Drugs in Tennis? For the Men’s Game, a 2-Year-Old Mystery Persists
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, tennis hardly faces the problems of sports like track and field, weightlifting, baseball, or football. Still, a mysterious sequence of doping discoveries over the last two years continues to stump tour officials and scientists who are looking for answers.
Between August 2002 and May 2003, 43 urine samples among male tennis players were found to have the presence of nandrolone, an anabolic steroid used to build muscle mass. The level of the substance was low in all 43 samples, but seven were elevated enough to be deemed “positive.” The only player identified by name, Bohdan Ulihrach of the Czech Republic, initially was suspended from the tour for two years.
In the past, tennis had never dealt with more than a single positive test in a year, and the multiple positives raised concerns about a wave of doping the likes of which the sport had never seen. Soon, though, the story took and odd turn that resulted in all seven players being exonerated.
One player, in preparing for a hearing before an independent tribunal, claimed that he tested positive after taking electrolyte tablets supplied by trainers of the Association of Tennis Professionals. The ATP promptly hired Richard Young, a Colorado Springs attorney and highly regarded doping expert, to look into the matter.
Young found that ATP trainers were passing out the tablets even though they had been told not to do so. Oftentimes the tablets, which are legal and fend against fatigue and muscle cramps, were left out in open containers for players to take at their convenience.
Legal supplements available over the counter can indeed cause false positives. Some, such as androstendione, which Mark McGwire claimed to have taken, metabolize into anabolic steroids. A sister compound of andro, 19-nor-androstendione, partially metabolizes into nandrolone, according to Dr. Harrison G. Pope, a steroids expert and the director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital.
“You or I could make our urine positive for nandrolone perfectly legally in about 12 hours,” Dr. Pope said.
Witness what happened to Argentina’s Guillermo Coria in 2001. Coria, one of the world’s best players, tested positive for nandrolone but later identified a multivitamin as the cause. The vitamin, tests showed, had been tainted with 19-nor-androstendione.
Even so, Coria was suspended for seven months. In tennis, as in other professional sports, legal substances like andro that cause false positives are banned. Coria was obligated to avoid taking any supplements that might influence his tests and strictly liable for his actions.
In the most recent drug cases, however, the ATP was in a bind, since its trainers had violated rules by providing the electrolyte tablets. The chances were small, but if the electrolyte tablets had been tainted – like Coria’s multi-vitamin – the governing association could hardly punish players for taking a legal substance that its trainers had sanctioned.
“As a lawyer, the moment I learned this, I knew that we had an uphill battle,” said Mark Young, the ATP’s general counsel. “If you are going to do that to a player, you better have clean hands.”
Considering the damage that could be done, the independent tribunal hearing the case of the player who first raised the claim decided to invert the principle of strict liability. Now the ATP would have to prove that its electrolyte tablets had not caused the positive tests.
It was a burden the ATP could not overcome under the tribunal’s time constraints, and the accused players were exonerated. Tests revealed that all seven had the same “fingerprint” of nandrolone, suggesting that the positive tests were caused by a common source. Though no one could say for sure, the electrolyte tablets looked like the culprit.
For a while, it seemed as if the drug scare would stop there. The offending tablets were seized, and the elevated test results disappeared.
Soon, though, more elevated readings were discovered. Then, last summer, Greg Rusedski tested positive for nandrolone. Rather than defend himself in private, he took his case public.
Rusedski’s test had the same fingerprint as the other seven, and he too re lied on the electrolyte tablet defense and was exonerated in March. Among other reasons the tribunal gave for its conclusion was that the ATP should have notified its players directly, rather than posting notices about the confiscated electrolytes in locker rooms and in the players’ newsletter.
So far this year, there have been 26 more elevated readings of nandrolone with a similar fingerprint, though no positives. The ATP will not say for certain that the electrolytes did not contribute to the rash of elevated tests, since it’s impossible to know whether the tablets it seized were manufactured in the same way as those taken by its players. Still, all the evidence suggests that the electrolytes did not cause the problem. The question is what did.
