What if every baseball player used the BALCO “cream” according to protocol? Would anyone fail the current MLB doping controls?
I could figure out how to take a fair amount of testosterone and you’d never catch me, and if I can say that, a lot of others can too.
Who is accredited with the aforementioned statement? Patrick Arnold? Victor Conte?
Actually, it is Don Catlin, the recently retired director of UCLA’s Olympia Drug Testing Laboratory, quoted in today’s Los Angeles Times. And it’s no big secret in competitive athletics…
It has been recognized for over twenty years that athletes can use a certain amount of exogenous testosterone and still pass drug tests that rely only on the testosterone:epitestosterone ratio. Dan Duchaine described this in some of his early writings on steroids.
It has even become easier for doped athletes to pass this test in the last decade with the newer transdermal testosterone delivery systems; transdermal testosterone (e.g. gels, patches, creams) that have a slower release and result in lower peak blood concentrations.
Contrary to what was widely reported in the media, the “cream” was not a novel designer steroid or sophisticated method of administering steroids without triggering positive test results. The cream contained a mixture of testosterone and epitestosterone prepared for transdermal absorption. Injectable cocktails of testosterone and eptitestosterone were used almost immediately after the T:E ratio test was first introduced in the 1980s. BALCO simply exploited the loophole using an improved delivery system.
After all these years, drug testers have been unable to close this loophole.
There is a drug testing procedure called “carbon isotope testing“ that has recently been used to determine exogenous (plant-based) testosterone from endogenous testosterone . This is what was used to corroborate Floyd Landis’ positive 11:1 testosterone:epitestosterone ratio test at the 2006 Tour de France.
However, most sports still rely only on the T:E test for exogenous testosterone. And even when carbon isotope testing is used, it occurs only after an athlete fails the T:E test.
Don’t kid yourself by believing the amount of exogenous testosterone athletes can get away with is not sufficient to result in significant performance-enhancing benefits. It doesn’t take much (much less than the Mitchell Report suggests). According to professor Charles Yesalis:
Small doses work… A 1% to 2% increase in performance is unbelievably valuable to an elite athlete, and very often we can’t even measure that as statistically significant in the laboratory.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-baseball15dec15,1,2188287.story