races like the Bolder have never been bigger.

"The other part of it is women," Shorter said. "You see, right along with that was Title IX. We have gone from 1972, where the longest (women's) event in the Olympics was 1,500 meters because they figured if you ran much farther than that your uterus might fall out. OK?

"That's 34 years. And then in '84, you had Joan Benoit Samuelson. That was the paradigm shift. And now, not only is it an equal participation, the women actually are higher numbers in most races. I'm certain the Bolder Boulder's probably 55 percent women, maybe more."

"Why do you think that is?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he said. "You ask me that question and it's not that I don't care, but I just like the fact that it is. It's sort of like, 'Oh, there's another surprise!' You watch it grow up and I don't need to know. I enjoy it too much."

Although Shorter is almost evangelical in his commitment to -USADA and the battle against sports doping, I go into our conversation a decided skeptic.

After all, the people who pulled the wool over baseball's eyes for a decade or two were not exactly criminal masterminds. You read about Victor Conte and Greg Anderson and you wonder who plays Curly.

If a rival coach hadn't mailed a syringe of THG, the designer steroid at the heart of Conte's BALCO operation, to USADA, there's no guarantee they'd be testing for it today.

And the words of a Russian anti-doping official at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 keep ringing in my ears.

He said the Olympics were morphing from a competition among athletes to a competition among laboratories. With all the new medical technologies on the horizon, among them gene therapy, the cheaters will always have an edge, he suggested, and perhaps a bigger edge than they have now.

So I asked Shorter about the perception that those fighting for clean sports are fighting the scientific and technological tide.

"The answer is no, and here's why," Shorter said. "The other aspect of the new agencies, the world agency, WADA, and USADA, is they have no conflict of interest. That person with whom you were talking had a huge conflict of interest. It would be as if Fehr were in charge of drug testing in baseball."

"Which he kind of is," I interjected.

"How enthusiastic would he be?" Shorter asked, ignoring my wit.

"The other point was that statement was made by someone who knew what drugs were out there, like EPO and human growth hormone, and wasn't doing anything to come up with tests to find them.

"So isn't it easy to then say to someone like you, 'Well, we just can't stay ahead of these guys.' EPO has been around since 1988. Human growth hormone was recombinant in 1982."

But that proves my point, I countered. After all these years, there is still no test for human growth hormone. If and when there is, it will almost certainly be a blood test, which baseball's drug testing agreement doesn't permit. So until and unless there's a urine test for HGH, which may never happen, you can still do HGH in baseball with impunity.

Shorter, of course, isn't responsible for baseball's mess, but even USADA doesn't have a validated HGH test . . . so far as we know.

"The thing is, we don't tell anybody what we're doing," Shorter said. "The test could be out there being used right now."

"Really?" I said. "There could be a valid test for HGH and we wouldn't know it?"

"The information you read doesn't come from us," Shorter said. "THG, we had it for a long time before we made it public. Why couldn't the same thing take place with the human growth hormone test? Why couldn't we have it right now?"

"What would be the upside of not letting anybody know?"

"Use it for a while and then have a big bust," Shorter said. "Just like we did with THG."

"Even so," I said, "isn't it fair to say cheaters will come up with these things and there will always be that sort of gap?"

"Yeah," Shorter replied, "but the other difference is now the clean athletes, like I was, know where to go."

"You mean USADA being there?"

"Being there, and all the information we get from the clean athletes. How long do you think the dirty athletes can keep this stuff secret?

"The other thing we're doing is moving up the food chain. The sentencing guidelines, Conte would have done seven years under the new guidelines."

Conte, the BALCO guy, did four months.

"When did those go into effect?" I asked.

"About two, three months ago. The federal sentencing guidelines have changed. The guy who came up with THG has pled out in Illinois. He's saying things just like Conte - 'Well, there's other stuff out there.' And he was working on some other stimulant, I read the other day.

"But isn't it interesting that the news is now out while it was even in the experimental stage with the cheaters. My view is you didn't have to be very smart to cheat before 2000. You've got to be smarter and smarter and smarter now, and people aren't taking that into account."

