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Spate of nandrolone cases spark controversy

A decision to refer British sprinter Doug Walker's doping case to an arbitration hearing will provoke further heated argument over nandrolone, rapidly becoming the most controversial drug in sport.

The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) council, meeting in advance of the World Championships - starting in Seville on Saturday, decided on Monday to refer the case of the European 200 metres champion to arbitration.

Professor Christiane Ayotte, head of the International Olympic Committee-accredited laboratory in Montreal, is indignant at suggestions that the testing is flawed.

''How can sports administrators say that we have got the tests wrong?,'' she asked. '' Do they think we are idiots? We have been working on nandrolone for 10, 15, even 20 years. I think I know very well what is nandrolone when I find it in a drug test.''

The IAAF's decision to reject last month's judgment of the UK athletics disciplinary panel on the case of Walker as ''erroneous'' could affect the handling of the nandrolone positive case of former Olympic 100 metres champion Linford Christie.

While the UK athletics ruling on Walker confirmed that nandrolone was found in the Scottish sprinter's urine, their three-man panel opted not to suspend him for two years because they could offer no explanation for the presence of the substance in the samples.

This represented a break from the IAAF's rules, based on the principle of strict liability, where the mere presence of a banned substance constitutes a prima facie offence.

In the Christie case, there may prove to be to be even less margin for giving the athlete the benefit of the doubt. In an effort to plug a loop-hole in the rules, the most common metabolites of nandrolone were specifically added to the IOC's banned list on January 31 this year -- less than two weeks before Christie's positive sample was collected after he had competed at a indoor meeting in Dortmund, Germany.

Professor Ayotte and other scientists in charge of the IOC's two dozen accredited laboratories around the world stand by their findings on nandrolone, having recently completed a two-year study into possible alternative explanations for the drug's frequent discovery in tests. They maintain that the discovery of more than two nanogrammes a millilitre of nandrolone metabolytes in the urine sample from a male sportsman (5ng/ml for women) constitutes an offence.

Nandrolone is an anabolic steroid, and has been on the IOC banned list since 1975, the first year steroids were banned. It is a very effective body-building drug, and remains popular in gymnasiums around he world, but competitors in sports subject to regular out-of-competition testing have been using it less in recent years because the drug's oil-based, injectible form can stay in the system for up to six months.

Recently, however, new precursors of the drug, which when broken down by the body have the same effect as nandrolone, have become popular additives to several forms of health food product, some of which are readily available over the counter, without a prescription, or can be bought mail-order or over the Internet.

Taken orally, nandrolone in this form can clear the body within three or four days, and therefore does not constitute such a great risk of detection by the drug testers. The authorities believe that this is the most obvious explanation for the recent epidemic of nandrolone positives.

Over the past two years, four soccer players in the French league, including World Cup-winning striker Christophe Dugarry, have tested positive for nandrolone, as has Olympic judo champion, Djamel Bbouras, also from France.

Only last week, at the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, Canadian roller-hockey goal-tender Steve Vezina tested positive for nandrolone, costing his team the gold medal.

Other nandrolone cases have resulted in the competitors being cleared for a variety of reasons. Paola Pezzo, of Italy, the Olympic and World champion mountain biker, and the Dutch woman cyclist, Yvonne Brunen, have been cleared because of the possibility that nandrolone metabolites can be generated naturally by women.

Olivier Bernhard, a Swiss triathlete, won his nandrolone case earlier this year, in a landmark decision at the court for arbitration in sport, where his advisors successfully argued that nandrolone could occur in the body after prolonged, strenuous exercise.

Lenny Paul, a former training partner of Christie, has also successfully fought charges of steroid use. Paul, a former British international sprinter who turned to bobsleigh, was cleared in 1997 after he showed that a dish of spaghetti bolognese, eaten the night before his drug test, may have contained meat which was contaminated with nandrolone. Farmers in Europe routinely fatten their livestock with steroids. But according to the testers, this is unlikely to explain a positive drug test.

''It is not possible, based on our research, for there to be more than 2ng/ml of nandrolone metabolites in a sample from any other source other than by using the drug,'' professor Ayotte said.

UNI