Drugs in Sports | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine, July 2005

Page:

The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports (cont.)

THE PRAGMATIST
So why persist? Partly because Catlin, a man who can seem cranky even on a good day, refuses to give in. "I just can't turn in my badge," he tells me. But there's a deeper answer. Beneath a gruff exterior softened by a dry sense of humor, Catlin really believes that sports are a vital part of the human experience, and he wants that experience to be honest.

Other than his two sons, whom he raised alone after his wife died of cancer, this work has been Catlin's greatest passion for 25 years. To him, sports doping is a "grubby, dirty, nasty, filthy business." Catlin's view of his mission is consistent with his character, which combines a serious sense of justice with a dash of Yankee pragmatism.

He was raised a New Englander, graduated from Yale University, and received his medical education at the University of Rochester, graduating in 1965. As a freshly minted doctor specializing in internal medicine, he entered the Army at the height of the Vietnam War and was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C.

One day, Catlin read a newspaper account of a D.C. storefront drug campaigner, a guy who dressed up in old Army fatigues and went around snatching addicts off the streets, hauling them to his "treatment" center, and reforming them. The government was planning to close him down because he had no staff doctor. Catlin went to his headquarters and volunteered.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, soldiers were dealing with the danger and drudgery by shooting up heroin. Catlin, now considered a drug-addiction expert by the Army, got the nod to head up a treatment program. He fought with generals over their plan to jail addicts, insisting that punishment wouldn't solve the problem. Instead, he focused on getting addicted soldiers out of Vietnam, then treating the addiction.

In 1972, UCLA recruited him to its med-school faculty; he was still teaching when Los Angeles was selected to host the 1984Olympics. Though a few academic labs, primarily in Europe, had researched sports doping, and the IOC had started using limited doping tests at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, there hadn't been much work done in the U.S. Catlin was asked to set up a lab for the L.A. Games, a job he thought would be nothing more than an interesting diversion. He's been at it ever since.

Catlin loves pure athleticism, and he's upset that drugs have made the very fact of greatness a cause for suspicion. He first encountered this reality soon after he started the lab. One day, track coach Pat Connolly stormed into his office. At the time, Connolly was coaching sprinter Evelyn Ashford, who would go on to win four gold medals and a silver in three Olympics. Back then there were whispers that Ashford's success was due to drugs. But Connolly knew Ashford was the best natural athlete she'd ever coached, and there was no way she would allow innuendo to mar her accomplishments. She wanted Catlin to help quash the rumors.

"I went in and said, 'Come out to practice anytime,' " Connolly remembers. " 'Do not tell us when. Come every day. Whenever. Get samples, test blood, whatever, so we can document. Then, once fingers start to point, we have this record.'"

Catlin watched Ashford work out and came away in awe. She didn't look like she was on drugs—she was lean, not bulky—and she had a natural grace that convinced him her talents were pure. "Don said, 'Evelyn will never need this. She will not have that problem,' " Connolly recalls. "I did not like his answer."

"She was mad at me," Catlin says. "But she wanted me to test Evelyn and declare her drug-free," and he could not think of any scientific way to give an athlete a formal stamp of approval. He sympathized with Connolly, though. It seemed unfair to be accused just because you were good.

"Though I could not do anything then, the thought was indelibly stamped in my mind," Catlin says. He assumed that, in time, a system would emerge that could exonerate pure athletes like Ashford.

"Something had to give," Catlin says. "It's been 20 years, and nothing gave."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.