THE 1988 OLYMPICS IN SEOUL GOT OFF TO A GOOD START FOR DICK POUND. As vice president of the International Olympic Committee, he had helped return the games to glory after the ruinous Cold War boycotts in 1980 and 1984. Millions of fans were in Seoul, and – more important for Pound – billions more were watching in 160 countries. He was in charge of TV rights and had brought in a record $403 million from broadcasters to air the 1988 summer games. To top it off, Pound – a Canadian – was in the stands at Olympic Stadium when his countryman Ben Johnson sprinted his way to a gold medal in the 100-meter final. Johnson's time of 9.79 seconds shattered his own world record, and in beating America's Carl Lewis, Johnson confirmed his position as the fastest man on the planet.

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The day after Johnson's victory, Pound was still glowing, soaking up congratulations at a lunch with Olympic sponsors, when Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC and Pound's mentor, burst into the room. Samaranch, known for his aristocratic manner, was in a panic.

"Dick," Samaranch said, "have you heard the news?"

"What is it?" Pound asked. "Somebody died?"

"No, no, no, it's worse," Pound recalls Samaranch saying. "Ben Johnson has tested positive." More precisely, Johnson's post-race blood sample showed evidence of stanozolol, an anabolic steroid used to boost lean muscle growth.

The scandal threatened to unravel the work Olympic officials had done to recover from the stain of the two boycotted games. A quick, decisive meeting of the IOC medical commission was in order. Desperate to save their medalist's reputation, Canadian officials asked Pound, an experienced attorney, to represent Johnson at the hearing, which would determine whether he would keep his medal or be booted from the games.

At that point, Pound was the presumptive heir to Samaranch as head of the world's most powerful sporting organization. Before he put his name and reputation on the line, he wanted to talk to Johnson.

Pound pulled Johnson aside in the only private space they could find – the bathroom in Pound's hotel suite. "Ben, are you on anything?" he asked. Johnson looked Pound straight in the eye. No, he said. He had no idea how the drugs could have ended up in his system.

Pound took the case. In the hearing, he argued that someone had sabotaged Johnson's sample or that it had been accidentally contaminated. But the scientific evidence was overwhelming. Blood tests showed that not only did Johnson have stanozolol in his system, his adrenal function was suppressed, indicating long-term steroid use. This was no glitch.

The verdict was swift: Johnson was stripped of his medal and suspended for two years. Three days earlier, Johnson had been a champion. Now he was a cheat.

The Johnson case was doping's mortal sin. Other Olympians had tested positive, but never a gold medalist in the premier event of the games. It was undeniable that drugs had permeated sports to their highest level and that sporting officials were lagging far behind.

The case also marked a turning point for Pound, who overnight went from romantic to cynic. "Most athletes, when they're caught, lie," Pound says today, the disappointment still fresh on his face. "Their coaches lie. The people around them lie. They just deny, deny, deny."

IN THE NEARLY TWO decades since Johnson's positive test, sports doping has gone from dirty secret to an epidemic. In 2004, former 400-meter world champion Jerome Young was banned for life from track and field after failing his second drug test. That same year, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) was accused of providing anabolic steroids to dozens of professional athletes. The 2006 Tour de France was rocked by the pre-race disqualification of several top favorites. To make things worse, Tour winner Floyd Landis tested positive for an abnormal ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone and may yet be stripped of his title and suspended from cycling. Drug use no longer festers on the margins – it is woven into the fabric of competition, and athletes play cat and mouse with regulators. As a result, fans are beginning to turn away in disgust, fed up with tainted athletes and distorted games.

Pound, meanwhile, created and has become chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and he's on a crusade to rid sports of drugs. His weapon is a rule book known as the World Anti-Doping Code. First issued in March 2003, the Code requires all athletes, regardless of their sport, to follow a universal set of regulations. That means one list of banned drugs, one set of lab protocols, one judicial and appeals process.

