Topic: News:3 Strikes & Out for Australia But No Stop in Sight

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Three strikes and we're out: but the hits just keep on coming

WHEN weightlifting hits the news it is almost always about drugs.

The credibility of the sport has been shredded in the past few years and over the next week before the Court of Arbitration for Sport there will be further probing of how four Australian weightlifters tested positive a collective five times to the potent stimulant benzylpiperazine (BZP).

Technically a country has to have three serious drug offences - such as steroids or other serious stimulants - to be banned from international competition for a year, but the testing has to be conducted by the IWF testers.

This may be the escape clause Australian weightlifting boss and Australian Commonwealth Games Federation president Sam Coffa uses to save his sport from international embarrassment.

For to have a sport headed by such a senior Commonwealth Games official - he is also the vice-chairman of the Melbourne organising committee - thrown out of the Games and all international competition for a year would be humiliating in the extreme.

So far Australia has only two "international" drug positives, the rest were domestic tests conducted by the Australian Sports Drug Agency. Still, there are a lot of questions being asked, not least just what does weightlifting have to do before its tax-payer funding is pulled?

On the street BZP is known as "frenzy", "nemesis", "blast" and "rapture" and is regarded in the same category as amphetamines and other party drugs like ecstasy. So just why has it been the drug of choice for so many Australian lifters?

Armenian-based champion Sergo Chakhoyan (who has previously served a two-year steroid ban) and Victorian lifter Corran Hocking tested positive to BZP while competing at the Oceania and Commonwealth championships in Melbourne at the beginning of October and just two weeks later Tasmania lifters Camilla Fogagnolo and Jenna Myers and, once again, Corran Hocking tested positive to it at the Australian championships in Brisbane at the end of October.

Apparently within the sport it was reputed to be a terrific little upper, something to get the mind focussed on lifting such incredibly heavy weights. Of course, all athletes, particularly those seeking to represent their country, know they will be tested, especially during times of competition. Why did they think they would escape detection?

One of those facing suspension, Hocking, is in partnership with Keith Murphy, a weightlifter who late last year was handed a two-year suspended sentence by the Victorian Supreme Court for trafficking in anabolic steroids. The two sell legal supplements to lifters but somehow one of the batches of the supplements became contaminated.

Coffa's hope that the lifters will be treated leniently by the CAS has not been the case in another recent incident involving the same drug.

Auckland bodybuilder Tony Ligaliga was banned last December for two years for taking BZP. He said he took it, not to help his performance, but as a party drug. So far Coffa has delayed naming the full Melbourne Games team pending the CAS result.

Under the WADA code there is a mandatory two-year sanction unless the athlete can show there was no fault on their part.

The two female lifters reckon they've been guilty only of swigging a contaminated sports drink. A similar argument was persuasively used by world kayak star Nathan Baggaley to reduce his two-year ban for swigging steroids to a 12-month suspension, allowing him to be back in time for the Beijing Olympics.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Aussie Weightlifter Banned for Two Years

Australian weightlifter Corran Hocking has been banned from competing for two years for using a prohibited substance.

The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) said Hocking had accepted the sanction after testing positive to the stimulant Benzylpiperazine (BZP) at the Australian weightlifting nationals in October last year.

Hocking, who won a silver medal in the men's over 105kg clean and jerk at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and also took out the overall an overall bronze medal, was ruled out of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games earlier this year over the same incident.

He delayed his appeal over the incident until after the Melbourne Games in March, but the unsuccessful and lengthy process has ended.

Hocking will be ineligible to compete until December 14, 2007.

He is the latest Australian weightlifter to test positive for the banned substance, following Camilla Fogagnolo and Jenna Myers, who also have been suspended for two years.

ASADA is conducting an on-going investigation into drug use in the sport that was launched mid-way through the Melbourne Games.

"This is a timely reminder to all athletes of the serious consequences of prohibited stimulant use," ASADA chairman Richard Ings said.

"Athletes who use prohibited stimulants and test positive in-competition will be prosecuted by ASADA for the maximum two year suspension applicable under the World Anti-Doping Agency Code."

