Lowell Taub and Sanya Richards, she of four-by-400-meters gold medal fame in Athens, were driving to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to meet with one of her sponsors when they had "that conversation," the one about doping.

"We had a heart-to-heart," Taub, a sports agent with Creative Artists Agency, said of the way he broached the topic with his client. "I told her, 'If you dope and you win and go home at night, what's the point of doping?' We probably spoke about it for half an hour."

Taub wasn't worried about Richards, 23, a woman he calls the face of her sport, "a beacon" for others to emulate. He'd done his homework when he recruited her. But talking about the 800-pound gorilla that lurks around every sports story is an obligation he feels compelled to put out there as part of his job, especially as glittering stars such as Marion Jones came crashing down in steroid scandals.

"Sanya has carried the placard of being the athlete who's doing it right, doing it the right way," he said of the native of Jamaica, in 2004 the youngest woman to break the 49-second barrier in the 400 meters. She coaches track at Baylor University and carries a leading role in U.S.A. Track & Field's Be a Champ Foundation.

Vetting Olympic athletes—from veterans to hopefuls—is a full-time job for the companies that sponsor them and the agents who represent them, a job made even more complicated by the breadth of exposure today's electronic world flaunts.

The transparency of internet resources poses the greatest challenge: newspaper articles, MySpace, YouTube, incidents where the athlete didn't act appropriately and caused controversy. "There's not a lot of room to hide," a sports marketer notes.

"Politics sometimes can be a slippery slope. But most athletes are being very careful. They want to win," Sue Rodin, president of Women in Sports & Events, observes.

Bottom line: Reputation is everything. Character rules.

"You can do all the background checks in the world, but you've got to be comfortable with their character, their behavior," Chris Console, managing director at Steiner Sports in New Rochelle, New York, says. "In some cases, you have to go with your gut."

For athletes, nothing carries the weight of doping, which can include jail time to go with the embarrassment.

"If you make a fallible mistake and apologize, our society is willing to forgive," Taub notes. "You will stomach a crazy parent or an unfortunate MySpace shot if the person is of strong character. People can recover from a heck of a lot. I don't know anyone who's recovered from doping."

For sponsors, an athlete with a strong hometown presence  in a key market is critical. Personal stories are their best marketing tool, Goode notes.

An ideal is Howard Bach, a San Franciscan sponsored by Bank of America competing in badminton (China's No. 1 sport). Bach is competing for his father, a top badminton player from Vietnam who never had the chance to compete on an Olympic team. 

"The Olympics is the only sporting event where the entire nation gets behind one particular team," Goode says.

The bank's selection process is intense: four qualifying heats over a two-year span before the games, each one digging deeper into the character of a pool of 300 to 400 potential spokespeople that will be winnowed down to 12 who are supported with tens of millions of dollars.

Bank of America leverages its relationships with agencies like Octagon, IMG, SportsMark, and Ketchum Sports Network to determine the hot sports and athletes, and talks to its partners at some of the sport governing bodies and the International Olympic Committee.

Contract clauses covering morality issues are standard and serve to protect both the sponsor and the athlete, Console observes. "There has to be equal protection on both sides. If a company is caught fudging investor numbers, that could cause financial disgrace."

At the end of the day, athletes need to be smarter, Taub says, and more guarded.

"Two generations ago, we didn't have the media coverage we have today. Media people are not your friends. You have to be shrewder about your communications and how you cover yourselves."