Filed under: Sports Business and Media
LEESBURG, Va. -- Not much light had been shed on sports' little pharmaceutical secret when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency began operations 10 years ago this month. "I think it was a normalized culture," USADA CEO Travis Tygart, pictured right, told FanHouse this week at the agency's annual science symposium. "The entire sports world grew so quick financially, including the Olympic sports that really took off after the 1984 Olympics. What did all that money, fame and glory bring? It brought the temptation of doping."
As the independent body charged with testing and disciplining U.S. athletes competing in Olympic sports, USADA has no official role in how Major League Baseball, the NFL and NBA test their athletes. That's not to say USADA hasn't had some sway on the matter over the last decade.
USADA was instrumental in uncovering the fact that Bay Area Lab Co-Operative (BALCO) was distributing performance-enhancing drugs to several elite athletes from track stars Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, to NFL and MLB players. Part of it was the fact that it received a gift in the form of a syringe shipped to the agency's Colorado Springs headquarters by disgruntled track coach Trevor Graham, a substance that was identified by the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory as THG ("The Clear"). Later in 2003, former IRS agent Jeff Novitzky led a raid on BALCO's headquarters.
It was the sort of investigation that Tygart said would be hard to fathom before USADA's creation.
"The sports themselves were like a fox guarding the hen house," Tygart said. "They didn't want to uncover the dirty side that might have existed at the time. By uncovering BALCO, you could see the cheating culture that existed before we took over. We wanted to dismantle that culture."
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