http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/chargers/20061025-0156-1s25nandro1.html Supplements often blamed in positive steroid tests
Analysis by Mark Zeigler
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Add to the list of certainties in life, along with death, taxes and the Clippers not winning the NBA championship:
An athlete who tests positive for nandrolone will blame a tainted nutritional supplement.
Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman faces a four-game suspension after failing an NFL urine test for the chemical fingerprint of the anabolic steroid nandrolone, a source confirmed to The San Diego Union-Tribune yesterday.
And while Merriman has not officially fingered supplements yet, the attorney for the 6-foot-4, 272-pound linebacker with a reported body fat of 5 percent has tossed the supplement card on the table.
“I know people get tired of hearing it, but it is a fact,” said David Cornwell, who is handling Merriman's appeal to the NFL (a hearing is scheduled for Nov. 7). “Men like Shawne get hooked up and penalized for taking something that they didn't know was present in the supplement.”
It is an increasingly common defense these days, if for no other reason than it is plausible and seems to gain sympathetic traction from a public not fully literate in the intricacies of doping. Less sold, though, is the anti-doping establishment that must sort through the various excuses and explanations for positive tests.
“It's not an accident that there are so many nandrolone cases,” Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, once said. “These folks are taking it because it works. So the minute they get caught, they go around bleating about (how) they didn't label the package properly or it was an iron supplement.
“It's just not credible to people with an IQ above room temperature.”
Nandrolone is one of the oldest anabolic steroids, commonly known as Deca Durabolin – a synthetic form of the hormone testosterone that rapidly builds muscles and enhances recovery from workouts and injuries. Athletes began using it in the days before widespread drug testing because, among the anabolic steroids, it combined a high level of effectiveness with fewer side effects.
There is one catch. The injectable form of nandrolone is stored in fat cells and can be found in urine samples months later.
Because of that, usage declined and positive tests disappeared until 1999, when a slew of athletes from the entire spectrum of global sports – soccer, tennis, judo, mountain biking, even badminton – began failing tests for the stuff. The prevailing theory among drug testers was that athletes were using a form of androstenedione or andro, the steroid precursor popularized by baseball slugger Mark McGwire.
Athletes offered an equally diverse set of explanations. A bobsledder said he ate spaghetti Bolognese made with meat from steroid-fattened cattle. Another blamed meat from an uncastrated boar. Another said his toothpaste tube was sabotaged.
But the most common defense was tainted supplements, either by a manufacturer secretly lacing his new protein powder with steroids to get better reviews or because it neglected to clean the machine of andro products before making a batch of supplements. And indeed, a 2001 study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee found that of 634 nutritional supplements tested, 14.8 percent contained banned substances; among products from U.S. companies, it was 18.8 percent.
A few athletes managed to wiggle out of competition bans in 1999. But that loophole closed in 2000, when WADA and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency – new, independent bodies – were founded and established the principle of “strict liability” as the cornerstone of an international doping code. That meant an athlete was responsible for what was in his or her body, no matter how it got there.
The NFL Policy on Anabolic Steroids has a similar clause, and a sign in locker rooms across the league reminds players they are responsible for anything and everything they ingest. A phone number is listed to answer any questions.
Translation: Precedent suggests Merriman's chances of overturning a four-game ban are slim, regardless of how compelling his explanation.
Take the case of swimmer Kicker Vencill. He tested positive for nandrolone in an out-of-competition test in January 2003. Suspecting it was the result of a tainted supplement, he had his multivitamin from Ultimate Nutrition tested and, sure enough, it showed evidence of containing nandrolone. Vencill sued Ultimate Nutrition and was awarded a $578,635 judgment by an Orange County jury.
But his U.S. Anti-Doping Agency case didn't go as well. While USADA officials expressed sympathy with his plight, they also adhered to the rules of strict liability. He received a two-year competition ban and was ineligible for the 2004 Olympics.
The numbers, however, indicate Vencill's case is a rarity.
The U.S. Olympic Committee has estimated that 90 percent of its athletes regularly use nutritional supplements, and USADA has conducted about 40,000 drug tests since its inception in 2000. Of those, according to a source, only six showed levels of nandrolone high enough to be considered positive but low enough to possibly have come from a contaminated supplement (and not a full-blown steroid cycle).
Of the six, one was Vencill. Another was an athlete who later admitted to taking nandrolone.
The most famous nandrolone case came at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, where word leaked out that U.S. shot putter C.J. Hunter, the husband of star sprinter Marion Jones, had failed four drug tests for levels up to 1,000 times above the allowable limit of nandrolone.
Hunter held a news conference in which he proclaimed his innocence, tearfully saying: “I can't explain it. I don't know what has happened. I can promise everybody I'm going to find out.”
Sitting next to him was an expert flown in from the West Coast to explain that the positive tests were the work of a tainted iron supplement. The expert's name: Victor Conte, of BALCO.
An iron supplement?
“He would be a very rusty person,” WADA's Pound said, “if that's all it was.”
