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But ex-BALCO chief says most in NFL use drugs
But ex-BALCO chief says most in NFL use drugs, By: Mark Zeigler
December 2, 2006
Look who's coming to the defense of the most dynamic figure in the Chargers' defense:
Victor Conte.
He is the founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, which you know as BALCO, and the epicenter of arguably the biggest doping scandal in the history of American sports – allegedly providing advice and/or banned performance-enhancing substances to dozens of elite athletes.
He also says Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, who returns tomorrow after serving a four-game suspension for violating the NFL steroid policy, deserves “the benefit of the doubt.”
Merriman insists his urine sample that showed excessive levels of a nandrolone metabolite was an innocent mistake, the result of a tainted nutritional supplement which, unbeknownst to him, contained traces of the anabolic steroid nandrolone, enough to trigger a positive test.
It is an increasingly common explanation from athletes with nandrolone positives, and it is one that Conte buys wholeheartedly.
What Conte doesn't buy, though, is the notion that NFL players are completely clean. He estimates “a majority” of players are using banned substances – steroids, human growth hormone, stimulants – because the league's testing program is full of exploitable gaps.
“I've worked with more than 300 NFL players in my career,” says Conte, who was sentenced to four months in a federal prison and another four months under house arrest for his role in the BALCO scandal. “I know what they do and how they do it ... You could drive a freight train through the loopholes in the NFL drug program currently being administered.”
Which is another way of saying the NFL program, in Conte's opinion, is catching players for something they didn't do and not catching them for what they really are doing.
“There are loopholes in any system, including any law enforcement system,” says Greg Aiello, the NFL's chief spokesman. “You can always suggest there are loopholes – short of testing every player every day, which no (anti-doping) program does. The point of the program is to create as strong a deterrent for use as possible.
“And we believe our program does that.”
Conte defended U.S. shot-putter C.J. Hunter, the ex-husband of sprinter Marion Jones, when he was barred from the 2000 Olympics after several nandrolone positives, and he claims to have helped at least one NFL player win an appeal for a nandrolone positive.
“I believe Shawne Merriman deserves the benefit of the doubt, as do all athletes who test positive for nandrolone,” Conte says. “Special circumstances need to be considered before they destroy an athlete's career and reputation for something he didn't do.”
Anti-doping experts acknowledge it is possible – although highly unlikely – for nutritional supplements to be tainted with certain steroids, most commonly nandrolone. But they also say it is difficult to determine whether a positive nandrolone test is from the tail end of a major steroid cycle or a steroid-laced supplement by a manufacturer eager to give its product a little more kick.
Because of that, most doping programs these days contain a strict liability clause – meaning an athlete is responsible for whatever is in his body, no matter how it got there.
Appendix F in the NFL Policy on Anabolic Steroids is devoted entirely to tainted nutritional supplements and states in bold type: “If you test positive or otherwise violate the Policy, you will be suspended.”
The NFL even has launched a program endorsing certain supplements that it guarantees are free of banned substances. Merriman and his attorney have declined to identify the brand he used.
Even so, Conte says the notion of strict liability is flawed and he will bend your ear about the inequities of sanctioning a nandrolone positive with the same penalties as for a full-blown steroid cycle. The anti-doping establishment considers it a convenient excuse to hide real nandrolone use or, at best, reckless attention to a supplement's true ingredients, which sometimes are not all listed on the label.
Conte counters that professional athletes know better than to use injectable nandrolone because, while effective, it stays in the body for six months or more. And the Andro-like steroid precursors that could result in a nandrolone positive as well, he says, have never been medically proved to build muscle as advertised.
“The athletes and those around them,” Conte says, “are smarter than to do something like that.”
Instead, he maintains, they circumvent the NFL testing system in other ways.
Conte divides performance-enhancing drug use among NFL players into two categories: anabolic or anti-catabolic agents used to build muscle and hasten recovery, and stimulants that heighten reflexes and amplify aggression during games.
Players are subject to testing during training camp, the regular season, the postseason and the offseason. However, a recent article in the New York Daily News outlined how, according to a half-dozen men who collect NFL urine samples as well as players, no tests are conducted from the end of the regular season until March 1 and again for three or four weeks in July.
In addition, the NFL steroids policy (available on www.nflpa.org, the NFL Players Association Web site) does not specifically detail the punishment if a tester cannot locate a player during the offseason.
Two months, doping experts confide, is plenty of time to complete a major steroid cycle and have any evidence flushed from your body.
“What can you do in two months?” Conte says. “A lot ... So if you know when the fish are biting, then why are you taking your line out of the water, leaning your pole against a tree and taking a nap? Because that's what they're doing.”
The NFL steroid policy states that players “may be tested during the offseason months up to six times.” Adolpho Birch, the NFL's drug czar, says players must fill out “locator cards” with offseason contact information and that any missed test can be treated the same as a positive test. In Olympic drug testing, it takes three missed tests in 18 months before an athlete is sanctioned.
“There are no restrictions in our policy on when and where we can test in the offseason,” Birch says. “Anybody who assumes that there is a schedule of periods where there is no testing makes that assumption at their own risk and will bear the full brunt of the consequences. That's as clear as I can say it.”
There also is the matter of human growth hormone, another potent muscle-builder. The only current test for HGH is in blood samples, and the NFL does not test for blood because, Birch says, the NFL believes there are “substantial questions about the reliability and availability” of the test.
By Conte's estimation, between offseason regimens of known steroids or substances that can't be detected such as HGH or designer steroids, “as many as 50 percent of players” are using some sort of anabolic agent.
That's nothing compared to the abuse of stimulants, which he puts at closer to 80 percent.
The NFL's list of banned substances contains 10 stimulants, or 52 fewer than the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2007 list of prohibited stimulants. Also, players are rarely, if ever, tested immediately after games, when stimulants – some of which can clear the body in a matter of hours – are most easily detectable.
“If they don't allow you to use stimulant A, you move on to stimulant B that's not on the list, and there's a wide variety to choose from,” Conte says. “The message to the players – and if they don't get it, the people advising them do – is that the two front doors of the barn are closed, but the doors on the side and the back are open.”
Birch says unlike WADA, which must cater to athletes in a wide spectrum of sports from nearly 200 countries, the NFL banned list is geographically and medically tailored for the testing program's population of athletes, all of whom play the same sport in the same country.
The NFL list also includes one stimulant, synephrine, that is merely on the WADA monitoring program (and, as such, carries no penalty for use) and has a lower allowable threshold for ephedrine. And several of the substances on the WADA list are covered under the NFL's recreational drug program.
“We feel it is a comprehensive list as it relates to our players,” Birch says. “The information we have is that we have covered the range of substances of any danger or realistic opportunity to obtain in the United States that would enhance their performance on the football field.”
NFL players are regularly tested the morning after games, still enough time, according to Birch, to detect stimulant abuse.
As for Conte's estimations that 50 percent of players use anabolic agents and 80 percent use stimulants, Birch called them “preposterous.”
Conte points the finger at the drug-testing program, not the players.
“I think the athletes are victimized,” he says. “Players have adopted a use or lose mentality. They know when they line up they better be on the same stuff as the guy on the other side of the line, or the first step is to the bench and the second step is off the team.
“The ineptness of the system creates that mentality. The problem is not to get the athletes to stop taking drugs but to fix the (testing) system ... They can act like I don't know what I'm talking about, but I tap-danced on their program for many years.”
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