“It’s a mystery, and I don’t like not knowing the answer to it,” said Mark Young of the ATP. “I’ll be the first one to say that.”
Young is convinced that there is not an epidemic of cheating in tennis. Yes, nandrolone has shown up in many test results, but the levels are still extremely low and spread out over a variety of players in terms of nationality and rank. What’s more, players who want to use steroids would be foolhardy to rely on nandrolone, which Dr. Pope said has no advantage over other steroids and, unlike many others, is easy to detect because it remains in the body for months.
“Until we know what it is, you can’t eliminate any possibility,” Young said. “But when you look at the fact that it is all low-level and it has affected so many players from so many different continents with rankings all over the place, the most unlikely explanation is that there is some vast conspiracy of cheating going on here.”
Steroids experts, for the most part, look at all of professional athletics in more cynical terms. Certainly, the need for strength is more apparent in sports like football and baseball, but one should not underestimate its importance in tennis. Andre Agassi summed it up nicely in 1992 after he lost to Jim Courier in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open: “I need to get stronger. I need to be able to hit that ball as hard as I do a little easier because I feel over the long haul, that paid off for Jim.”
In the last dozen years, strength has become even more important in top-level tennis. Initially, it might seem that steroids would hamper flexibility or range of motion, both essential for tennis. But Dr. Pope said an athlete can prevent this by stretching and training properly.
“I think most of us in the field suspect that steroid use among high-level athletes is much more extensive than is popularly recognized,” Dr. Pope said. “And it’s not going to go away anytime soon.”
In a report issued earlier this year, the World Anti-Doping Agency found that the ATP’s anti-doping policies were sound and administered by tribunals that acted independently. It also sympathized with the “difficult situation” faced by the organization and commended the time and energy it has put into solving the riddle.
Still, WADA questioned the ATP’s willingness to accept the electrolyte defense so quickly, and said it ought to have asked for more time or appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. WADA also noted that the ATP, which is 50% owned by the players, was in “an awkward position” when it came to enforcing drug tests. “In the ATP’s situation, there is obviously a perceived, if not real, conflict of interest,” WADA said.
Young defends the integrity of the ATP’s testing policies and the way it handled the recent tests. First, he said, it’s clear that the tour has invested significant time and money in uncovering and discouraging cheats. Roger Federer and Andy Roddick were each tested more than 20 times last year. Federer and nearly 40 other players were subjected to surprise, out-of-competition tests as well as urine and blood tests.
As far as appeals and conflicts, Young noted that accused players have a right to a speedy resolution and said that other governing bodies, such as the International Tennis Federation, would also appear to have mixed interests. Members of the independent tribunals serve on the CAS, and an appeal would not have been likely to succeed, he said.
“I don’t think there should be any doubt that we’ve approached this in a very serious, responsible way,” Young said.
Right now, tennis does not face doping worries as severe as in other sports, and the ATP would like to keep it that way. It has asked a lab in Montreal to use new technology to isolate the source of the nandrolone or determine if perhaps it might have been produced naturally. There is a debate over how much nandrolone a body can produce on its own, but so far the Montreal scientists, without having made any final conclusions, have said that the substance found in the samples was not natural, Young said.
As the mystery lingers, tennis players have become more fearful of supplements, which they feel are necessary in a game that grows more demanding by the year. Several players, including Agassi, are taking part in a task force to give fellow players guidance on supplements – particularly a multivitamin and an electrolyte – that are clean, or at least manufactured in a way that is less susceptible to contamination.
Young said that for the most part, players simply shrug when told to avoid supplements altogether. “The players are looking at us and saying, ‘You guys are in suits and you are dreaming,'” Young said. He said the task force could release recommendations after the U.S. Open ends.
Meanwhile, the ATP has asked new experts to help it uncover the cause, including Robert Ellicott, the former solicitor general of Australia, who sat on the CAS during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
“We’ve interviewed almost all the players and we’ve spent over $100,000 sending this stuff off to labs,” Young said. “We’ve gotten hold of all the things they were taking on their own and we’ve also gone out and bought stuff and had it tested. It’s been frustrating that we haven’t been able to figure it out.”