BEIJING (AFP) — Competing athletes must carry the onus in the fight against doping in the drugs-tainted sport of athletics, Olympic legend Carl Lewis told AFP in an interview here on Thursday.
In a year when American fallen star Marion Jones and the 2000 US men's 4x400m relay squad were stripped of their Olympic medals because of positive drugs tests, sprint and long-jump specialist Lewis said the emphasis for change had to come from individuals.
"The athletes need to step up and decide that they want to stop the drug problem in their own sport. Until they do that it's going to be an issue," American athletics great Lewis explained ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
"If the athletes don't want it (doping), they can't stop it but they can eliminate a lot of it.
"For instance, if you're on a relay team, the athletes know who's dirty. Why are you going to run on a relay team that is going to lose a medal in five years?
"It's up to the athletes to say 'I'm not running, I know what you're doing, I know what's going on, if you're on the team I'm not running'.
"If we tell the athletes it's okay to say 'no more', we're eliminating that but also bringing the competition more fair."
"Take a stand for your sport," urged Lewis, who won 10 Olympic medals including nine golds, and 10 World Championships medals, of which eight were golds, in sprint and long-jump events in an astonishing career that spanned 1979-96.
Lewis said there was still more damaging fall-out to come from the dreadful year US athletics had suffered. "Between Marion Jones and that relay, about 30 medals are going to be given back."
He was also outspoken about his own experience with doping, which saw Lewis fail three drugs tests during the US Olympic trials in 1988.
Under international rules at the time, he should have received a ban but it turned out he was just one of more than 100 athletes who were allowed to escape censure and thus compete in the Seoul Games.
"It's a remedy now that is not even on the drug-testing list," Lewis told AFP of the stimulant he unknowingly ingested in a herbal remedy.
"The reality is that when they first started testing they put everything on it (the list of banned substances). When they saw what the effects (of certain substances) on the body they started adjusting it.
"So if I took the exact same thing now it would not even test positive.
"The reality is that I've never taken performance-enhancing drugs. I was the first athlete in the world more than 20 years ago, in the mid-1980s, to talk about independent agency drug-testing out of competition."
Lewis admitted those failed tests had damaged his reputation in the eyes of some of his many detractors.
"To the a-ha people, yes of course it did (tarnish my reputation), because they were haters anyway. But people know me and my integrity and what I've stood for," he said.
"Let's be real: if I ever really took performance-enhancing drugs someone would have found out because there are so many people I've called out.
"Trust me, even Stern magazine (a mass-selling publication in Germany) tried to do it and I want to thank them for the settlement because we're all doing very well.
"For every one hater, there are probably 10,000 people who say 'I really believe in what he did and what he stands for'."
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