The issue is intensely personal for Pound, a blunt, sarcastic tax lawyer. In his view, the ongoing drug scandals are more than a disappointing symptom of a win-at-all-costs culture; they're antithetical to the essential nature of athletic competition. "I think in sports, when somebody's cheating, it destroys the whole exercise," Pound says. "It's not fair, and it's not right. It's outrageous."

Hiding his outrage is not something Pound is good at. He dismisses the testing procedures of the National Hockey League as "just nonsense" and in 2005 said a third of pro hockey players were on performance-enhancing drugs. He's said that there's no way football players could be as big as they are "simply by eating Ma's porridge" and has referred to Major League Baseball's pre-Balco drug policies as "a farce." He has called retired slugger Mark McGwire a "souped-up" national hero.

Pound has said there's evidence that Lance Armstrong used drugs in the 1999 Tour de France. He mockingly suggested that Landis and US sprinter Justin Gatlin could blame "Nazi frogmen" who injected them with testosterone against their will. When US sprinter Marion Jones tested positive last summer for an artificial form of erythropoietin (known as EPO), a hormone that boosts red blood cells, Pound wasted little time reminding people of Jones' long-rumored involvement with Balco, saying, "People have a tendency to judge you by the company you keep."

There's one problem with these statements. The World Anti-Doping Code requires that results of a positive drug test stay confidential until confirmed by a backup test – which in Jones' case came back negative. And following that, there's an arbitration and appeals process before an athlete is formally found guilty – a process that's still in progress with Landis. Pound himself oversees the entire system by which these allegations against athletes are adjudicated, but he can't seem to stay silent and impartial. By speaking out, Pound violates his own rules.

The tendency to indict athletes before the process is over has earned Pound their distrust and has even put his supporters on the defensive. Too often, critics say, Pound himself becomes the issue when a competitor tests positive. "He is just after publicity," Pat McQuaid, head of the International Cycling Union, or UCI, told reporters in September. "For the UCI, the sooner he is replaced the better."

Call it Pound's paradox: In the Code, Pound has created a framework that could restore faith in athletes and sports. But his inability to live by the Code may make him exactly the wrong person to lead the fight.

THE BAROQUE WORLD of international sports is a long way from the mill town of Ocean Falls, British Columbia, where Dick Pound grew up. The tiny community of 3,000 wasn't just isolated, it was almost inaccessible: No roads led to it, and the boat ride from Vancouver, the nearest city, took 36 hours. In Ocean Falls, with Link Lake on one side and the Cousins Inlet of the Pacific on the other, the one constant was the water. It carried the timber to the mill, connected the village to the outside world, and stretched from horizon to horizon.

No wonder, then, that swimming was a popular sport there. Pound learned to swim at the pool built by Pacific Mills, the town's only employer. In 1950, the company hired pool manager George Gate, who convinced his small-town kids they could stack up with anyone in the world. They did, and his swimmers – Pound among them – won 26 Canadian national titles from 1952 to 1964.

In 1960, Pound traveled to the Rome Olympics, where he made it to the finals in the 100-meter freestyle. He finished sixth, then took his place on a favored Canadian 4-by-100-meter medley relay team. They came in fourth. "We didn't do as well as we should have," Pound says. "But I'm not sure you don't learn more about life finishing fourth or sixth than you do finishing first."

He went on to college and law school, but he never lost his passion for sports. As a law student, Pound was asked to become secretary of the Canadian Olympic Association, and eight years later he became the president. In 1978, he joined the International Olympic Committee at the exceptionally early age of 36. In an organization filled with men in their sixties, Pound's energy and ambition caught the eye of the IOC's leadership, especially its eventual president, Samaranch.

For much of Samaranch's 21-year tenure as head of the IOC, Pound was his trusted lieutenant. In 1983, Samaranch asked him to negotiate television rights. So began a new era of wealth and commercialization for the games. Pound convinced the networks that the Olympics was worth a premium price: His first deal brought in $325 million for worldwide TV rights to the 1988 Calgary winter games. For the 2008 summer games in Beijing, the last deal that Pound worked on, the IOC is projecting a revenue windfall of $1.7 billion.

