Warne faces fresh claims of using banned steroids, By: Steven Downes

AUSTRALIAN cricket hero Shane Warne has been bowled a googly, with fresh suggestions that he may have been using banned anabolic steroids when he tested positive for a diuretic three years ago.

The allegations come from the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound, in a book due to be published in Scotland this week.

Pound, a Montreal-based lawyer, has been an outspoken figure ever since he was appointed as WADA's first chairman seven years ago, and he seems determined to take no prisoners with his book, Inside Dope. In a section on great drug test excuses, Pound claims that the diuretic for which Warne tested positive in 2003, leading to a one-year ban, was most likely being used as a masking agent.

"Shane Warne said his mother had given him a diuretic so that he would look slimmer on television, without mentioning the shoulder injury from which he was trying to recover," Pound writes.

"The diuretic was a masking agent that could have hidden the possible use of steroids that would help the injury cure faster. He had returned to play almost twice as quickly as the experts had predicted."

Warne, Test cricket's record wicket-taker, might have been banned for two years. He opted not to appeal when given a 12-month suspension by the Australian Cricket Board, despite the leg-spinner's testimony, and that of his mother, being described by the disciplinary panel as "vague and inconsistent". Publicly, Warne said he had taken just a single pill, although the drug test discovered two separate diuretic substances in its analysis.

Diuretics are on sports' international banned list because they can be used by competitors in weight-category sports, such as boxing, to help them qualify for a lower weight by flushing the body of fluid, although sometimes with fatal consequences.

Some anti-doping experts believe diuretics have also been used as a masking agent for other performance-enhancing drugs or to help flush traces of muscle-building steroids out.

Warne opted not to comment on Pound's latest allegations ahead of the Adelaide Test match. At the time of his doping case, he strenuously denied taking any performance-enhancing drugs, claiming, "I feel I am a victim of the anti-doping hysteria."

Among other notable excuses included in the Pound book, he cites Javier Sotomayor, Cuba's world record high-jumper, who blamed a CIA plot for his career-ending positive drug test, and US sprinter Dennis Mitchell, who said his abnormally high levels of testosterone were because of a session of beer-drinking and sex with his wife.