WASHINGTON (AP):
THE U.S. ANTI-DOPING Agency could be employed to oversee testing and enforcement in American professional sports leagues, a U.S. senator said yesterday at a hearing about funding for the USADA.
Senator John McCain, who ran for president in 2000 and is considering another candidacy for 2008, said he was going to introduce legislation late yesterday to create uniform doping policies for professional sports, a bill he drafted with House Government Reform Committee chairman Tom Davis and ranking Democrat Henry Waxman.
Their panel has held hearings with players and officials from Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer.
McCain said he wasn't sure how their proposal differs from the Drug Free Sports Act, which was introduced last month by Rep. Cliff Stearns in the House of Representatives.
"It's obvious that a vital component of this whole business is who does the testing," McCain said. "If it's not USADA, then clearly it has to be an organisation that is entirely credible. And USADA seems to me to be a likely candidate for that."
He was the only senator present for most of yesterday's Commerce Committee hearing on a bill that would authorise funding for USADA, starting at US$9.5 million (euro7.53 million) in 2006 and rising to US$11.1 million (euro8.8 million) in 2010.
"We may be falling behind in what is truly an arms race of doping," McCain said.
U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Jim Scherr told McCain that the government "has a role to play in addressing the issue of drug use in sports at all levels".
USADA, Scherr testified, "has brought much-needed credibility to our efforts to combat doping in sport. ... We would expect that other sports bodies would experience similar benefits and, therefore, we believe they would welcome externalising the whole drug testing and adjudication processes as we have done."
McCain said after the hearing that pro leagues would be expected to contribute money to USADA if it were to oversee their testing, but "there may be a need for some federal funding as well".
Also among the witnesses was sprinter Kelli White, who is serving a two-year suspension after admitting she used steroids and other banned substances. She was stripped of two gold medals at the 2003 World Championships.
White testified that she passed 17 doping tests while taking performance-enhancing substances she got from the San Francisco-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO.
"Being mindful that my use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs was not detected through the extensive testing that I received, USADA needs the resources to go further in its fight to detect the people who are breaking the rules," White said.
