Lund suspension is hair splitting at its awful worst
Turin, Italy -- As other U.S. athletes pulled on their sleek white parkas Friday evening and prepared to march in the Opening Ceremonies, Zach Lund had to pack his bags and leave the Olympic Village like an exiled criminal. A banned hair-replacement drug had made a martyr of the top U.S. skeleton racer and a mockery of the anti-doping crusade in Olympic sports. The farce here isn't that Lund got busted for a vanity product, or even that he was booted from the Olympics by an arbitration panel that called him an honest athlete. The real joke is that, with this dubious victory, the World Anti-Doping Agency made life a whole lot easier for athletes who shoot up like street addicts.
A lot of sports fans already see drug testing as a nonsensical nuisance that can't distinguish between a petty offense and a capital crime. Critics love to cite the injustice of stripping a gold medal from Romanian gymnast Andrea Raducan in 2000 because she had pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cold medicines, in her system. WADA dumped pseudoephedrine from its ban list in 2003, as much for PR purposes as for scientific reasons.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport said it had yanked Lund from the Olympics and implemented a one-year suspension "with a heavy heart.'' Lund made a mistake, a really stupid one. He didn't check the updated list of banned substances at the beginning of 2005. He didn't call the 800 number that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency set up to answer athletes' questions about drugs, 24 hours a day. So he didn't know that finasteride, sold under the brand names Propecia and Proscar, had been added because it could mask steroid use.
Lund, who at one point was leading the World Cup standings this season, had used the potion for six years and consistently entered the name on drug forms that athletes submit whenever they are tested. The form doesn't constitute a request for indemnity. It simply provides information for the lab, which needs to know of any substance that might interfere with its analysis.
After he tested positive in November, the U.S. agency reviewed Lund's case, believed that he was innocent and let him off with a warning.
"Why would anyone in his right mind, if he was intentionally cheating, write it down on the form?'' said Travis Tygart, director of legal affairs for
USADA.
Then in stepped WADA, always hyper-vigilant and frequently suspicious of Americans who receive leniency. (Chairman Dick Pound, a Canadian, once referred to U.S. track and field as "sleazy.'')
The global agency appealed USADA's compassionate verdict, and the arbitration court reluctantly agreed on a strict interpretation of the regulations. A failure to understand the ban list is not an excuse. Lund had to go.
"They stuck to the rules, which need to be reviewed,'' Lund said on a conference call. "Their solutions aren't always fair.''
Anyone who sees this as the double curse of a balding man misses the point. If the drug masks performance enhancers, it has to be banned. If you made exceptions for men with underperforming follicles, the excuses would never stop. A cheating athlete will say or do anything to cover his tracks. He might even pull out his own hair.
Lund does have a very convincing baldness pattern around his forehead, but what are we to make of Montreal goalie Jose Theodore, who tested positive for finasteride during screening for the Canadian Olympic team and said he, too, was using a baldness cure? The man has more hair than Fabio.
Lund's best defense got through to the arbitrators a little bit. Banning him for one year, instead of the two mandated for a first offense, the panel said it didn't like the fact that his use of finasteride went undetected for almost a year, even as he routinely confessed to it in writing.
"The Panel finds this both surprising and disturbing,'' the court wrote in its decision, "and is left with the uneasy feeling that Mr. Lund was badly served by the anti-doping organizations.''
Lund estimated that he had taken seven drug tests since the finasteride ban went into effect, but he didn't test positive until November. That's not unusual. The science of drug testing routinely lags behind innovations in cheating. That's why many cunning dopers will come through the Winter Olympics unscathed, while Lund sits at home in Salt Lake City.
Lund said he probably would have been better off if he had been caught as soon as his hair-raising drug went onto the list. Even if he had still been suspended for a year, he might have returned in time for the Olympics. It's a notion as odd as this whole episode -- that more effective testing would have led to a more palatable punishment.
But stronger testing requires more money, and plucking an obviously innocent man out of the Olympics at the last minute won't stoke any fundraising drives. Common sense is free, but like Lund, it was banned from Turin on Friday.
