Sen. Hatch on USOC’s side? What a joke

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I had to laugh when the U.S. OIympic Committee proudly announced Thursday it has Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on its side in the battle to stop what USOC calls ‘ambush marketing’ by Subway and some other companies. It made me feel the same way I did when Donald Fehr, a steroid stonewaller as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, was part of the Congress-appointed committee to reform the USOC in 2003.

Or the way I felt after I learned that the Governator, former steroid user Arnold Schwarzenegger, was carrying the Olympic torch in Vancouver on Friday.

Sen. Hatch long has fought U.S. Food and Drug Administration monitoring of the dietary supplement companies that have found his state a safe haven. There are more than 100 such manufacturers in Utah, making them one of the state’s top five industries.

These are some of the companies whose unregulated supplements can contain unlabeled banned substances that often turn into positive drug tests for Olympic athletes.

Because the companies don’t have to label accurately every ingredient in the supplements, anything goes.

Stick an unidentified steroid into a supplement, watch people rave about how strong they feel, see sales boom.

None of that stuff apparently bothers Hatch. But have Subway blur the lines about whether it is an Olympic sponsor in a commercial featuring none other than Michael Phelps, the greatest Olympic swimmer in history, and the senator becomes a white knight.

This is Hatch’s statement:

Hatch would to a lot more good for Olympic athletes by pledging to stop the unfair and unregulated marketing of supplements.

In the meantime, I’m going to Subway to satisfy my Olympian appetite.

-- Philip Hersh, reporting from Vancouver, Canada