"Personally, I began to re-evaluate why I should be so concerned about Cierpinski," he recalls. "I mean, this was much more of an atrocity to the people who finished out of the medals. Then I began to think, You know, it's self-serving to use my recognition and influence only to say, I want the color of my medal to change.'"
So in the fall of 1998 Shorter wrote to retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton's appointee as White House National Drug Policy director. McCaffrey had been pushing for a new agency to oversee drug testing for the Olympic Games and other high-profile athletic competitions. It turned out that McCaffrey's chief spokesman was Bob Weiner, a master's runner who has on his wall a photo of himself beating Shorter. The general, Weiner told Shorter in a phone call, would love his help.
For Shorter, an elite athlete who says he has never even been tempted to use drugs, the test of what substances should be banned has always involved the metabolic control panel inside the human body, the mechanism that tells an athlete when he must stop or slow down or rest. When that self-control is turned down or off by a drug, he says, it's time to ban it.
"If you're training to your maximum and you're taking yourself to your limit, then what does it mean to take the governor off the engine?" Shorter asks. "If you're willing to sacrifice yourself to compete, that's your choice. But then you put pressure on others."
That pressure is Shorter's primary argument against doping. Drug use in any sport tends to follow a predictable pattern. It begins with the athletes who need just a slight advantage -- a stronger kick at the race's finish, a few more pounds on the clean-and-jerk, an extra breath pedaling up a hill -- to start finishing in the money. But sooner or later the top finishers begin looking over their shoulders, noticing that guys who once finished firmly in the center of the pack are now just behind them. It doesn't take much to figure out why, so little by little, the top athletes start using drugs, too.
Once that happens, Shorter says, the issue of performance-enhancing drugs boils down to one of free will. It is an individual athlete's right to do what he pleases with his body -- inject steroids, sleep in an oxygen tent, drip EPO into his veins until his blood freezes in place, or simply push himself cleanly until he drops, exhausted. But when he is forced to do something that he would not ordinarily do because the man next to him is doing it and now he must, too, just to keep up -- that's when the athlete has lost control over his own body.
This spring, Shorter was named chairman of the new United States Anti-Doping Agency. Beginning October 2, the day after the summer Olympic Games in Sydney end, the agency will assume responsibility for all sports drug testing within the country. (At the same time, a related organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, will become responsible for all doping matters involving the Olympics, a function previously -- and disastrously -- handled by the International Olympic Committee.)
The USADA also plans to spend $2 million a year on research -- an attempt to keep up with the newest doping and masking methods being used by coaches, trainers and athletes. "The drug issue was always viewed by the IOC as a public-relations problem, not as a drug problem," Shorter says. "Now that it's being viewed as a drug problem, it needs to be attacked as one."
On a personal note, Shorter has also pushed for samples of each athlete's urine and blood to be frozen in perpetuity. That way, when new testing methods are developed, former winners -- even dead ones -- could be retested to verify that they won cleanly. He says the move would deter potential cheaters by making them constantly confront their past. Waldemar Cierpinski, who reportedly runs an athletic-apparel store in Germany, has avoided commenting on the recovered Stasi files. But that would be hard to do if his blood were frozen in a vial in Switzerland someplace waiting to be thawed for a steroid test.
Despite the reforms, however, there is a serious concern that the new anti-doping agencies -- however well-intentioned -- are far too little and much too late. "There is a gross epidemic of drugs in elite sports," says Charles Yesalis, a professor of epidemiology at Pennsylvania State University, an expert on Olympic doping and the author of a forthcoming book, Anabolic Steroids in Sport and Exercise (Human Kinetics Press).
He says that not only will it be difficult to eradicate all drug use among current athletes -- Yesalis calls the USADA's $2 million annual research budget "chump change" -- but reformers will be swimming against a stiff tide to prevent future use, as well. That's because the people who pay for the events have become addicted to extraordinary athletic performances -- performances that, in turn, have become dependent on drugs.
"Would NBC have spent billions of dollars on broadcasting the Olympics from Atlanta if it knew the announcer would end up saying, Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Johnson has just posted the 154th best time ever in the 200 meters!'?" Yesalis asks. "Of course not. Drugs have created bigger-than-life athletes doing bigger-than-life things."