"Is baseball almost a good thing for you in that it's brought so much attention to the issue?" I asked.

"I think it's good because it's helped people get through the denial. You can always believe what you want to believe. Now, I don't have to name names or give my opinion; the public can understand.

"The public now knows enough about the science and the drug subculture in the athletic subculture because of all this, to put it in sort of sociological terms, that they can truly admit that given all those circumstances, of course it happened and of course it got out of hand and of course people let it go too long."

"I can tell you what it feels like to have your dream compromised by the drug use of another," Shorter told the House subcommittee a year ago.

"In 1972, I won the gold medal for the United States in the marathon at the Olympics in Munich. Four years later, I ran an even better race but finished second at the Olympics in Montreal.

"I lost that race to an East German. At the time we all expected, and later it was confirmed, that in 1976 the East Germans were benefiting from a state-sponsored doping program. I knew I could have improved my chance of winning by taking steroids, but I never even considered it. I chose to compete clean and, as a result, I finished second."

Maybe I've been watching too much Cold Case Files, but I couldn't help wondering why they couldn't go back and look at some of those results in light of evidence discovered since. After all, they stripped Ben Johnson of his 1988 gold medal in the 100 meters when he tested positive for steroids, and the Olympic movement has stripped medals from any number of other drug violators since.

Is it impossible to right a wrong retroactively, even with documentation?

"Well, in 1999, at a meeting in Switzerland, I very hurriedly asked to address the IOC, because our great champion on the IOC, Anita DeFrantz, along with a bunch of other athletes, introduced a statute of limitations on cheating," Shorter said. "At that very conference, they approved a two-Olympics statute of limitations.

"It's the only civilized entity in the world that has a statute of limitations on fraud." Shorter laughed.

"The statute of limitations should toll from when the fraud is discovered, not when it was perpetrated. They basically said, 'If you can get away with it for two Olympics, you're home free.'

"The other point is, they can always change that. They can do whatever they want."

Of course, there are no samples from those days. For a long time, the IOC position was it couldn't save samples. Shorter remembers a dinner from that pivotal IOC meeting in 1999, at which McCaffrey and the health and sports ministers from other countries helped to create -WADA.

"Before we got through the appetizer, McCaffrey turns to this guy and says, 'Can we save samples?' And the guy says, 'Sure.' Everybody goes back to eating. OK? You getting an idea now?"

I wondered how that sits with Shorter now, the idea that proof may have existed at one time that he deserved a second Olympic gold medal.

"I honestly don't think about it," he said. "It's almost an extension of when I was competing, or you do anything in life where you have goals and you don't quite achieve the goal. My way of reframing that disappointment was to always say to myself, 'You know, the people that love me and really care about me, it doesn't matter to them.' "

Shorter has a training book out for beginning runners called Frank Shorter's Running for Peak Performance. He still has an interest in his clothing line overseas. He does TV work on road racing, as he will today after running in an early citizens' wave of the Bolder. A Boulderite since 1970, he's been at every Bolder, to run or broadcast or both.

He also has a new venture in mind.

"I think I'm going to get back into coaching now," he said. "Because if I were to coach some people now and they got good, I think they'd actually have a chance to do it clean. I'm that optimistic."

Shorter stepped down as chairman of USADA in 2003, in part so he could resume making a living. But he remains the highest-profile athlete in America making a real difference in the campaign to wean sport from performance- enhancing drugs.

"My hope," he told the House subcommittee, "is that the increasing exposure the problem of doping in sports is receiving through the effort of this committee and others will result in an increased commitment of resources to the fight against drugs in sport.

"I also hope that there will soon come a time where every American sports organization, amateur or professional, will be in a position to say that it is doing everything within its power to eliminate doping in sports."

That makes twice Shorter has been an authentic American athletic champion on the big stage. And I am not talking about 1976, although, of course, I could be.

WEEKEND SPECIAL

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

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