Drug Testing A Challenge For Nagano Games Screening For Illegal Substances Not A Regular Issue For Japanese

During a trial run for the 1998 Winter Olympics, a skier sped off on the slopes after a freestyle race and momentarily disappeared before his required drug test.

The skier wasn’t trying to avoid it. The escort who was supposed to accompany him just couldn’t ski fast enough.

In another foul-up, the official forms that accompanied urine samples for required drug tests were mishandled.

The forms had too many carbon sheets, so the urine samples could easily have arrived in the lab with the athletes’ names on them - not anonymously, as required. (Olympic officials use numbers to identify the athletes).

Glitches such as these have left some Japanese officials worried about the much-larger drug screening program at the Nagano Games, which begin Feb. 7.

“There is no proper anti-doping system in place in Japan,” said Takashi Kawahara, chairman of the Japan Olympic Committee’s doping control commission. “Nagano officials are just coming to terms with the seriousness of the problem.”

He and other officials say the problem is partly cultural: Drug abuse is not a major concern in the country. As a result, the Japanese sports world has had little experience with drug tests and there are not yet enough people trained to police all the Olympians.

Random, no-notice tests are unheard of in Japan, and drug tests in general have been restricted to world championships, such as swimming and track, where international federations require them.

At the Olympics, many different races will be run at the same time across the Japan Alps, requiring a medical staff of several hundred people.

They’ll need to quickly find the athletes, make sure they take their tests within the required time, and obtain their urine samples. At some venues, escorts who accompany athletes to drug tests will have to ski well enough to keep up with them.

Hitoshi Kobayashi, in charge of drugs tests and other medical services at the Olympics, said training should produce enough qualified volunteers in time for the games.

“All our problems will be solved before the Olympics,” he said.

Urine samples from Olympians must be sent to a laboratory approved by the International Olympic Committee. An accredited Tokyo-based lab, the only one of its kind in Japan, is setting up a branch in Nagano.

The Japanese handled broad drug tests once before, at the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo, the first Winter Games to include them. But these days, cheating is becoming far more rampant and sophisticated - involving mists and even skin creams.

In blood doping, athletes have been known to extract a pint or two of their own blood, freeze it, then reinject it into their bodies on the day of a race. The additional red blood cells give them more stamina.

Athletes also have used a hormone called EPO, or erythropoietin, that boosts the production of red blood cells.

Neither can be detected by the urine tests used at past Olympics, but officials are working on new methods of detection.

Ever since Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal in the 1988 Seoul Games for testing positive for anabolic steroids, doping has been associated with the Summer Games.

But drugs are becoming more of a problem in some winter sports, said Dr. James Betts of the U.S. Olympic anti-doping committee.

Lyubov Egorova, a six-time Olympic champion from Russia, failed a drug test during the World Nordic Ski Championships in Norway in February. The International Ski Federation said Egorova used a stimulant that can mask other prohibited drugs.

“Doping is ongoing,” Betts said. “The only way to have a level playing field is to have all athletes exposed to no-notice, random testing.”