But the establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency stands as Pound's defining achievement. After the Johnson disaster in 1988, doping regulations didn't change much. The IOC continued to test athletes at the Olympics, but otherwise the various international sports organizations monitored doping separately – supposedly self-policing the problem. There were sporadic positive tests, but none as high-profile as the Johnson case, and for a decade doping largely faded from the public eye.

Until 1998. A few days before the start of that year's Tour de France, French customs agents stopped Willy Voet, a trainer with the Festina cycling team. In his car they found a rolling pharmacy stocked with growth hormones, testosterone, amphetamines, and EPO. Voet was arrested, and the Tour was nearly canceled. The damage might have been limited to cycling if not for the coincidence that a journalist was with Samaranch as the Festina case broke. Rather than decry the scandal, Samaranch offered the opinion that the IOC's list of banned substances was too long and that a substance should be banned only if it was potentially harmful to the athlete.

All sorts of PR hell broke loose, and Samaranch looked to Pound for a solution. Pound's proposal: Create an independent international authority to regulate and police drug use, keep it separate from the IOC or any of the individual sports' governing bodies, and make governments part of the process so you can use their powers of arrest and subpoena.

It was an elegant antidote to two great stumbling blocks in the fight against drug use. The first was that each sport had its own list of outlawed substances, creating confusion about what was legal and what was banned. WADA would cut through the clutter by publishing a single, unified list of banned substances to be adopted by all Olympic sports. From steroids to stimulants, from hormones to narcotics, every athlete in the world would be held to the same standard.

More crucially, WADA would establish a clear and precise process for all drug testing to follow. Each WADA-accredited lab, whether in Bangkok or Bogotá, would follow the same procedures in handling and processing urine and blood samples from athletes. If a foreign substance was found in testing, the Code laid out in exquisite detail what would happen next: A so-called B sample (taken at the same time as the A sample) would be tested to confirm the result. If B was negative, the investigation was over and the athlete would be exonerated. If both samples were positive, the lab would forward the results to the anti-doping agency in the athlete's country.

So, for example, the US Anti-Doping Agency would be apprised of the positive test of an American athlete, and it would bring formal charges against him. There would be a hearing, and a decision would be rendered. Everyone involved, from the athlete to the national anti-doping agency to WADA itself, would have the right to appeal that decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which serves as a World Court for sporting issues and has the final word. The process would be clear, fair, and beyond reproach.

The World Anti-Doping Agency came into existence in 1999; by 2003, the Code had been adopted by all Olympic sports. In some ways, WADA has been a great success. Just the act of organizing all anti-doping efforts under the same set of rules has been hugely beneficial, eliminating confusion over which drugs are banned in which sports. And WADA is funding some of the first scientific research into the effects of performance-enhancing drugs in an attempt to replace superstition with actual fact.

"WADA has been a sea change in anti-doping," says Gary Wadler, a doping expert and WADA committee member. "I'm not sure we'd be here today without Dick's force of personality and his understanding of all the issues." Forceful doesn't mean loud, however – Pound is surprisingly soft-spoken in person. It's the content, not the delivery, that has the impact. He's not a loose cannon; rather, he's made a conscious decision to be prosecutorial rather than judicial.

"It's confrontation," Pound says about his style. "You're confronting a problem: People agree to certain rules of the game and then deliberately break them. You can't finesse it or isolate it or surround it. You have to confront it."

His critics disagree. To them, the problem isn't the rules, it's the enforcer. "If Dick Pound is saying, 'I'm going to be an advocate in these cases,' then athletes start to wonder, 'Am I even going to get a fair hearing here?'" says Howard Jacobs, an attorney who has represented several athletes, including Landis and Jones. "When you have the head of WADA passing judgment on pending cases, whatever the intention is, certainly people can question whether one of the goals is to signal to arbitrators how you expect the results to come out."

