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Wednesday, September 20
Brushing off a positive test
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
SYDNEY, Australia -- In what is believed to be an Olympic first, a German athlete who tested positive for steroids has maintained his innocence while claiming that someone must have spiked his toothpaste with the illegal substance.
"It's a pretty daring move," said one official who asked not to be identified. "You don't often see the AquaFresh Defense put into action this early in a competition."
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It's a pretty daring move. You don't often see the AquaFresh Defense put into action this early in a competition. ” |
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— Unidentified Olympic official |
Now, I'll grant you that drugs are not the top story at these Olympics. What with world records being wiped out at the swim venue as though they were written in disappearing ink, the U.S. softball team experiencing the shocking jolt of an actual defeat, the men's soccer team reaching the quarterfinals for the first time in history, Ian Thorpe doing his thing, and so on and so on, there are a million vastly more immediately compelling threads of stories to follow around here.
Drug use isn't merely old hat in athletics, it's dreadfully predictable: Jock gets popped; jock denies use; suspension is suspended pending further review -- you know the drill. You've seen it too many times to count.
But danged if these guys don't keep it interesting. They may be in the news for all the wrong reasons, but once they get there, by cracky, they seem to find a way to hang around.
You've got the German athlete, who really did try the old someone-injected-my-Crest theory on the IOC (to no avail), but that's barely the tip of the nandrolone-rich iceberg. On Tuesday in Australia, a Romanian weightlifter who had been banned for 'nando became so adamant about his innocence that he threatened to go on a hunger strike until the IOC agreed to re-test him.
"I want to give blood, not just urine," said Adrian Mateas, who claimed a urine sample that he had provided to his sport's governing body on the eve of the Games had been tampered with.
And if the IOC didn't budge off its original finding, which mandated expulsion from the athletes village for Mateas and fellow lifter Traian Ciharean?
"I will sleep in the street," Mateas replied. "I don't sleep for three nights. It's impossible to make something of this situation. I will start hunger strike from this day unless they give me another test."
That would, of course, make Mateas the only person located even remotely close to the athletes village who wasn't chowing down as a mind-boggling pace.
According to some propaganda handed out by the McDonald's people, the world's elite sports competitors had already slammed 10,000 Big Macs after their first two days of encampment, to say nothing of "4,000 kilos of our world-famous french fries, 107,484 Chicken McNuggets and 14,080 Hot Apple Pies."
This, naturally, begs the question: 107,484? What, they've got somebody counting each McNugget as it's dished out? Do you know how many times in fast-food history a person has gotten home with his Six-McNugget Meal to find only five McNuggets enclosed? Plenty, mister, plenty.
But the point here is not to debate apple-pie sales totals, which are, after all, subject to significant differences in interpretation, but to discuss drug testing at the Olympic level, which is a practical nightmare of staggering proportion.
As lousy as it is to see drug suspensions mucking up a really good Games, these governing bodies have it coming to them. The variances in testing procedures allows for a whole raft of plausible deniability when a positive result occurs, for one; and for two, these tests have a history of being kept about as secure as a piece of pizza left alone in a frat-house TV room.
In short, anybody who comes up dirty can claim either that the test was tampered with or the sample wasn't kept safe, and history will actually be on that person's side. The athlete gains the benefit of the doubt long enough to go ahead into that big upcoming competition.
And maybe the one after that, too. At the start of these Olympics, for example, the IOC adopted a blood test for EPO that was almost immediately ripped by the sports medicine community as being far weaker and less effective than another available EPO test. The suggestion was clear: The Olympic poobahs aren't all that keen on catching every drug cheat in Sydney, at least not for the next couple of weeks.
That may or may not be true, but one thing is certain: That assistant coach who was found trying to smuggle Human Growth Hormone into Australia, and claimed it was really for himself so that he could treat his skin condition? There will always be room in the news for a story like that.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a Web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.
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