The Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously agreed to put the International Convention Against Doping in Sport forward to the next level necessary to make it part of national law.

 

The UNESCO agreement, which has been ratified by more than 80 countries, seeks to apply standardise for tests and penalties for athletes in international competitions.

 

Of the four countries bidding to host the 2016 Olympics the US is the only not to have agreed it and Chicago will technically be ineligible to host the Games if it is not ratified by the full Senate.

 

The US Constitution gives the President the power to make treaties with the approval of two-thirds of Senators present.

 

It took two years after the treaty was adopted in Paris for George W. Bush to send the convention to the Senate.

 

He first ordered the State Department to complete a study on the matter.

 

Bush sent the treaty to the Senate in February.

 

Scott Burns, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Committee that the US was already in compliance with the convention and that no new laws, policies or financial obligations would be required for its ratification.

 

America has one of the worst records in the world on doping.

 

Last month Coe, a vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations and a two-time Olympic 1500 metres champion, wrote in the Daily Telegraph: "Even with the unconscionable state-supported drug programmes in the old Soviet Union and large part of the Eastern Bloc, the real damage to my sport for too long has been inflicted by American track and field."