Bob Nightengale with a report that could well cause Rick Ankiel and Wade Wilson to cancel their subscriptions to USA Today :
Gary Wadler of the World Anti-Doping Agency (above) believes athletes are using HGH, for which their is no reliable test, to help conceal the use of steroids, beating MLB’s three-year-old steroid-testing policy.
“Taking HGH enables you to take lower doses of anabolic steroids,” Wadler said. “By taking a lower level of steroids, you may not be detected when undergoing drug tests.
“They are not testing for HGH, so athletes can take that as well as anabolic steroids and beat the system. That could be what we’re seeing going on right now.”
Simply taking HGH by itself, said Karl Ullis, formerly of UCLA, would make little sense for athletes unless they’re also taking steroids.
BALCO founder Victor Conte believes MLB’s drug-testing program is faulty, citing Gibbons as an example.
According to SI.com, Baltimore’s Jay Gibbons received six shipments of HGH and two shipments of testosterone between October 2003 and July 2005. Yet he has never been identified as testing positive by MLB.
“He should have been caught,” Conte said. “Players are using steroids during the offseason, and then using HGH during the season to maintain.”
Though Gibbons has yet to play the erectile dysfunction card, his teammates have little to share regarding the PED allegations. SS Miguel Tejada is quoted by the Sun’s Roch Kubatko as saying “it’s not really good to see a teammate go through that”, though I suppose it’s preferably to being served up as the guy supplying the bogus B-12 supply.
I’ll need to see Mr. WADA’s credentials & labcoat before I can believe his claims.
I don’t doubt Wadler’s hypothesis (I have absolutely no fucking clue about the actual science behind PEDs), but sometimes I wonder if WADA and its employees are conciously or unconciously inclined to overestimate the scope or effects of PED use. Put simply, if it ain’t a big problem, they don’t have a job. So why not talk it up?