Pound dismisses these complaints. "I'm not getting much criticism from athletes who aren't using drugs. I'm getting it from the folks who either have been caught, are representing those who have been caught, or are representing organizations who don't want to admit that there's a problem."

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST drugs in sports is simple: It's not fair to cheat. But fairness is a slippery concept in a world where it's legal to sleep in an altitude tent to increase your red blood cell count, yet getting a transfusion to exactly the same end is banned. And any paean to the virtue of sports breaks down pretty quickly when an athlete sees the rewards available to winners and the obscurity of the losers.

Small wonder that some athletes look for an infinitesimal edge to put themselves ahead of the pack. Infinitesimal, because the margins in sports have shrunk so. The difference between the Olympic gold and silver medals in the women's 500-meter speed skating race last winter in Turin was 0.21 second, or 0.2 percent of the winning time. The difference between gold and fourth place was 0.35 percent.

The winning margins are so narrow because, at the Olympic level, athletes basically train the same way. They all monitor their diets to the calorie, optimizing the ratio of protein to carbohydrate to fat. They measure, time, and test each workout to maximize the benefit from every expenditure of energy. They take the same legal nutritional supplements, in dosages and schedules plotted by a team of dieticians and trainers. Equipment is honed with 3-D modeling and wind tunnel testing. They are, in short, maxed out. Any margin comes down to genetics or drugs. Athletes can't do anything about the first, and it shouldn't be a shock that they are tempted by the second.

Every sport has its drug of choice. The arrival of EPO in 1989 seemed like a godsend to cyclists and other endurance athletes. The hormone regulates the production of red blood cells – more EPO means more red blood cells, and that means more oxygen to muscles. Result: Athletes ride or run longer without fatiguing and can recover faster, which is especially important in multiday events like the Tour de France. The problem: Too many red blood cells can thicken the blood, leading to heart attacks.

In strength-based sports – weight lifting, track and field events – anabolic agents like steroids and growth hormones help athletes build muscle mass and strength, increase bone density, and recover from injury faster. But these, too, have their side effects, including high blood pressure, liver cancer, testicular atrophy, and baldness.

Even athletes in sports like archery and curling have their performance drug of choice: beta-blockers. Usually used to treat cardiac arrhythmia, these drugs are ideal for precision sports, reducing heart rate and suppressing the flow of adrenaline, making for better aim and accuracy. (Beta-blockers are also highly valued among musicians for their anxiety-reducing properties.)

All of these substances violate the WADA code, which states that a substance must meet two of three criteria to be prohibited: (1) it enhances, or has the potential to enhance, performance; (2) it's an "actual or potential health risk" to the athlete taking it; and (3) it's contrary to "the spirit of sport" (the fairness argument).

So how many athletes are doping? In 2005, WADA-sanctioned labs performed 183,337 tests on A samples, and 3,909 – about 2 percent – of those showed an "adverse analytical finding" in WADA's legalistic syntax. An adverse finding means the sample shows the presence of a banned substance or evidence of a prohibited training method. Oddly, in all the reams of reports that WADA produces, the agency doesn't publish a list of how many B samples were likewise positive, nor does it disclose how many athletes were formally found guilty of doping after the entire appeals process was completed. For an agency founded on transparency, these are curious omissions.

Some might argue that drug use by two out of every 100 athletes isn't that significant. Compared to other measures of cheating in our culture – 70 percent of college students admit to cheating – and since more than 8 percent of Americans use illicit drugs in a given month, a 2 percent positive rate seems low. But in athletics, the issue isn't that just 2 percent are testing positive. It's who's testing positive.

In the 100-meter race, for example, three of eight world-record holders since 1987 have seen their record times wiped from the books for doping: first Ben Johnson, then Tim Montgomery in 2005, and, last summer, Justin Gatlin. In baseball, Barry Bonds is approaching the all-time home run record under the shadow of suspected steroid use. It's at the point where any display of excellence is cause for suspicion, where you can't be champion without someone wondering if you're a cheat, too. And no sport suffers from that perception more than professional cycling.

