A three-member arbitration panel ruled last December the testing of her sample, given at a meet in Belgium, was not done in accordance with WADA rules that require tests be run by two different technicians.
That broke USADA’s perfect record in front of arbitration panels, which was 35-0 according to the best available statistics.
To the question of Jenkins’ appearing to have won on a technicality, Valparaiso Sports Law Clinic director Michael Straubel had said, “[The arbitrators] set aside the test results because they were not based on reliable lab results.”
The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has been conducting a formerly secret pilot program for longitudinal testing for anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. USADA recruited twelve U.S. athletes for voluntary participation in “Project Believe.” News of the anti-doping program was leaked when decathlon champion Brian Clay and runner Allyson Felix discussed it at a press conference possibly violating USADA’s code of secrecy on the program (”US sports stars try to dim doping fears with ‘Project Believe’,” April 17).
“I may get in trouble for talking about it but I want people to know I’m doing everything in my power to stay clean,” said Clay, who began having extra tests done before last month’s world indoor championships.
In spite of Clay’s concerns, it is unlikely that Clay or Felix will face any sanctions by USADA for revealing the existence of “Project Believe” prior to its official launch.
Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have modified a bill that would have added human growth hormone (HGH)Â to the Controlled Substances List. The bill was introduced as a kneejerk reaction to revelations of widespread HGH use in professional baseball. But in the end, legislators avoided making the same mistake with HGH as they did with anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990. (”HGH bill altered to help children,” April 16)
Disgraced former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich is to pay out a million euro fine to end a fraud case which German prosecutors have been investigating, Focus news magazine reported on its Web site Saturday.
Prosecutors accused the 1997 Tour de France winner of taking performance-enhancing drugs, leading under German law to fraud charges against the 34-year-old on the basis he deceived the public, sponsors and his team.
The United States does not have laws that specifically criminalize doping in sports. However, the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, passed as a direct result of doping scandals in sports, criminalizes the non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids. One of the primary objectives for the act has been to combat “cheating” in sports although it has been largely ineffective for this purpose. Instead, the federal government has had some recent success using perjury laws to prosecute athletes who use steroids. Maybe sports fraud prosecutions will join perjury as an additional way of making examples out of “immoral” athletes.
Angel Guillermo Heredia was a major steroid source for elite track and field athletes. He has been working with federal investigators for several years; he has disclosed the names of at least a dozen elite track athletes who won Olympic medals and World Chamionships as well as another dozen elite track stars who have not won Olympic medals (”Witness in Track Doping Case Ready to Name Big Names,” April 13).
Among his clients, Mr. Heredia identified 12 athletes who had won a combined 26 Olympic medals and 21 world championships. Four of the 12 athletes, including Ms. Jones, had been named and barred from competition for illicit drug use. Eight of the 12 — notably, the sprinter Maurice Greene — have never been previously linked to performance-enhancing drugs.
Angel Heredia is a Mexican national who lived in Laredo, Texas and utilized his family connections in Mexico to obtain steroids and other pharmaceuticals for athletes. Heredia explains how easy it is for athletes to use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs and avoid detection.
Cyclist Tammy Thomas has been convicted on three counts of making false statements (perjury) and one count of obstruction of justice. She was acquitted of two counts of perjury (”Cyclist convicted of perjury in BALCO case,” April 4).
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Thomas faces a sentence that likely would range from probation to about two or three years in federal prison for the perjury convictions.
Thomas was specifically accused of lying to the grand jury about using steroids and obtaining performance enhancing drugs from Illinois chemist Patrick Arnold, a key Balco figure who pleaded guilty to manufacturing designer steroids and providing them to elite athletes through the now-defunct Peninsula laboratory.
Tammy Thomas already received a lifetime ban from competitive cycling for doping violations several years. This effectively ended her career as a cyclist. The conviction for perjury in the government’s case against Thomas may have effectively ended the pursuit of a second career as an attorney (”Tammy Thomas found guilty of perjury,” April 4).
“I already had one career taken away from me,” she yelled. “Look me in the eye. You can’t do it.”
Thomas then turned to a prosecutor and shouted, “Look me in the eye …. You like to destroy people’s lives.”
 The government has succeeded in its unstated goal of making an example of an athlete using steroids. Is this justice served?
The federal government’s obsession with eliminating anabolic steroids from Major League Baseball is compromising state law enforcement efforts to fight drug dealers and violent criminals thereby jeopardizing the public safety…
The feds are spending more and more taxpayer money pursuing steroid-related investigations while at the same time cutting funding for narcotic-related investigations (via Byrne task force investigations). Grits for Breakfast responded by pointing out how the Byrne task force programs had no meaningful effect on public safety (”Byrne task force funds mainly financing low-grade drug enforcement,” March 10).
The jury in cyclist Tammy Thomas’ doping perjury trial did not reach a verdict after the first day of deliberations (”Thomas jury deliberations to continue,” April 3).
Thomas, whose case is the first to go to trial in the five-and-a-half-year Balco investigation, was charged with making false statements to a grand jury in 2003 about substances she is suspected of receiving from Arnold. For the jury to convict Thomas, it must conclude that her statements were false and that they were material to the government’s investigation.
I am certain that Tammy Thomas is anxiously awaiting the verdict. Not only is her freedom in jeopardy but also a future career as an attorney. She has been silent about the case and has not spoken to the media; however, she has been very outspoken in her fashion statements outside the courtroom where she was photographed wearing a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, no doubt in support of other athletes who have been targeted for perjury by this federal investigation.
WADA refuses to worry about trivial genetic factors. WADA is loath to do longitudinal tests of athletes. WADA might find a variable that might refute their laboratory findings or challenge their presumption of laboratory perfection. WADA would never invest time and money doing pedigree studies to determine if a single metabolite above threshold for exogenous testosterone is a trait common in a family, or among a group of people found in a geographical region. But idiosyncratic individual differences in medicine have been documented in many pedigree studies. For example, hematocrit levels above 50% have been found in fathers and sons of elite cyclists. These hematocirt levels are inherited tendencies, not based on EPO doping. The same is true for testosterone/epitestosterone ratio(s) and may be true for Carbon Isotope metabolite delta/delta scores.
