Now a burgeoning scandal involving a small “high-tech nutrition” company that boasts a large roster of big-name athletes as clients may provide a window into the problem. Last month in California, multiple federal agencies raided the facilities of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) and went on to confiscate containers of steroids, human growth hormone and synthetic testosterone from an off-site storage facility. As a result, a grand jury in San Francisco has subpoenaed some 40 athletes–reportedly including baseball superstars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, several NFL players and Olympic queen Marion Jones–to testify about what BALCO has to offer. “This has the potential to explode into the biggest doping scandal ever to hit our shores,” says Charles Yesalis, coeditor of “Performance-Enhancing Substances in Sport and Exercise.”
None of the athletes appears to be a target of the current investigation, and the handful who have acknowledged receiving a subpoena have denied any wrongdoing. But all are reportedly BALCO customers. Bonds has sung the praises of its program to a fitness magazine, an endorsement the company featured on its Web site. The home of Bonds’s personal trainer was raided at the same time as the police action against BALCO.
The federal investigation was launched after a track coach sent a used syringe containing what he said was a new “designer steroid” to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), an independent body formed three years ago to police this country’s Olympic sports. The anonymous whistle-blower indicated that the compound–tetrahydrogestrinone (THG)–was similar to other banned steroids, but altered to make it undetectable with existing tests. And he pinpointed BALCO as its source. An attorney for BALCO’s owner, Victor Conte, denied that the company provided steroids to athletes. In an e-mail to the San Francisco Chronicle, Conte, a former bass player with the ’70s rock group Tower of Power, blamed the investigation on “jealous competitive coaches and athletes.”
The USADA sent the syringe to the International Olympic Committee’s accredited testing laboratory at UCLA. Lab chief Dr. Don Caitlin confirmed that the compound was THG and developed a test that could detect the steroid in urine samples. The lab then retested 350 stored samples from this summer’s U.S. Track & Field Championships, resulting in a handful of positives for THG. No offenders will be named publicly until a test of a second sample duplicates the result. But USADA chief Terry Madden was not withholding judgment: “What we have uncovered appears to be intentional doping of the worst sort. This is a conspiracy involving chemists, coaches and certain athletes.”
Track and field and other Olympic sports are bracing for an onslaught of bad news and a public backlash. (The NFL has said it will consider retesting, but Major League Baseball’s anti-steroids plan doesn’t even include testing.) The UCLA lab has shared its new test protocol with all IOC-accredited labs around the world, and a retesting of recent samples has begun. Last week one prominent British sprinter, Dwain Chambers, said he has been informed that he tested positive for THG. While Chambers denies he took a steroid intentionally, he says he did acquire a nutritional supplement from BALCO. Meanwhile, sprinter Kelli White, who won the 100 and 200 meters at the World Championships in August, could be stripped of her medals after testing positive for the stimulant modafinil. White, a BALCO client, claimed she took the medication because of a family history of narcolepsy. The UCLA lab also retested its samples for modafinil and, according to a knowledgeable source, found “a lot of narcolepsy going around track and field.”
Last week USA Track’s top executive, Craig Masback, urged more whistle-blowers to come forward, as well as “former cheats… to tell us how they did it.” Yesalis believes the cheaters will simply move on to a new drug. He notes that practically every major drug scandal over the past decade has resulted not from testing, but rather from police action. “If we really wanted to go after it, we’d have undercover sting operations aimed at our elite athletes,” he says. “And that ain’t going to happen.” Still, the anti-doping community was cheered by what it regards as the biggest breakthrough since Canada’s Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter gold medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. “The noose is tightening,” says Dick Pound, the Canadian attorney who heads the World Anti-Doping Agency. “We’re getting to the point where you can run, but you can’t hide.” Stephen Ungerleider, author of “Faust’s Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine,” hopes that by warning athletes about these newer, more sophisticated tests, this scandal will produce “a sea change”–or, at the very least, a start at cleaning up athletics. True sports fans can only hope it’s not a false start.
