A Flawed Policy For Drug Testing
February 25, 2012
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Ryan Braun’s successful appeal of his doping case appears indefensible. In any valid antidoping system, athletes are judged by a standard called strict liability: no matter how an illicit substance gets into their bodies, athletes are responsible for it.
Otherwise, the usual excuse — “I didn’t knowingly take a banned substance” — can be almost impossible to refute.
There can be mitigating circumstances. LaShawn Merritt of the United States, the reigning Olympic 400-meter champion, took a steroid derivative contained in a male-enhancement product. He was trying to enhance his sexual performance, not his athletic performance, arbitrators acknowledged. They did not give him the maximum punishment, but Merritt was still barred from competition for 21 months. The drug was detected in his body. He was held responsible for it.
Braun, on the other hand, was cleared by a flawed baseball policy that lacks the independence and transparency of the Olympic system governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
If Braun had a medical dispensation to take a banned substance or had some medical issue that he could document even if he had received no waiver, then he could argue that he was not significantly at fault. But he has made no such public claim. Instead, he has been cleared on what cannot even be called a technicality.
In a 2-1 vote, a baseball panel ruled that there were legitimate questions about how Braun’s urine sample was handled by a collector. In truth, no real doubts appear to exist about tampering and the chain of custody.
Braun’s sample was collected at the ballpark after the Milwaukee Brewers’ first game of the 2011 postseason. The drug tester said that because no nearby FedEx center was open, he took the sample home and stored it in his basement for the weekend. This was not a violation of protocol but rather the preferred approach, according to Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Any baseball player should prefer to have his sample in the custody of a trained professional — one agreed to by his union — than to have it sitting abandoned in some FedEx facility over the weekend, Tygart said. That way, the urine collector can be cross-examined about the chain of custody: What was the temperature of the basement? Did anyone else come into contact with the sample?
Lawyers for Major League Baseball argued there was no evidence that Braun’s sealed sample was tampered with before it reached a Montreal laboratory. And Braun apparently did not prove tampering had occurred. Nor, apparently, did he argue that the sample did not belong to him. Braun also did not challenge the science behind the positive test, Tygart said.
Could the sample have degraded over the 48 hours in question to produce a false positive? “To say it degraded and created synthetic testosterone is contrary to logic and science,” Tygart said.
He added: “For synthetic testosterone to be in the urine, it had to come out of the body into the collection cup. Nothing voided would cause synthetic testosterone to magically appear in a urine sample. They never tried to argue that at all.”
In fairness, baseball has made significant improvements in its drug-testing aspirations. Some consider its program more stringent than the N.F.L.’s. Still, Major League Baseball and the players union bear blame in the Braun case.
It is a conflict of interest for baseball and the union to have votes on an arbitration panel in a doping appeal. By supporting Braun, the union seemed to act in contradiction of testing and collecting procedures it negotiated. To truly give credibility to drug testing, the union and baseball should agree through collective bargaining to completely outsource drug-testing collection, oversight and prosecution to an independent organization.
Until then, baseball remains vulnerable to suspicions that it is interested in drug testing only as long as its biggest stars are not caught.
“You have to wonder who is ultimately being protected — those players doing everything possible to be clean or a single individual who has a positive test?” Tygart said.
If baseball and its union were truly serious about combating doping, they would agree to close significant loopholes in testing during the off-season. Drug screening conducted out of competition is considered the only reliable way of detection, because the testing is done when athletes are most likely to be doping to help recover from injury and build muscle.
To be effective, drug testing must be random and unannounced. Elite athletes in the Olympic sports must essentially let drug-testing officials know their whereabouts from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., 365 days a year. Testers knock on doors or appear at training sites without notice and demand a urine sample. Sixty-five percent of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s tests are administered out of competition.
By comparison, only 3 to 6 percent of baseball’s drug testing comes in the off-season. Players must make their whereabouts known, as in the Olympic sports, but testing is not unannounced. Instead, officials say, a phone call notifies them that they will be screened. Even if the test is given the same day, as baseball says, the vital element of surprise is lost. Thus, players are afforded time to try to mask banned substances.
“We are really serious about our program,” said Dr. Gary Green, the medical director of Major League Baseball. “I feel we followed everything we were supposed to do” in the Braun case. “We’ve never lost a case until this.”
But unless the testing policy is shored up, the guilty will continue to go free and, more alarmingly, the innocent will be unable to prove their innocence.
Prince). It's not your son, people.
There are tamper-evident seals on the specimen bottle, the specimen pocket (bag) the bottle goes into, and the box the bag goes into. Oh, wait, sorry - Mr. Pack's wife said this was easy to bypass. Never mind.
utshandsoverears:La-la-la-la-la. I'm not listening.
I think I remember reading somewhere that was the exact rational behind the guy doing what he did.