The effects of BZP are similar to ecstasy, increasing alertness, euphoria and a general feeling of well being.

While it is banned in most countries, it is legal in New Zealand where it is sold over the counter as an alternative party drug.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Lifter's Ban is Bad News for Sailor

VICTORIAN weightlifter Corran Hocking has been banned from sport for two years after testing positive to the stimulant benzylpiperazine (BZP).

Hocking's ban - which comes as the wide-ranging investigation into drugs in Australian weightlifting nears its conclusion - is not good news for rugby star Wendell Sailor, who also tested positive to stimulants, although in his case the drug was cocaine.

Hocking was banned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport until December 4, 2007. He tested positive to BZP at the Australian weightlifting titles in Queensland in October 2005.

His exclusion from the sport follows that of the two female Tasmanian weightlifters, Jenna Myers and Camilla Fogagnolo, who also tested positive to BZP and were banned for two years.

Another Australian weightlifter, Sergo Chakhoyan, faces a life ban for testing positive to the same stimulant. Chakhoyan has previously been sidelined for two years for a steroid offence.

All four lifters have been approached for questioning by Australian Sports Anti Doping Authority investigator Richard Young, whose report into the sport is due soon.

Young has been looking at the supplement business relationship of Hocking with another lifter, Keith Murphy, who was given a two-year suspended sentence for trafficking in anabolic steroids in the Victorian Supreme Court.

The anti-doping authority's chairman, Richard Ings, said Hocking's sanction showed there were serious consequences for athletes taking stimulants during competition, and warned that ASADA would apply for the full two-year penalty.

Sailor is facing a two-year ban for testing positive and will appear before a closed anti-doping tribunal which the ARU will not name, possibly within a month.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

A picture of the adopted Australian cheater in full enhanced form, courtesy of World Weightlifting and the Herrick family:

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

More of Chakhoyan, courtesy of World Weightlifting and the Herrick family:

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Beware Knock on Door as Big Brother Opens New Front to War on Drugs
By Patrick Smith

BEN JOHNSON got himself a headline. People want to see athletes run fast and don't care if they are using performance enhancing drugs to do it, according to the Canadian. Last time Ben made the news he finished third to a trotter and a 17-year-old thoroughbred. Stanozolol Ben's got a credibility problem.

People watch sport to be astonished, not duped. Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin are charged with cheating the world. They have tested positive to elevated levels of testosterone. The Tour de France winner and the Olympic champion are con men.

Sports like athletics and cycling are running and peddling out of good will. Every time a positive drug test is announced WADA heavy Dick Pound thumps the desk and says it isn't good enough and that the war on drugs in sport will continue.

If the winners of such prestigious and significant titles as the Tour de France and the Olympic 100 metres dash are boosting their performances by using drugs we are entitled to know whether Pound's war is winnable. Or at the very least if new strategies are required. It might just be that the chemists are self-medicating because nobody appears in danger of catching them.

The man charged with keeping Australian sport clean is Richard Ings, chairman and chief executive officer of ASADA, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority. He has an annual budget of $12 million and a directive from the federal Government to ensure Australian sport is drug free.

If Australia is to avoid its own Landis and Gatlin then it is very much in the hands of Ings.

ASADA officially took its first breath in March, replacing the Australian Sports Drug Agency. The mission for the new authority is grand if not impossible - to eliminate doping altogether. With the new body has come a new front to the war. Far from waiting for cheats to show up in drug tests, Ings has launched a campaign to hunt them down.

"We have people knocking on doors, asking questions, following leads today," Ings told The Australian yesterday. If it sounds dramatic that's only because that's the way Ings wants it. The war on drugs in sport in Australia has changed.

ASADA will perform 4200 tests this year but that alone will not stop cheating. In fact, it can't. Athletes can now use drugs and methods that are undetectable. Other drugs remain in the system so briefly that it would be nothing but a fluke if an athlete was to be caught.

