I happen to appreciate this post since I have missed this news flash when it first came out 11 years ago.
Welcome to my nightmare ... This is a story in which truth is more elusive than the Road Runner. The SI story is better than most of what you'll read on the subject. It's news today because Wade Exum, who lost a racial discrimination/wrongful termination suit against the USOC, has decided to take his case to the press instead. There are a few people in the international community whose knives are always sharpened, and they'll be glad to see anything embarrassing ... even if the logic behind their accusations is fuzzy at best. Basically, doping regulations in the past have been more muddled than Wile E. Coyote's plans to catch the Road Runner. (I never have been good at analogies.) One sign of progress in the matter is that USOC and other U.S. federations are no longer in the drug-testing business. To say they were in a rough situation is an understatement. They were in a tangle of contradictory laws and regulations that they were more than happy to escape when the USADA was formed in 2000. I'm not sure if the individual athletes even matter in this case. If the international and national organizations can't sort out which cold medicines and herbal supplements are legal and which aren't, how are the athletes supposed to do it? Most of the athletes in question didn't break any doping regulations -- at least as they understood it at the time. That's not to say that all of them are blameless, but it probably doesn't the matter -- the critics are likely more concerned with sniping at U.S. officials than retired athletes. Exum's beef isn't with Lalas or Lewis, it's with the USOC. Eventually, someone may find something interesting in the 30,000 pages of documents this guy handed over. Then we'll see if anyone can write or speak intelligently on the subject.