MADRID -- According to World Anti-Doping Agency chief Dick Pound, the indictment of Barry Bonds for lying about his steroid use should send a message -- to Major League Baseball and its players' union.
"They still don't have an effective program, not even on the third try," he said of the league's drug-abuse policy, the third version of which was implemented in November 2005 under the threat of congressional action. "Their control program is insipid. It's protecting some goon who hits the ball so hard it's still rising when it crosses the fence, but there's a fraud on the public and on the other players."
Pound made his remarks during a break in the World Conference on Doping in Sport, where he is presiding over a redraft of the World Anti-Doping Code, which governs drug policy for the Olympic movement and hundreds of other sports organizations around the world.
Baseball and the other major sports leagues in the United States set their own policies and have refused to join WADA. That has always irritated Pound, who views any drug policy that departs from WADA's rigorous rule book as merely a giveaway to cheating athletes.
Notwithstanding the views of Pound, a Canadian lawyer, on Bonds, the slugger's indictment raised barely a ripple among the 1,500 delegates at the Madrid conference. That may be because Bonds' fame is an American, not a worldwide, phenomenon, and also because the WADA program's focus has always been on Olympic and amateur athletics rather than big-time pro sports.
Delegates were also preoccupied most of the day with the intrigue over the selection of a successor to Pound, who is retiring Dec. 31. Among the American attendees, however, there was unanimity about what the indictment represented -- a gratifying case of cooperation between government law-enforcement agents and anti-doping crusaders in sports.
"BALCO has changed the world's perspective on how to address this problem," said Travis T. Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, referring to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, the steroid dispensary that allegedly supplied Bonds, along with dozens of other athletes, with illicit drugs. BALCO was raided by a federal task force in 2003, producing a cascade of doping cases and criminal charges against such one-time sport paragons as sprinter Marion Jones.
"What it says is that for an athlete the cost-benefit analysis of whether to use drugs has changed," Tygart said. "There's a new cost -- a federal investigation and jail time."