"Bodies that have their main focus on testing need to change. They need to bring in new methodologies and new tactics to deal with the reality of sophisticated doping today," Ings said.

"How do you detect drugs that are undetectable? That is the premise for the launch of ASADA with its extensive new powers of investigations and presenting cases at sporting tribunals."

To understand how broad the battle must become you only have to look at the eight ways it is possible to violate the WADA code. Positive test, use or attempted use of a prohibited drug, refusing to provide a sample, tampering with the drug protocols, possession, trafficking and administration of a prohibited substance. The eighth is a catch-all clause: failure to comply. Only the first three directly relate to testing. The other five can only be discovered through investigation.

"ASADA will always have a testing program and it will always be very important to us but our new focus is on investigations. It means working with other government organisations - the federal and state police forces, it's working with Customs, the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration), and working with state medical boards to develop a holistic, integrated approach to eradicating drugs in sport," Ings said.

"The lines between sports and drug use are now being blurred. Abroad there are examples such as Balco of persons distributing prohibited substances to athletes across multiple sports.

"Australian sport is not immune to this type of threat. To protect the integrity of Australian sport we now need sophisticated systems of investigation that view drug use as a whole-of-sport issue and assertively apply cross-sport measures to detect doping violations that may be undetectable through testing alone.

"We have a comprehensive ability to share information both ways, between ASADA as the focal point for driving drug free sport and other government agencies that have a similar brief to stop the distribution of these drugs. We forecast that investigations will be ASADA's driving force for achieving pure performance in Australian sport."

The potential for ASADA to dig deep is vast if you collect all the powers available to organisations like Customs, police and the TGA. To ensure it is best placed to make best use of these connections, ASADA has its own team of investigators.

Ings has engaged specialist forensic experts to interrogate all information that comes into the possession of ASADA. Emails, financial statements, and other transactions are all noted, tracked down and cross referenced.

"It is all part of our assertive approach to deter, detect and sanction athletes and support staff who are breaking the rules," Ings said.

He has commissioned investigations into old court cases that might have involved possession, distribution or trafficking of steroids and other banned substances.

"Where there are persons who through the courts have been found guilty of distribution of prohibited substances, we want to know if they did business with any athletes or athlete support personnel," Ings said.

Cold Case is not just a TV show.

ASADA has also set up an anti-doping hotline where information can be left anonymously. Ings said that since the publicity that came with the Wendell Sailor suspension, the phone line has been busy.

"Our guys are running around like crazy at the moment. Chasing down leads, knocking on doors, interviewing people, building networks of informants. People are coming forward giving us quality tips," Ings said.

"Of our budget we will spend 50 per cent in the area of detection. We can get an investigator on somebody's doorstep anywhere within 12 hours of receiving credible information."

Once ASADA has evidence, he has instructed his enforcement team they must extract the appropriate penalty. "Fight and win" is the motto he has commissioned for them. Later this month ASADA will present the results of its first investigation - the possible use of drugs in weightlifting.

While testing remains critical to drug detection, Ings has moved away from the philosophy of random testing.

"We fish where the fish are," he said. "So we are target testing. When you are dealing with drugs that are difficult to detect then random testing is a waste of time. We are maximising the chance of finding athletes who may be using drugs."

So this is the new Australian war on drugs in sport. It had better work. Only when sport is running on empty will it be running with the unconditional good will of the people.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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No Cash Until AWF Found To Be Clean
By Jacquelin Magnay

AUSTRALIAN Sports Commission officials have told the Australian Weightlifting Federation the sport will not receive any funding until after the current doping investigation is completed and major changes to a range of corporate governance issues are made.

Certainly, the debts have mounted since the ASC withheld its funding last year, and there have been questions about the solvency of the federation. Only one quarterly payment of a sports commission grant worth more than $350,000 in total was made in year 2005-06.

At June 30, 2005, the organisation had $18,556 in cash but there were tax liabilities of $21,461. The net assets of the federation were $3121 and several member states were questioning the lack of detail concerning more than $100,000 in expenses. One immediate requirement of the ASC is for the AWF to prepare a full list of creditors and debtors.