SOMETIMES IN SPORTS, there are transcendent moments of performance, when athletes find a way to push themselves far beyond their limits to reach victory. That's what Floyd Landis did on Stage 17 of the Tour de France last July. During the first of the day's five giant mountain climbs, when he was behind by eight minutes, he launched what seemed like an absurd attack, pulling ahead of his competitors and teammates with a long, grueling 75 miles to go.

Against all odds and sense, he won the stage and, days later, the Tour, in one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

Then it was over. Three days after his victory, Landis was told that his A sample tested positive for an abnormal testosterone ratio the day of his Stage 17 win. The news was leaked to the media, and the merde hit the fan. The cyclist held a press conference to proclaim his innocence, and every sports columnist in America wrote Landis off as a cheater.

So did Pound. "It's always disappointing when you see something like this," Pound told the Associated Press. "You build up and create a new hero, and he gets slapped down. It's a serious blow."

Pound offered this opinion before the B sample was tested, let alone before the appeals process. So while Landis failed the test, the Code failed him. Perhaps that's why his defense is largely an attack on the Code. Instead of accepting the usual closed-door arbitration hearing between an accused athlete and the US Anti-Doping Agency, Landis and his team are insisting that it be public every step of the way. Landis has released all the documentation related to his case on his Web site, hoping not only to convince people of his innocence but also to get their input on how to best prove it. He calls it the Wikipedia defense. "With Pound making his comments, I think the public felt that Floyd had already been convicted," says Jacobs, his lawyer. "If the hope is to restore his reputation as much as possible, the only way to do that is going to be with a public hearing."

Landis' argument rests on some inconsistencies and ambiguities in the Code. In particular, he points to the so-called carbon isotope test, which examines four different signs of testosterone use called metabolites. In Landis' A sample, one of the four came up positive; three were negative. The Code says that the values "measured for the metabolite(s)" must differ significantly from the norm to be a positive test. But does that mean one metabolite, or two, or all four? Landis argues that the standard varies among WADA labs; some require four positive metabolites to call it a failed test, some require just two, and the French lab in Landis' case requires only one. Landis' entire future may hinge on the meaning of the parentheses in the term metabolite(s). The hearing is slated for January, although Landis isn't optimistic about the outcome.

"Do I expect to get a fair hearing?" he says. "No. I expect them to do everything they can to make it complicated for me. If your goal is to enforce the ethics and not just to promote yourself, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. You're just trying to find the truth. If your goal is to make yourself look good, and you like to read your name in the paper like Dick Pound does, then it's important that you win. So you do whatever you have to do to win."

Landis says this quietly, in an almost matter-of-fact way. But he is effectively accusing Pound of the same win-at-all-costs mindset that Pound ascribes to athletes. It's the sort of stuff Pound implied about Lance Armstrong. The seven-time Tour winner was long accused of doping, but he never failed a drug test. In the summer of 2005, though, L'Equipe, a French sports newspaper, claimed that Armstrong used EPO in the 1999 Tour de France, based on tests performed on old samples by the WADA lab in France (the same lab involved in the Landis case). Two weeks after L'Equipe's story came out, Pound told a German online newspaper that he thought that there was "a very high probability" of doping by Armstrong.

Armstrong responded by sending a letter asking that Pound be removed as the head of WADA. "Dick Pound is a recidivist violator of ethical standards," Armstrong wrote. "Mr. Pound has depicted himself as the ethical conscience of the IOC, while failing to practice what he preaches."

Pound insists that he chooses his words carefully and always includes a disclaimer. "If you're caught, then I'm enough of a lawyer to know that you're innocent until proven guilty," he says, "even in cases where there's a moral certitude that you're dealing with somebody who's doped. You sort of have to let the system deal with it."

Sometimes, though, those disclaimers fall short. Late in our conversation, I tell Pound that I'm going to talk to Landis.

"'Roid Floyd?" he says. "His nickname on the circuit was 'Roid Floyd. But I repeat it as hearsay only."