A Cautionary Tale

Or: Even When You Do Everything Right, You Can Still Lose

Imagine this: You’ve done everything right, at least as far as you know, and yet you still wind up caught in the claws of the anti-doping machine. Worse, you lose what you fought so hard to achieve. Admiration. Respect. An Olympic gold medal.

Never could happen, you say? Oh, but it did. To a young 16-year-old swimming sensation from California’s Bay Area in 1972. In Munich. At the Olympics.

Now, for most people who remember the 1972 Olympics or who learned about it in school, two events stand out. One pleasant, the other grotesque. The one story would be Mark Spitz and his seven gold medals. The other, of course, is about the terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes and trainers.

But there’s another story, the story of Rick DeMont. In 1972, Rick DeMont was a certified swimming star. He held the world record in the 1500-meter freestyle, and was a very good middle-distance swimmer, too. DeMont suffered from asthma since early childhood, but with the help of medication had been able to compete successfully for a number of years prior to the Olympics. And never once did he run into any problems related to his medication.

In preparing for the Olympics, DeMont filled out a medical history questionnaire sent to him by the US Olympic Committee. On it, he detailed his medical history, including the asthma and the medications that he had been prescribed — Marax and Actifed — to deal with both the asthma and certain allergies. And he returned the form to the USOC, thinking all was well.

In the middle of the night before the 400-meter finals, DeMont woke up wheezing. So he took Marax, an anti-asthma drug, to ease his breathing. The following morning, he took another pill. That night, DeMont raced in the 400-meter freestyle finals. He wasn’t expected to win. But it was an exciting race, right down to the wire. As DeMont told Steven Pegram, in an article on the US Olympic Team web site:

“No one took it out really fast, everyone was pretty cautious and that just played into my hands,” said DeMont, known for his ability to negative split races (swimming faster in last half of a race). Last at the 100-meter turn, DeMont moved up into sixth at the 200-meter mark. As his splits improved, he leaped into second at the 300-meter turn, only trailing Australian Brad Cooper.

“At the 350, we flipped even and I thought I can get this guy on the last lap,” DeMont recalled. “He was a lot stronger than I thought he would be. We were toe to toe the whole length.”

DeMont dug his head down and out-touched the Aussie by a mere .01 seconds to win the gold medal.

“I skipped one breath in there and I think that gave it to me,” he said.

Afterwards, like all medalists, DeMont had to submit to a drug test. Then, he went back to the Olympic Village to celebrate his victory. The celebration wouldn’t last very long. Two days later came news that he’d flunked the drug test. His sample showed the presence of ephedrine, a stimulant that has been banned since the first prohibited list was drawn up by the IOC Medical Commission in the late 1960s. It turns out that Marax, the medication DeMont took, contained a small amount of ephedrine.

But DeMont had let US Olympic Team officials know that he was taking Marax, so what went wrong? It turns out, none of the team physicians reviewed his medical questionnaire, and as a result, the information had not been passed on to IOC medical officials. In between the time DeMont submitted his urine sample after the 400 and the announcement of his positive result, he had qualified to swim in the 1500-meter freestyle finals.

A meeting was held with IOC officials, and after the meeting DeMont continued his preparations. Only moments before the 1500-meter final, DeMont was pulled from the race, suspended from further Olympic competition, and the decision to strip DeMont of his gold medal was announced. DeMont was forced to return his medal in order to maintain eligibility for further international competition.

The IOC initially decided not to award DeMont’s gold medal to Brad Cooper, the Australian he’d narrowly beaten. But after a protest by Australian officials, Cooper was given the gold. Cooper’s time in the event is listed among the Olympic record times for the 400-meters, with the current record-holder being another Australian, Ian Thorpe.

In 1973, DeMont channeled the anger and disappointment he felt at Munich into a new world record. As Pegram wrote:

“Prior to the Olympics, I was powered by optimism, dreams, and desire,” [DeMont] said. “After that, I was pretty much just powered by anger.”

So much anger, that one year later at the World Championships in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, DeMont smashed the world record in the 400-meter freestyle, becoming the first swimmer in history to break the magical 4-minute barrier (3:58.18). The feat earned him World Swimmer of the Year honors.

In setting the new record, he beat Brad Cooper a second time. For a number of years after Munich, DeMont and his family fought to clear his name. It wasn’t until early 2001 that the USOC finally cleared DeMont.

“It was nice to be acknowledged, to be recognized, and for the truth to come out,” [DeMont] said. “It wasn’t just me. It was my coach. It was my family. Everyone had to live with this stigma.”

One week later, at an International Olympic Committee meeting, DeMont’s case came up for discussion. Despite the actions of the USOC, the IOC decided not to clear DeMont, or offer him any special recognition. They let the results of the 1972 race, as decided long ago, stand. Among the members of the committee discussing DeMont’s case were IOC members involved in the original case all those years ago.

The moral of the story: Even when you do everything right, the actions (or inaction) of others can still lead to a doping violation and cost you a hard-won victory.

For those who see a parallel to current doping stories: Let’s hope whatever the outcome of the Floyd Landis case that we won’t find out 30 or so years from now that, oops, someone made a mistake and that Landis didn’t really test positive after all.

As a side note, in researching this story, I ran across an interesting quote from Jacques Rogge, in an article by Alan Abrahamson which originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2002:

“The IOC, I can say this, under my presidency, will be a witch hunter in doping,” Jacques Rogge, a Belgian physician elected IOC president last year, said recently. “Zero tolerance. Pushing relentlessly to test, and to catch the cheats. And we support WADA wholeheartedly.”

For those who’ve been observing the Landis case and other doping cases and called what’s going on a witch hunt, there it is. Dick Pound is, in fact, Witchfinder General, according to none other than M. Rogge.

Rick DeMont, by the way, went on to become a painter and well-respected swimming coach at the University of Arizona.