Don H. Catlin, M.D./Lab Consultant:
I don’t know. I think every country is dirty, it just a matter of who’s more or less dirty. An athlete, a smart athlete today says where’s the line, where is it, right here, 6 to1, 7 to 1. So I’m going to get as close as I can because our program ain’t working. And I think that’s what most of them want to know. If they can get away with it, they can get away with it.
[I am suggesting that athletes are abusing the current system by taking testosterone in small doses that elevate their TE to just under the 6:1 threshold. That is why I want to put pressure on the international system by applying CIR testing in the 4 to 6 range, to close that loophole.]
Richard Young, the USOC Counsel for doping affairs at that time, speaks often during the meeting:
I had a conversation with Dick Pound about a month ago to try to solve this and if it works, I think it solves it. The question is whether it’ll work. [Rich is pointing out that if CIR works, it will solve the TE problem.] What I suggested to him was that, one of the reason that the Atlanta Olympics was as clean as they were is because the drug testers had this new Star Wars machine of high resolution GCNS. [he means GC-high resolution Mass Spectrometry, GCMS not GCNS] It’s supposed to go back and do all these things and it had a good deterrent effect. We need something like that. Surprises need to come out now and say we have this new technology called isotope ratio. It’s the new Star Wars machine and you dopers better watch out because it’ll do all these fancy things. Now, that by itself , [even] if you never plugged it in has some value. The second thing is, that sure you can decide you’re going to use it 24 hours before the Games. But why not get athletes clean early. Tell people that this is what they are going to do, the more athletes you’re going to get off the juice.
This is a summation point from a number of comments earlier. Rich is saying that employing CIR at the Sydney Games is likely to lead to a cleaner Games overall. He says that there is an option to surprise athletes by deciding to use it 24 hours in advance but suggests that more athletes are likely to clean up if it is announced in advance. Rich is not discussing the motion here.