Pound Expounded

Walt Kelly, who created the comic strip Pogo, once penned a comic where the headline read, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly’s quip is really just another way of saying we’re our own worst enemy.

Perhaps no one is this more true for than Richard W. Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. It is Pound’s own ability to craft outrageous and quotable quotes that gets him into more trouble than anything else. This is illustrated very effectively in Michael Sokolove’s article, The Scold, published in the New York Times Magazine.

But is it a hit piece or an objective personality profile? Before we get into that discussion, there’s an actual bit of real news buried in the Sokolove’s article. And that is the identity of the person who leaked information about Floyd Landis’ test results to the New York Times in the early days of the Landis affair. Consider these quotes from the beginning of the article. From the article’s third paragraph:

As it happened, the news that the cyclist Floyd Landis had failed a drug test at the Tour de France broke in July, in the midst of a series of interviews I had with Pound in Montreal, where he runs WADA and also holds down more big jobs and positions than would seem humanly possible …

And the article’s fifth paragraph, which has been quoted in a number of places:

Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”

The juxtaposition of this information within the story suggests that Pound made these comments in the early days of the scandal, before Landis had received the full details of his A sample test results, and long before Landis received the lab documentation package. And before the results had been officially made public, the New York Times ran articles which cited sources within WADA as saying the T/E ratio was 11 to 1. It’s not too much of a stretch to connect the dots here and figure out that the source was none other the Dick Pound, himself.

This is not something that Sokolove spells out in the article, but it is what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of the information and how it’s presented by the author.

In between these two quotes, Pound offers his assessment of Landis’ performance in Stage 17:

“He was 11 minutes behind or something, and all of the sudden there’s this Herculean effort, where he’s going up mountains like he’s on a goddamn Harley,” [Pound] said.

(OK, Floyd, here’s an idea: Next time, you need to disguise the Harley better. Change the mufflers, at the very least, so they’re not so loud that Dick Pound can hear them all the way over in Montreal.)

But seriously, in this article Sokolove does an excellent job of letting his subject speak for himself. And speak, he does. I read the print version article in the magazine this morning marking quotable quotes and notable sections. When I was done, I’d marked up virtually the entire article.

If you don’t have the time to read the full article, I’ll do my best to summarize it for you, as it applies to who Dick Pound is. The article also features a very good discussion of performance enhancing drugs and techniques, as well as a discussion of what constitutes legal performance enhancement or not. In the latter category, Sokolove offers this about weight training (without the `roids):

The specificity of WADA’s list of banned substances — hundreds of steroids, stimulants, beta blockers, masking agents and other compounds — tends to make the whole anti-doping endeavor look tidier than it really is. Weight and endurance training, strictly speaking, enhance performance, yet nearly everyone would agree that they fall within the spirit of sport. But what about scientific approaches to nutrition? And all those vitamins and nutritional supplements that athletes gobble by the handful — believing (or hoping) that they are performance enhancers?

Sokolove’s article raises a number of similar points. For those alone, the article is well worth your time.

But back to Mr. Pound. Sokolove offers this about how his subject approaches the fight against doping in sports:

Battling the known and the unknown, and probably outspent and outgunned, Pound has seized the prerogative of the underdog: fight with whatever you’ve got. Fight fair. Or unfair. His best weapon is his brilliance as a formulator of quotes, his ability to make headlines and call attention to his cause. (He takes great pride in this; one of his books is titled “High Impact Quotations.”) Pound is not a stereotypical Canadian, if you think of Canadians as reticent, nor is he very lawyerly: he assembles whatever facts he can gather, but when they’re not attainable, sometimes just makes them up.

And then he gives an example of how Mr. Pound does just that:

Take the ruckus he caused when he charged that one-third of players in the National Hockey League, or about seven per team, were using illegal performance enhancers. Sitting in his office, I asked him how he came up with that estimate. He leaned back in his chair and chuckled, completely unabashed to admit that he had just invented it. “It was pick a number,” he said. “So it’s 20 percent. Twenty-five percent. Call me a liar.”

Pound, it appears, admits he plays a bit fast and loose with the facts. If this were the only occasion where Pound had done so, one could maybe excuse his hubris. But Sokolove then goes on to discuss Pound’s comments about Carl Lewis, the American sprinter awarded the gold medal from the 1988 Seoul Olympics after Ben Johnson, Lewis’ archrival, was disqualified after testing positive for stanozolol, a banned steroid.

Pound argues that Lewis should not have been allowed to compete in Seoul, because Lewis had tested positive for a banned substance at the US Track and Field trials earlier that summer, a result that Pound says US officials disregarded, saying:

“USA Track and Field was, of course, the gold medalist at doing that,” Pound told me. What Lewis tested positive for, Pound said, “was a steroid of some sort. A steroid.”

Pound even claims to have paperwork to back his assertion up. But Sokolove dug deeper and found what Lewis tested positive for was Sudafed. And apparently US Track and Field accepted Lewis’ explanation that he’d taken Sudafed for a cold and did not sanctioned him. When Sokolove asked Pound if he can see his documentation, Pound was unable to find it. Sokolove observes:

[W]hen I asked him before my second visit if he could dig [the documents relating to Lewis] out, he said he couldn’t find them. It didn’t seem to bother him any more than acknowledging that his estimate on the percentage of chemically enhanced N.H.L. players was pretty much a wild guess. Pound’s words are sort of like darts: he lets them go, accumulates points, then throws some more.

Further on, Sokolove offers this assessment of Pound from a well-regarded expert on the history of doping:

John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas who writes extensively on issues of athletic doping, credits Pound for aggressively raising the profile of his cause but says that he has been “fast and loose with historical fact, and with what you can and cannot say with regard to the verifiable level of drug use among elite athletes.”

It’s easy to find quotes within the article that bolster the contention that Pound is WADA’s own Achilles heel. Pound’s verbal virtuosity makes for many quotable (and often outrageous) quotes, without a doubt. But the article is actually quite balanced, offering discussions of WADA’s history and accomplishments, and Pound’s role in making WADA what it is today.

And Sokolove gives a balanced account of Dick Pound’s time within the International Olympic Committee, including his service as the lead investigator into bribe-taking related to the awarding of the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City. Pound’s effectiveness in that role may well be the reason he did not succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch as head of the IOC.

And of course, no personality profile on Dick Pound would really be complete without a discussion of Dick Pound and his running feud with Lance Armstrong. Readers looking for a discussion of the animosity between the two won’t find much new, with the exception of perhaps one or two startling quotes, such as this one:

Pound told me he likes Armstrong, or at least he likes the mythic Lance: “I like the idea of sports heroes. Nothing I like better.”

For people who are ardent Dick Pound fans, it would be easy to view Sokolove’s article as a hit piece. And just as easily, rabid anti-Pound partisans could easily take this article to be even more proof of why Dick Pound should be relieved of his duties. In the end, it is neither a classic hit piece nor a classic unmasking of the face of evil. Sokolove paints a detailed and complicated portrait of the man behind the mask. For those interested in doping scandals, the role of WADA, and Dick Pound’s guidance of the anti-doping system — regardless of their personal beliefs about Mr. Pound — this article is a must-read.