Athletes who cheated by using designer steroids to avoid detection in the past may find that their dirty secrets are no longer safely frozen in time.
Canadian antidoping authorities are considering reanalyzing urine samples stored frozen in a Montreal laboratory, in the wake of revelations of widespread use of a previously undetectable steroid by professional and Olympic-level athletes in the United States. The results could unmask a doping past some athletes thought was buried forever.
“We don't know how long THG [the synthetic anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone] has been out,” said Dr. Andrew Pipe, the chairman of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, which is mandated to carrying out Canada's drug-testing policy. “The answer may come from systematic retroactive examinations of samples.”
The retestings could be the tip of a doping iceberg, Pipe suggested. Thousands of urine samples dating back several years are frozen at the Olympic-approved Montreal lab. Pipe said that as the identities of athletes who fail a new test become known, the CCES would consider looking back at old samples to find out how long the athlete had been using the drug and when its use became popular in the doping underground.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said on Thursday that a high-level coach had came forward in June with a syringe containing residue of THG, making it possible for Prof. Donald Catlin to develop a test for it at the Olympic-approved lab at the University of California at Los Angeles. Several U.S. athletes apparently were using the substance at national championships last summer. The track coach, whose identity is being kept confidential, said the source of the substance was a California lab operated by Victor Conte.
Conte has denied the allegation, but a U.S. federal grand jury is investigating whether Conte has links to an international doping conspiracy. As many as 40 athletes may have been subpoenaed.
Baseball's Barry Bonds, football players, bodybuilders and top sprinters Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones and Kelli White have reportedly used products from his company, Balco Labs. In Muscle and Fitness Magazine last summer, Bonds was bullish on Conte's fitness program and nutritional advice. “I'm just shocked what they've been able to do for me,” he said.
Conte is well known for selling a zinc and magnesium preparation reputed to boost testosterone.
The International Association of Athletics Federations is standing by for the B-test results on the U.S. athletes. Terry Madden, the chief executive officer of the USADA, said the A tests indicated “intentional doping of the worst sort...This is a conspiracy involving chemists, coaches and certain athletes to defraud their fellow competitors and the American and world public who pay to attend sports events.”
For years, antidrug campaigners have been thwarted by two factors. Determined cheats, unburdened by ethical considerations, have been willing to try a vast spectrum of hormonal drugs, including veterinary medicines and experimental substances, in order to stay ahead of the testers. Second, some sport organizations have been responsible for testing their own athletes, and positive tests on stars have been ignored, covered up or excused to avoid damaging the sport's image.
“But now we're certainly drawing abreast of the cheats,” Pipe said. “The nature of cheating is such that there will always be someone out there considering how to alter slightly a pre-existing compound, but by and large, we are drawing abreast of them, for sure.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency, headquartered in Montreal, saluted the USADA for its work in developing another tool to fight the cheats. Canadian head track and field coach Alex Gardiner, citing a dearth of record-breaking performances at the world championships in Paris in August, said it “shows the effect of WADA's work. Performances are levelling off to where they should be.”
The USADA operates independently of bodies such as the U.S. Olympic Committee, which allowed athletes who had failed drug tests to compete at the Sydney Olympics.
“When you‘ve got a coach going to USADA with evidence, that speak to two things,” Pipe said. “It shows USADA is gaining credibility as a legitimate entity in addressing drug use. And perhaps there's a change in the culture of sport and the attitudes toward cheating. Someone has said ‘enough is enough.'”
Donovan Bailey, who was the Olympic 100 metres gold medalist and world record holder in 1996, said that when he was competing, he was aware of Conte's lab and of other people who might try to get inside training camps to advise athletes about supplements and products they claimed would improve performance.
“There were always rumours about some medalists and champions and that the cheaters were already one step head of the people policing the activity,” he said. “But did anyone actually try to get me to try something? No. There's always people hanging around, and you don't know who they are. But my group was tight — Dan Pfaff [coach], Mark Lindsay [therapist] and myself. I'm not approachable in that scenario. I wouldn't allow people to come in who weren't directly involved, and I realized I could do without any of that stuff.”
Bailey said he never used prepared mixtures of vitamins and nutritional supplements because labels did not accurately represent what was inside — when he trained in Texas. He said he advises athletes in Canada's current track and field generation, such as world champion hurdler Perdita Felicien and sprinters Pierre Browne and Nicolas Macrozonaris, to stick to pure vitamins purchased in Canada, where product labelling is stringent.
Gardiner said in an interview from Edmonton that it was “a courageous move” for the U.S. coach to come forward with the drug. “At the end of the day, something's being exposed,” he said. “I know Canadian athletes will be saying hurrah for this.”
CCES sources said they were aware for some time that Catlin was working on the THG test. Gardiner said there is no hint that any Canadian athletes are involved in use of the drug.
