Lance Armstrong has called Richard Pound a "violator of ethical standards." Floyd Landis wrote that Pound "continually makes public comments that ... are truly bizarre attempts to obfuscate the truth."
NHL executive vice-president Bill Daly once described Pound as "irresponsible." Don Cherry said the NHL should sue him.
Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice-president for labour relations and human resources, said Pound made "public misstatements" to make baseball look bad.
The outspoken, grandstanding style of 65-year-old Pound has made him a lot of enemies since he became the founding chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999. He's gone beyond the Olympic ring to take shots at professional sports and heroes. In Pound's world, there is no progress without confrontation. He doesn't want to understand cheats; he wants to eradicate them.
There will be cheers today when Pound is scheduled to step aside as the chairman of the WADA (although his official departure will take place at year's end). Those who love him and those who loathe him will have one voice.
They'll be cheering for different reasons, of course. Pound says parents and athletes who believe in honest competition and fair play will laud him for setting up the global body that co-ordinates the war on drugs in sport. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said Pound and WADA had to take strong action or else the recruitment of young athletes would dry up. "Mothers would stop sending their children to gyms."
Others - professional sports leagues, including the NHL; the International Cycling Union; Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner; and Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour victory for a doping infraction - will cheer that Pound is leaving and taking his pitchfork with him.
Pound's zeal to root out drugs in sport led him to accuse a third of NHL players of taking chemicals to help get them through the season. He also told Canada's cross-country ski queen Beckie Scott she was on a "rant" when she said drug users blighted her medal chances.
He has butted heads and traded barbs with Armstrong over alleged blood doping. Pound defended results of research tests that allegedly identified Armstrong as a user of a blood-boosting drug in 1999, when the iconic cancer survivor won the first of his record seven Tour de France titles. The strict regimens that are in place today were not followed in those tests and Pound was accused by Armstrong of pushing the laboratory to produce a report nonetheless. Pound was criticized by the IOC and told to be more prudent.
"Dick Pound is a recidivist violator of ethical standards," Armstrong wrote in a letter in June of 2006 demanding that the IOC dump Pound. "His conduct in this matter is completely reprehensible and indefensible." Pound's response?
"Cheating is cheating," he said, without apology.
Pound said he discovered more doping was going on than he expected when he established WADA in 1999, from the top pro levels, where the role models make millions, to the high-school level, where dreams begin of playing pro sport, winning gold medals and making millions.
He is not sorry for being confrontational or for painting the doping picture with a broad brush that slathers guilt on cheaters but can also stain bystanders. He does what it takes to bring attention to doping issues.
His opponents claim Pound is arrogant and irresponsible in some of his comments. During a telephone conversation this week from a doping-in-sport conference in Madrid, an evangelist's energy crept into his voice as he discussed his war on doping.
"We deal with Interpol, and they tell us they believe the illegal sport drug market exceeds the market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined," he said. "Everyone out there is somebody's kid."
A tax lawyer with the blue-chip Montreal firm of Stikeman Elliott, he commands attention as the master of the sound bite and colourful one-liner. He's Don Cherry with a quieter wardrobe and a better handle on the English language.
Sometimes he's glib, such as when he described an adversary's opinion as "the southern effluent of a northbound bull." Other times, Pound speaks with the bluntness of a two-hander with a hockey stick.
"There are a significant number of people who think I might be a complete asshole - and they could be right," Pound told Reuters this week. "But I really don't care if I piss people off."
Pound possesses today the same competitive nature that earned him a place in the swimming competition at the Olympics in 1960. He hates to think he or his anti-drug initiatives are ever beaten. Yesterday, as he prepared to turn over the reins of WADA, he found himself in yet another messy battle with European governments that are making a sudden, last-minute push for a former French sports minister to replace Pound.
Colleagues in the anti-doping war praise Pound, saying there's been some benefit in his bluster.
"He was the right person at the right time for that organization," said Paul Melia, the chief executive officer of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport. "That organization needed instant public profile, media attention.
"Dick is able to command media attention. No one is better with a quick one-liner."
Scott, who finished third in a cross-country ski race at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002 but was upgraded to gold when the two Russians in front of her were disqualified over doping issues, told The Canadian Press there is substance behind Pound's showmanship.
"As a front man and a media personality ... I think he's done a good job in many scenarios of calling out people in situations that needed to be called out," said Scott, who has now joined forces with Pound and sits on WADA's athletes committee and foundation board. "The cycling situation, it has been an antagonistic relationship for sure, but he called a spade a spade."
There is no middle ground, Pound acknowledges. People love him or hate him.
"I don't think it's all negative or I'm the most unpopular guy in sport," he said. "In the right quarters, I'm the most popular guy," Pound said. "I may not be popular with the UCI [cycling union]and pro sports, but ask parents and others who realize how important this fight is. They're happy there's someone out there leading the charge and taking the heat."
Pound never asked for the job of drug cop. Ironically, he'd been on the defence side in one of sport's seminal drug cases, the Ben Johnson Olympic steroid scandal in Seoul in 1988. Pound happened to be the only lawyer with the Canadian team when Johnson set a world record, then tested positive for the horse drug Winstrol V or Stanozolol. It fell to Pound to make Johnson's plea before the IOC medical commission.
Pound had no ammunition to counter the lab work. Ultimately, Johnson was stripped of the gold medal. It was passed down to his rival Carl Lewis, who it turned out shouldn't have been in Seoul because he'd failed a test before the Games, but the result wasn't made public. In fact, it was eventually shown that at least six of the eight 100 metres finalists in Seoul had used steroids or stimulants during their careers.
