Straight Dope Remains Elusive

"I couldn't care less about the rumors anymore," said Herb Elliott, the Jamaican team doctor. "We have been tested and tested and tested and tested. We know in Jamaica, they have no means of getting at these things. We have very stringent laws in Jamaica."

Hours before Bolt broke his second world record Wednesday, a spokesman for track's international governing body (IAAF) carried a notebook of drug-testing statistics on Bolt to a news conference in which Bolt wasn't even a participant, prepared to publicize Bolt's drug-testing history in the hope of staving off the inevitable doubts.

"Some of our athletes perform extremely well and their performance is put into question," said Juan Manuel Alonso, the chairman of the IAAF's medical and anti-doping commission. "Other sports get more privileges, even though the IAAF has done more to test than other federations."

Some officials complain that Bolt's domination of his sport's glamour events has been met with more cynicism than levied on U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, whose showing during these Summer Games was at least as incredible. Phelps set seven world records and won eight gold medals last week.

But unlike in swimming, which hasn't seen a major international doping scandal in more than a decade, track and field has seen Olympic medals and world records stripped from a handful of prominent athletes because of doping violations over the last five years. More than a dozen athletes have been suspended since 2004 and two of the four previous 100-meter world record holders lost their marks because of drug suspensions.

"I am ashamed, quite frankly, of my generation and what we did," said Ato Boldon, a four-time Olympic medal winner in 1996 and 2000. "We left the sport kind of tattered. The queen of swimming has never gone down. The king of swimming has never gone down."

Not only has testing failed to catch some of the sport's most notorious cheaters, but there are also widely differing ranges of anti-doping vigilance in different parts of the world. Countries such as the United States, Germany, Australia and New Zealand have their own national anti-doping agencies. But other powerhouse sports nations, such as Kenya and Jamaica, have less stringent steroid laws or lack national anti-doping agencies altogether.

"The fact that an athlete has passed a drug test at the Olympic Games is almost meaningless," Victor Conte, who was jailed for masterminding the drug scheme that led to Jones's incarceration, said in an e-mail. "It makes far more sense to spend a good portion of the available funds for drug testing during the offseason when the athletes are actually using drugs. There are not many athletes dumb enough to show up at the Olympic Games with drugs in their system."

The IAAF has been trying to address that problem, IAAF President Lamine Diack said, spending between $2 million and $3 million annually on its own drug testing and focusing on nations that don't have their own national anti-doping agencies. There are 22 elite Jamaican athletes, including Bolt, who have been "targeted" for regular testing, IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said. All have undergone urine testing, blood testing and blood profiling -- an accumulation of testing information designed to signal irregularities even when tests are not actually positive.

About a week before the Games, the IAAF announced it had banned seven Russian athletes after a year-long investigation showed they were providing urine samples that weren't their own to testers. The IOC, meantime, has broadened its pre-Olympic testing, tracking down athletes for urine and blood tests much earlier than in the past in an attempt to catch them off guard. One casualty of that extra testing, Catlin said, was Greek hurdler Fani Halkia, the gold medal winner at the Athens Olympics. She was caught using methyltrienolone and banned before she competed.

"We're using much more intelligent testing and targeted testing," said Arne Ljungqvist, the chairman of the IOC's medical commission. "I feel the sport is becoming more clean and people probably understand that doping is not the way to go."

Ljungqvist's point might be arguable, but there is one issue about which there is no debate.

"Doping will never be something entirely of the past," Diack said. "We will always have people who cheat."