Two days after the midnight doping raid by Italian authorities here Saturday, Harald Wurm was eating pizza in a restaurant when the police struck again.
"Austria?" one asked.
"Yes," the young cross-country skier said, nervously.
"Come with us."
They turned Wurm's living quarters upside down, flipping over the couch, leaving his personal belongings strewn about. Wurm said they found nothing and left the place in a shambles.
"I was angry, it was difficult to concentrate on the sport," said Wurm, who finished a disappointing 24th in the men's sprint event Wednesday. "This is my very first Olympics. I never thought about doping or controls. Now I come here and this happens."
His teammate, Martin Stockinger, finished 20th. "It is very hard to eat pizza and deal with police," Stockinger said. "I am not good for the race. I am very tired. My head is not free. We are sportsmen. Nothing else."
When Congress shamed some of baseball's biggest power hitters on Capitol Hill last year, it worked. Whatever grandstanding transpired, the steroid hearings roundly embarrassed union chief Donald Fehr and Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig into toughening the sport's lax drug policy.
To catch the silent intruder, turn off the lights and wait. Cuff the cheats any way you can.
Yet there is something troubling about the way the Austrians have been singled out at the Winter Games. It bears watching abroad. See, the International Olympic Committee did not conduct the raid, although it turned over the information that led to it. Many European countries have enacted extremely tough laws for users and purveyors of performance-enhancing drugs. Russian biathlete Olga Pyleva, stripped of her 15-kilometer silver medal after a positive test for a banned substance, may face worse than a two-year automatic IOC ban. Pyleva may need a lawyer to keep her out of an Italian jail.
Intolerance for steroids in Europe is growing. U.S. track star Kelli White, in France for the 2003 world championships, tested positive for modafinil, which was not banned by the IOC. But she was caught because the French government casts a wider net, testing for more drugs. The French, too, often jail their performance-enhancing users and dealers.
Here, they want every cheat (or perceived cheat) to pay for his or her crimes and/or associations (or perceived crimes and/or associations) with known drug cheats. It's the Olympic equivalent of civil liberties vs. national security, a perpetual weighing of the tactics against the results.
The reason Wurm's room was searched on Monday was Walter Mayer, Austria's former Nordic team coach who visited the team despite the fact he has been barred from these Olympics and the 2010 Games in Vancouver after being accused of blood doping at the 2002 Olympics. On Saturday night, Italian authorities seized blood analysis equipment, syringes, vials of distilled water, asthma medication and other substances after searching Austria's biathlon and cross-country team quarters. The results of their tests, which included the unannounced, out-of-competition testing of six cross-country skiers and four biathletes -- have yet to be released.
Why the Austrian ski federation allowed Mayer to visit its athletes is beyond comprehension. The federation dissolved its association with Mayer, but only after a police chase and car crash that put him in a psychiatric facility.
Still, should every Austrian skier be branded as dirty, their mattresses turned on end?
"The last three days," Stockinger began, rubbing his eyes, "were very hard for me. I have not had good sleep."
Is it really worth catching the cheater if you obliterate due process? In the end, you can try to make sports fair and safe for the competitors, but if you circumvent decency and fairness along the way -- taking down a few innocents as you go -- is a greater good done?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both," Ben Franklin said.
"If it smells like a cheat, it is a cheat," should be Dick Pound's credo.
Pound is the World Anti-Doping Agency chairman, a militant in the great syringe witch-hunt. He is ultimately responsible for Zach Lund, the U.S. skeleton star, being sent home after WADA challenged a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency ruling that he could compete. The Court of Arbitration for Sport denied its request for a two-year ban, saying that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, but ruled Lund couldn't compete for a year because of the presence in his system of Proscar, a hair-replacement treatment.
"It's also a masking agent," Pound said in a telephone interview from a Turin hotel. "How do you not know that? At least find out before you have to test."
Aspersions are cast, labels are formed. Austria has won a record 19 medals so far in these Olympics, including eight golds. But rather than celebrating the Alpine victories of Benjamin Raich and Michaela Dorfmeister, talk of drugs abounds at home.
The cross-country skiing venue felt like a police state all afternoon: Doping control monitors, walking the first five finishers and one random competitor to their assigned urination areas. The police, eyeing everyone with skis. They want their sport clean here, and they are willing to sacrifice casualties — naive kids trying to enjoy their first Olympic experience before their room is searched and trashed.
"You're known by the company you keep," Pound said. "The lesson of this is, you don't have the Walter Mayers of the world involved with your teams. For a long time, the United States kind of thought it was the only pure place in the world and all the cheating was done elsewhere. BALCO has woken people up to that."
Asked whether there would come a day when young U.S. athletes have their hotel rooms raided in the middle of the night, Pound answered, "Yes."
"You are dealing with sophisticated cheaters, it's not beyond the realm of possibility," he said.
If science is not good enough to catch them legitimately -- if WADA's testing is not yet good enough to catch them legitimately -- are scare tactics the next frontier in the Great Syringe Witch-Hunt? It comes down to this:
How much do we want performance-enhancing drugs eradicated in our society, and how much personal freedom are we willing to give up to that end?
