A package mailed anonymously reveals a new world of steroid use by professional and amateur athletes.
By BRANT JAMES
Published November 30, 2003
They called it Compound X.
Odorless, colorless, but assumed nefarious, the mysterious molecules floating in a tablespoon of methanol would soon have ramifications that exploded far beyond this corner of Olympic Analytical Labs at UCLA.
Professor Donald Catlin's role in the war against performance-enhancing drugs had before this June afternoon involved testing urine samples and developing detection methods for the U.S. Olympic Committee, NCAA and NFL. He was constantly searching for the unidentified enemy. Now, for the first time, he might have one in his hands, sent to him in an overnight package from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
He had, in effect, the smoking syringe.
What began as an innocuous parcel mailed in June - presumably from a college coach - to the USADA led within weeks to Catlin's identification of a new designer steroid, tetrahydrogestrinone or THG and the mushrooming scandal that has enveloped Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, in California and led to an in investigation by a federal grand jury. No major amateur or professional sport seems immune as a federal grand jury reconvenes Dec. 4 Friday in San Francisco with baseball superstar Barry Bonds expected to testify.
Catlin's part in the process was simple, scientific.
"We didn't need any instruction; the context was obvious," Catlin said. "The USADA is in the anti-doping business and the coach wanted the USADA to have it. I don't remember exactly what they said to us, but they would have told us if it was a false alarm. There could have been nothing in it, but that wasn't the case."
Proving that was the hard part, but, Catlin said, "That's what we're good at."
Catlin knew within three days that the vile contained "steroid-like structures" and after three weeks could draw the molecules that comprised THG.
"Then we had to prove it," Catlin said. "The way we did that is to synthesize the molecule we drew on paper and show it is identical to the molecules in the syringe.
"We made Compound X and compared it to what was in the syringe, and there was a perfect identity, so we knew it was THG."
The USADA and its international equivalent, the World Anti-Doping Agency, quickly banned the substance, and athletes throughout the sports spectrum began testing positive once screeners knew how to detect it.
The consequences reached far beyond Olympic sports, where five track-and-field athletes face two-year suspensions after testing positive. NFL players Bill Romanow-ski, who was among four Oakland Raiders reportedly to test positive for illegal substances, track star Marion Jones, boxer Shane Mosley and baseball players Jason Giambi and Bonds are among the parade of athletes called to testify in a federal investigation ofBALCO and proprietor Victor Conte.
"I think the American public has come to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to professional athletes," former Olympic swimmer Rowdy Gaines said. "Football? Baseball? Big deal. But when it comes to the Olympics they don't take that attitude. They hold (Olympians) to a much higher standard."
Bonds, the record six-time MVP who has added a large amount of muscle mass late in his career, has been implicated by his association to personal trainer Greg Anderson, whose office was searched in September by investigators.
"He's a wonderful person, a very giving person, but I'm associated with a lot of people," Bonds said in a teleconference. "That doesn't mean I'm involved in anything and I don't think it's fair to single me or any athlete out because you know a person or have been to a GNC store. I don't know what a person does when he leaves me."
Bonds began taking BALCO nutritional supplements just before the 2001 season in which he hit a record 73 homers. He is not reported to be a target of the drug and tax investigation the grand jury is hearing.
Bonds said he favored the new system of testing and punishment for steroid use in baseball, saying, "I am glad there is going to be testing. Hopefully this will diminish a lot of the speculation, and I'm glad we can move on. I'm glad it will be over with eventually and the whole thing will be washed into the water."
A provision in the last collective-bargaining agreement will allow mandatory steroid testing in major-league baseball in 2004 because 5 to 7 percent tested positive in anonymous tests this summer. Bonds' attorney, Michael Rains, said it is possible but unlikely Bonds unknowingly ingested illegal substances in a nutritional shake.
And this all started with a spent syringe.
Catlin is not sure how it got to the USADA in the first place. It has been widely speculated that a coach - he says he does not know who - upset or concerned by its use, mailed a used syringe to the organization. That the syringe was empty suggests it had been discarded by the user and recovered by the sender, but the USADA recovered enough of the drug by swishing methanol through the syringe to facilitate a test.
The USADA, Catlin said, still has the syringe. Now it needs funding to try to keep pace with the shadowy laboratories that continue to tweak and churn out undetectable replacements for THG. The fortuitous discovery of THG has actually had a great impact on ongoing research, Catlin said.
"We're looking forward for our next research project and that includes looking for other designer steroids," he said. "We were already looking for some designer steroids we already knew the structure of but the THG and syringe came as a surprise. Its chemistry was a surprise and we now know what that's all about and it's put us a quantum leap ahead of where we were."
But still behind.
- Times staff writers Bruce Lowitt and Tom Jones contributed to this report.
