Lombardo’s lie detector nails the cheats

Olympic 100m champion Justin Gatlin, banned from defending his title in Beijing, joins a sprinting hall of shame bulging with drugs cheats. Gatlin is now the third of the past six Olympic 100m gold medal winners to be banned for steroid use.

Yet if polygrapher Al Lombardo was given free rein, drugs cheats like Gatlin and Marion Jones - the one-time golden girl who faces a possible jail term for lying about steroids and cheque fraud - wouldn't get anywhere near the starting line. In his day job, Lombardo puts 1,500 murder suspects through lie-detector tests each year for the Brooklyn District Attorney, and in his spare time he tracks down sporting drugs cheats.

His work with the British Natural Bodybuilders Federation (BNBF), which has made polygraphing a pre-requisite for all competitors, has attracted the attention of sports administrators. In a sport renowned for drug abuse, the BNBF's tournaments

are widely perceived to be 'clean' thanks to pre-competition polygraphing.

Cheaper and quicker than conventional testing, polygraphing identifies athletes who are using drugs for which there is no test or those who have taken drugs in the past. Only 95 per cent reliable, it needs to be used in conjunction with conventional testing, but Lombardo believes its main impact is as a deterrent. "There's no reasonable argument against a polygraph," he says. "An athlete can cite nerves, but you don't fail because you were nervous, you fail because you lied."

In the US, the winner of a fishing tournament returned his $463,000 cheque after failing the polygraph and admitting to using illegal bait.

Advocates of polygraphing believe that clean athletes should favour it because it can remedy mistakes that inevitably occur in conventional testing. One man who might favour polygraphing is Britain's top sprinter, Mark Lewis-Francis. He has missed two out-of-competition tests through a combination of circumstances, and one more would see him miss Beijing.