The Pounding of Landis et al

I was flipping through my Sunday edition of the New York Times when I happened across this NY Times Magazine article with Dick Pound, "The Scold." It's a lengthy interview with the chairman of WADA, and details his rise with the IOC as their television and marketing chairman. The Olympics can thank Pound for all those lucrative sponsorships with companies like Visa and Coca-Cola. Under Pound's direction television rights went from a measly $100m to what will now become $218b in 2008 for Beijing. There are complimentary comments from business associates and fellow lawyers, and did you know Pound was a former Olympic swimmer himself?

The article doesn't strive to humanize the controversial man, but it does provide us with a background to understand why this guy shoots from the hip without aiming. He knows exactly what he's saying and why he's saying it, and will admit he comes up with numbers out of thin air such as when he suggested one-third of the NHL players used banned substances. "Call me a liar," stated Pound. OK, liar, now what.

Some of the more interesting information regards the future of human enhancement. The Defense Department is working towards "the metabolically dominant soldier", which is lead by a man whose measure of success is that the IOC bans everything he does. That's not such a hard goal to reach actually, but athletes will most certainly tinker with the DD's techniques to improve athletic performance. While scientists work on ways to improve the health of those in true need there will be athletes looking for ways to exploit the grey area associated.

Pound's biggest job for the future will be to develop tests to keep pace with advances in technological health. It's easier now to understand why he's not so concerned with documentation and protocol of testing procedures when his target keeps moving. One University of Texas professor, John Hoberman, envisions dividing up sport into two leagues, doped and un-doped. Hell, some believe we already have that and it's called professional and amateur.

Here's an interesting side note that you won't find online. If you can get your hands on a print copy then flip the last page of the Pound article to see an ironic cartoon for an article that follows. It's a red colored page with 6 big syringes intended to compliment an article about a nurse accused of poisoning patients.

There are so many good quotes and notes within this article that I simply cannot cover them all. However, the one that has deservedly received all the attention comes as the writer describes Pound lighting up like a schoolboy when discussing Floyd Landis: “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?”

Sounds like someone else is quite erect, no?