Five months after the U.S. track and field team failed to meet expectations at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, a high-profile task force charged with investigating the underachievement released a scathing report citing a lack of professionalism among U.S. athletes, "chaos" in the organization's relay program and a "culture of mistrust" among athletes and coaches.

The 69-page report, written by nine-time Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis and eight other members of an independent task force, recommended an overhaul of the organization's high-performance program, improvements to its anti-doping policies and the termination of its million-dollar relay program, which it described as "a waste of money and a failure."

The report caps what has been a difficult decade for USA Track and Field, which has struggled to maintain its standing as the world's most decorated track team while being battered in recent years by doping revelations and seemingly declining interest -- NBC arranged to have swimming and gymnastics, but not track, live during its telecasts during the Games in August.

"The problem now is not that everyone's catching up," Lewis said on a conference call, "but we're going backwards."

USATF Chief Executive Doug Logan called for the analysis soon after last August's Olympic track and field competition, which featured subpar performances by many U.S. stars and was dominated by Usain Bolt and other sprinters from Jamaica. Though the United States led all nations by winning 23 track and field medals, its struggles came to a head with stunning, back-to-back dropped relay batons by the men's and women's 400-meter relay teams near the end of the competition.

"I became uneasy with some aspects of the competition [in Beijing], some of the performances I was witnessing," Logan said during the conference call. "I saw that our athletes were not performing at their peak. The relays gave me a bit of anguish, but at the end of the day, it only became a symptom of what I saw were some significant lapses ... "

Logan said he would take a couple of weeks to digest the report and solicit opinions before taking action, some of which would require board action and bylaw changes. He said he hoped the task force would reconvene once a year for the next three years to evaluate progress.

"Change never comes out of a climate of comfort," Logan said. "This report has and will produce a significant amount of discomfort ... at the end of the day, this is the only way this institution will be able to ... realize its potential."

The report noted that "poor planning" in advance of the Olympics and excessive travel by athletes contributed to the mediocre showing. It called for the creation of a general manager for the organization's high-performance division; the development and support of a number of high-performance training centers across the nation; a shorter Olympic trials; a specific criteria for athletes to compete as professionals; a comprehensive plan for winning 30 medals at the 2012 Summer Games; the creation of an organized athletes' union; and more stringent standards for reinstatement after doping bans.

Task force members emphasized that U.S. athletes must take a more active role to assure the sport's success in the United States.

"We have to come together to save our sport," Lewis said. "It was pretty clear to all of us what needed to be done. If, at the end of the day, the athletes accept this and say they are going to make our sport better, there's no problem."