GENEVA, Nov 29: Skiing’s world governing body is ready to open cases against athletes suspected of doping as soon as the World Anti-Doping Agency finalizes new scientific and legal rules.

Sarah Lewis, secretary-general of the International Ski Federation (FIS), said Friday it could act “the sooner the better” using blood profiling from tests taken for its so-called athletes’ passport project.

The Swiss-based FIS has five examples of unnamed cross-country skiers who gave samples for an individual blood profile that produced abnormal results, but who can’t yet be pursued because the legal framework is not in place.

“The net is closing,” Lewis told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The examples are a demonstration of what needs to be looked at.”

She said FIS could not act until it received WADA’s operating manual on athletes’ passports for governing bodies to use which is scheduled for completion next spring - less than a year before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

“It needs to have a solid, stable legal base,” Lewis said. “It is better to get it right first time than to spend years trying to correct things.

“Next spring would then be a number of months before Vancouver, and hopefully enough time for organizers to consider it as a part of their anti-doping program.” Lewis was speaking from Ruka, Finland, where the cross-country ski season begins this weekend under a cloud of suspicion.

At an anti-doping forum held in Berlin on Thursday, Bengt Saltin, the architect of FIS’s blood-testing program in 2001, said the governing body is looking at suspect test results from five skiers in the Nordic endurance discipline.

Lewis said the Swedish professor’s system had become steadily more sophisticated. It detects suspected doping cases indirectly through variations in an athlete’s blood readings rather than direct identification of banned substances.

WADA’s executive committee met last weekend in Montreal, Canada, where it announced progress in the athletes’ passport concept.

However, it must produce more technical documents to standardize blood-profile programs before cases leading to sanctions could be brought under the revised WADA Code, which comes into effect Jan. 1.

Lewis said the momentum exists to give athletes’ blood profiles a key place in the anti-doping fight _ and that skiing was one sport prepared to confront its problem with doping.

“Of course, it is a painful process,” she said. “If that means that there will be positive tests then those are the consequences. It is the only way we are prepared to go.”—AP