LA Times investigation.

The worldwide sports anti-doping program, created to fight
performance enhancing drug use in international athletics, imposes severe
punishments for accidental or technical infractions, relies at times on disputed
scientific evidence and resists outside scrutiny, a Times investigation has
found.


Elite athletes have been barred from the Olympics, forced to relinquish medals,
titles or prize money and confronted with potentially career-ending suspensions
after testing positive for a banned substance at such low concentrations it
could have no detectable effect on performance, records show.


They have been sanctioned for steroid abuse after taking legal vitamins or
nutritional supplements contaminated with trace amounts of the prohibited
compounds. In some cases, the tainted supplements had been provided by trusted
coaches or trainers.


The findings emerge from a Times examination of more than 250 anti-doping cases
involving runners, cyclists, skiers, tennis players and competitors in dozens of
other sports from around the world.

2nd part of the investigation

A panel of international sports arbitrators hearing a doping case
against Olympic sprinter Torri Edwards went out of their way to sing her
praises.


They described Edwards, then a 27-year-old USC graduate, as "a diligent and
hardworking athlete" who had "conducted herself with honesty, integrity and
character."


They acknowledged that her purported breach of doping regulations was entirely
unintentional, caused by the obscure additive nikethamide in a couple of
otherwise innocent glucose tablets she took at an exhibition race in Martinique.


"She has not sought to gain any improper advantage or to 'cheat' in any way,"
they wrote in August 2004.


But the arbitrators, while expressing "unease" about the rules and acknowledging
their "harshness," still found Edwards guilty of doping. Her sanction: a
two-year suspension from international competition.

Tyler Hamilton story

To anti-doping officials, the case against Olympic and Tour de
France cyclist Tyler Hamilton for an illicit blood transfusion ranks among their
greatest victories — a sanction for "intentional cheating at its most
sophisticated," in the words of Travis T. Tygart, general counsel to the U.S.
Anti-Doping Agency.


To others, including independent scientists who worked on Hamilton's defense, it
underscores one of the most glaring flaws of the international anti-doping
system — its reliance on scientific research performed hastily and on the cheap.