In a letter to the board and state members, AWF chief executive Matthew Curtain said he had attended a meeting with president Sam Coffa and two sports commission officials on July 19. He wrote that the meeting was held "to discuss the AWF's core business viability, with the expectation government funding would be restored as soon as possible, notwithstanding the outcome of the [Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority] investigation into weightlifting".

However, a sports commission spokesman told the Herald yesterday that "the ASC has made it clear in writing that funding which was suspended last year will not be restored until a number of issues are resolved to our satisfaction and until the outcomes of the ASADA investigation are received". One of those matters is removing proxy votes from board meetings.

The sports commission has made special payments of around $60,000 to 11 elite weightlifters as reimbursement for incentive payments that have not been paid, and other grants. The lifters will have to repay the monies if they are implicated in the drugs investigation, which is expected to be tabled at ASADA's next monthly board meeting.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Weightlifting Inquiry Uncovers Evidence of Sports Drug-Trafficking Triangle
By Jacquelin Magnay

THE exhaustive nine-month Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority inquiry into drugs and weightlifting has uncovered startling evidence linking drug trafficking between weightlifters and Australian athletes involved in two other sports.

Lead investigator Richard Young is finalising his long-awaited report, which may be handed down late next week, and is tipped to create controversy not only in weightlifting but possibly in other strength-based sports such as cycling and powerlifting.

As part of the inquiry, Young last week obtained computer data from the Melbourne offices of the Australian Weightlifting Federation president, Sam Coffa.

The Coffa data is understood to relate to an adjunct to the main Young investigation, that of how to restructure the sport after strident criticisms of Coffa's dominant role in it, the lack of financial records, and governance issues. There is no suggestion that Coffa is linked to the drug investigation.

However, computer forensic scientists working for Young are understood to have earlier uncovered data from other private, non-AWF computers about possible drug-trafficking links to the other sports.

But the intense scrutiny of Coffa's management has not gone down well at the sport's Hawthorn base. Coffa, who is also the president of the Australian Commonwealth Games Association and was on the Melbourne Commonwealth Games board, has also come under fire this month from the Australian Sports Commission for misrepresenting the reasons $340,000 of taxpayer funding has been frozen.

In correspondence sighted by the Herald, Coffa has been taken to task for "inaccurate statements on the rationale for the ASC withholding the AWF's funding and the inter-relationship between the ASADA investigation and the reinstatement of funding to the AWF". He was told to amend his president's report and that of the chief executive to "ensure the situation is accurately recorded for the AWF membership and the public record". Coffa was also criticised in the letter for the non-payment of Melbourne 2006 expenses to one weightlifter.

The Herald has previously reported that Commonwealth Games grants for athletes were withheld for months by the financially strapped AWF and used instead on day-to-day expenses. The ASC has held grave concerns about compliance, financial and governance issues, and AWF funding has been withheld for more than a year, although athletes have continued to receive funds from the ASC.

Coffa has told the ASC that due to the pressure of the Commonwealth Games, "things were not done up to standard" but he still believed he was correct in reporting the ASC had withheld funding mainly until the drugs investigation was completed.

Young was appointed by ASADA chairman Richard Ings to look into the issue of drugs in weightlifting in March this year following a series of revelations in the Herald that two Tasmanian weightlifters, Camilla Fogagnolo and Jenna Myers, had tested positive to a banned stimulant after buying a supplement from a third woman, Belinda Van Tienen, who has links with convicted drug trafficker Keith Murphy. Van Tienen was the subject of an internal ASC review into whether she should compete in Melbourne - taking the place of one of the banned lifters - or face trafficking charges. That review was then taken over by Young.

Young also looked at the drug conviction of a former elite weightlifter, Caleb Loades, who has been stripped of more than $350,000 in assets following conviction as a drug trafficker and suspicions of money laundering.

Young also investigated banned weightlifters Sergo Chakhoyan and Corran Hocking, who tested positive to the same stimulant as Fogagnolo and Myers, benzylpiperazine.