Johnson would make the admission of steroid use a year later at a federal inquiry presided over by Charles Dubin, the Ontario Appeal Court's chief justice at the time.
In 1998, the Festina scandal at the Tour de France, in which police raided cyclists' hotel rooms and found a mobile pharmacy of blood-boosting materials, brought the call from former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch for a new body to wage the war on drugs.
Pound had salvaged the Olympic movement when it was moneyless and IOC members had to pay their own way to meetings. He developed marketing schemes and turned television rights fees negotiation into an art form. The IOC went from getting about $100-million (U.S.) for its TV rights in 1980 to nearly $2-billion for the total broadcast fees for the Beijing Games in 2008. He would be the go-to man the IOC called on to sit in judgment when corruption beset the bid process and greedy IOC members had to be turfed.
Cleaning up Olympic sport before it lost all credibility and marketability was another dirty job. Pound had a track record for getting things done.
He took the job believing that athletes were getting help from coaches, doctors and other support staff in taking performance-enhancing substances. He also knew that sports organizations themselves didn't have the teeth to fix everything. Governments with legislative powers and financial clout had to buy in. He brought both into the WADA tent.
"It's one of those things that grew on me as I got stuck with the job," Pound said. "My conclusion was, very quickly, that there was a tremendous amount of cover-up and denial, and no one wanted to tackle it. Well, the only way to deal with organized, well-financed cheating is to confront it.
"One of the things I decided early on was not to turn cheek after cheek when people with an axe to grind said the findings couldn't stand up or the science is not good. That's nonsense and should be treated as nonsense.
"What these folks try to do is destabilize the entire process of fighting drugs in sport so they can get their clients off."
Pound's bluntness made him an enemy in the pro ranks. He considered baseball's testing and penalties inadequate and suggested the major leagues weren't serious about the messages their heroes were sending to the kids. That raised hackles because Major League Baseball couldn't unilaterally make changes to its drug policies. It had to be negotiated with the players' union.
Baseball did eventually tighten its drug policy, pushed by U.S. government inquiries.
Pound won no friends in the hockey fraternity for his suggestion that a third of NHL players were stoking their competitive fires with some kind of drug to get them through a demanding season. He also said that the NHL and National Hockey League Players' Association joint drug policy "looks as though they found an early copy of the baseball policy on the floor somewhere."
Daly said Pound, who subsequently admitted he'd plucked the one-in-three estimate out of the air, had no credibility.
"I haven't seen him do anything good for sport or anti-doping since I've been involved in the game ... WADA is an important organization, but as long as Dick is head of WADA, it will be tainted by his irresponsible behaviour."
Pound and his wife, author Julie Keith, will soon be grandparents for the ninth time. If his grandkids eventually get into sport, Pound wants it to be a drug-free environment.
Richard Pound, OC
Born: March 22, 1942, St. Catharines, Ont.
Job: Outgoing chairman of World Anti-Doping Agency.
Profession: Tax specialist and partner in Montreal law firm Stikeman Elliott.
Athletic career: Sixth in 100-metre freestyle at Summer Olympics in 1960 and member of Canada's fourth-place relay team; gold medalist at Commonwealth Games in 1962.
Claims to fame
IOC member since 1978; groundbreaking negotiator for Olympic television and sponsorship deals; transformed cash-poor IOC into multibillion-dollar giant in sports and marketing.
Headed inquiry into corruption after Salt Lake bid bribery scandal, after which six IOC members were expelled, four resigned and nine received warnings.
Established World Anti-Doping Agency, serving as chairman until end of 2007.
Member of the IOC executive board (1983-1991, 1992-1996); vice-president of the IOC (1987-1991, 1996-2000); has chaired six IOC commissions.
Canadian Olympic Association secretary-general (1968-1976) and president (1977-1982).
Chancellor of McGill University since July 1, 1999.
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POUND'S PATH: CONFRONTATION AND CONTROVERSY
LANCE ARMSTRONG AFFAIR
In 2004, a French laboratory analyzed frozen urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France to find ways to detect blood-boosting erythropoietin. Cyclists had submitted samples for research purposes only, but information got leaked to L'Équipe, which claimed in August of 2005 that six of Armstrong's urine specimens showed traces of EPO. Pound said there was "an onus on Lance Armstrong and the others to explain how EPO got into their systems." The International Cycling Union held its own inquiry, led by lawyer Emile Vrijman, who said there had been no process to ensure the security of the samples and he exonerated the implicated athletes. Vrijman's report impugned WADA and Richard Pound, saying they had targeted Armstrong and the cycling union. Pound rejected the Vrijman report as "so lacking in professionalism and objectivity that it borders on farcical."
NHL ALLEGATIONS
Commenting on the NHL in November of 2005, Pound said, "you wouldn't be far wrong if you said a third of hockey players are gaining some pharmaceutical assistance." Both the league and National Hockey League Players' Association said Pound had no evidence. They cited 1,406 tests in the program jointly administered by the league and the union without a single positive finding. Pound said such a level of purity only illustrated the NHL rules are lax, unclear and ignore some substances, including certain stimulants. But he admitted in 2007 that his one-in-three estimate was an invention.
FLOYD LANDIS
In January of 2007, Pound commented luridly on Floyd Landis's elevated ratio of the male hormone testosterone to epitestosterone after the 17th stage in the American's eventual victory at the Tour of France. Landis was stripped of the title after losing his doping case and losing at arbitration. Pound declared: "I mean, it [the ratio]was 11 to 1. ... You'd think he'd be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?"
James Christie