Cuban Drug Testing an Issue for Pan-Am Games

The United States might not send athletes to next summer’s Pan American Games unless the host country, Cuba, arranges for drug testing sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee, USOC President Robert Helmick said Saturday.

He said that was the message he was instructed to send to the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) and the Cubans after a special meeting of the USOC’s national governing bodies Saturday in Chicago .

The meeting was called to discuss several concerns expressed by the national governing bodies about the participation of U.S. athletes in the Games, which are scheduled for Aug. 3-18 in Havana and Santiago.

Three former U.S. Olympic athletes who went to Cuba on a fact-finding mission last month submitted a positive report Saturday, but Helmick said drug testing remains an issue.

“We feel that everything else can be overcome, but we think it’s unfair to ask our athletes to compete down there without IOC-approved drug testing,” Helmick said. “We’re gravely concerned with that. If it’s not resolved, we’ll have to think very carefully about how that will affect our participation.”

The Cubans attempted to obtain sophisticated drug-testing equipment from a U.S. company, but the sale was prohibited by the U.S. government’s trade embargo against Cuba. Even if the Cubans were able to purchase the equipment from another source, there is not enough time between now and the Games for a new laboratory to receive IOC certification.

There was no IOC-approved laboratory in Caracas, Venezuela, for the 1983 Pan American Games, but PASO arranged for Dr. Manfred Donike and his technicians from Cologone, West Germany, to operate a portable lab in Caracas during the competition.

“I don’t know if that would work again because the drug-testing process is far more technical today,” Helmick said.

But he suggested that PASO could arrange to send the samples for testing to IOC-approved laboratories in Los Angeles, Indianapolis or Montreal.

“There’s got to be a way to solve the problem,” he said.