Blackistone: Is truth serum a banned substance?
dallasnews.com
Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and that athletes who flunk banned substance tests, or are found with illegal drugs or its tools on their person, will have a whale of fish tale to explain it all.
Why, just the other day, while still scratching or shaking our heads over the Floyd Landis scandal, we learned that world record-tying sprinter Justin Gatlin failed a drug test. Gatlin tested positive for too much testosterone.
Gatlin said he wasn't sure how that could have happened. But his coach, Trevor Graham, knew. Graham charged that a masseuse with a grudge against Gatlin surreptitiously rubbed testosterone cream into Gatlin's legs. Not surprisingly, Graham refused to identify the saboteur.
Cycling
That was not as creative a story as one of those Landis served up to account for an initial test that revealed an imbalance in testosterone in his body, forcing Landis to demand a second sample be examined in hope that it would exonerate him of cheating charges.
After all, leaked grand jury testimony from Barry Bonds revealed that if the home run slugger used steroids he did so unwittingly, because he thought that the ointment he applied to himself was flaxseed oil. Outfielder Gary Sheffield supposedly testified much of the same thing. As a result, we'd become well acquainted with the Bell Biv DeVoe excuse – you know, "Smack it up, flip it, rub it down. Oh no! Failed drug test!"
But the Prince Defense – partying like it's 1999 – that Landis tossed out seems pretty novel. As he put it, he was so bummed out by his horrific Tour de France Stage 16 performance, in which he looked like a Shriner trying to pedal a tricycle up Mount Everest, that he tried to get over it by knocking back Jack Daniels and beer. (That's a boilermaker, or nip and tuck, in the lexicon of mixology.) Then he got up and rode the race of any cyclist's life.
Good thing he didn't get pulled over by the French highway police. They may have hauled him away for TUI, Touring Under the Influence.
One of the reasons Landis volunteered about his night of debauchery is because alcohol consumption has been found to do funny things to male hormones, as any of us who've ever awakened on a couch with nothing but a knit hat on in an apartment we don't recall having entered can attest. When sprinter Dennis Mitchell got busted for high testosterone some years ago, he all but took it as a compliment. He said it was due not only to a night of drinking, but of, uh, knocking boots, too. U.S. track officials, blushing no doubt, let him off.
German cyclist Jan Ullrich got suspended a few years ago after he tested positive for amphetamine. He said that was from being in a disco where he took the designer party drug ecstasy which, really unfortunately, must have been cut with amphetamine. (OK, maybe the Prince Defense isn't so original.)
A bobsledder named Lenny Paul credited his positive test for steroids some years ago to eating a plate of spaghetti Bolognese that contained beef from cattle that had been fed steroids. It was reported then that there was only a remote possibility of meat consumption leading to a positive steroids test, but the bobsled governing body, um, ate up what Paul fed them nonetheless.
Athletes don't always get credit for offering explanations that appear beyond the imagination of even the finest fiction writers. Lithuanian cyclist Raimondas Rumsas told authorities that the cargo of drugs, many on the banned substance list, found in a car driven by his wife, Edita, weren't even for him. (And this was several years before Michael Irvin employed the same defense about drug paraphernalia found in a car he was driving. It wasn't his. It was his brother's. I mean a friend who was like a brother. You know, "T.")
Rumsas said the stuff in his wife's car was for her ill mother, which was where his wife was transporting them shortly after his surprising third-place Tour finish in 2002. Rumsas got banned a year later after failing a drug test.
Yet some people worry more about test tubes of stealth steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs that supposedly are being developed as we speak in clandestine laboratories around the world. That may not be as big a problem for drug abuse sleuths in sports as sorting through all the explanations popping up that would win Oscars and Emmys if put to the screen from Hollywood.
When are we going to hear the one about the dog who ate the negative test results?