Prince Alexandre de Merode was an unlikely father of the battle to control use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
A hereditary noble who never married, Prince de Merode came from a Belgian family so venerable it once owned the Merode altarpiece, a cornerstone of 15th Century Flemish art. He was trained in the classics, had no background in medicine or science and his athletic endeavors were recreational.
As a recreational cyclist and International Olympic Committee member in a country passionate about that sport, Prince de Merode learned in the mid-1960s that doping was part of elite cycling. In 1967, he wrote to IOC President Avery Brundage, saying drug use in sport was a problem and a program to combat it was needed.
For Prince de Merode, that letter led to three decades of sometimes controversial involvement in anti-doping efforts.
The prince, 68, died Tuesday, Nov. 19, in Brussels. The cause of death was not disclosed.
He was named first chairman of a new IOC medical commission, a position he held until his death. By the 1968 Winter Olympics, he had convinced the IOC to do rudimentary drug testing, a pioneer step in the effort to stop cheating.
“The prince did all that when no one else even was thinking about the issue,” said Dr. Don Catlin, head of the drug testing lab at UCLA and longtime adviser to the medical commission. “Imagine how hard it must have been to convince others at that time.”
Over the years, the prince displayed an independence of thought and a caustic wit, even as he was criticized for being part of a system that seemed to turn a blind eye to doping if revelations would prove too commercially or politically damaging.
According to a biography of former IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, Prince de Merode threatened to go public with the truth after Samaranch attempted to quash the positive drug test that cost Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson a gold medal and world record at the 1988 Olympics.
“That was the prince,” Catlin said. “Terribly straightforward, no wheeling and dealing. If we could know how many other times he acted that way, we would be amazed. He absorbed a lot of blame, but, from everything I know, he was blameless.”
The prince would deny allegations in 1994 of an IOC coverup, which he also reportedly had opposed, to suppress positive doping results at the 1984 Olympics. He confirmed that several positive results could not be completely processed because critical paperwork had been taken from the medical commission’s temporary office and destroyed.
“I do not believe it was deliberate,” he said.
The tangled relationship between anti-doping efforts and the IOC’s governance of them led in 1999 to creation of the independent World Anti-Doping Agency. The prince was on the agency’s executive committee, but his anti-doping role had been minimized.
Suffering from lung cancer the last two years, he was absent from recent meetings of the IOC. His tenure, which began in 1964, was third-longest of active members.
