The GAA has lost itself in grey area of doping

Ten years ago this week the sports editor asked me out for a coffee and somehow lured me into agreeing we should start a Saturday athletics column. He ordered his black and mine white, and even back then when we talked about the sport and where it was at it didn’t feel like there was much of a grey area.

Especially when it came to doping.

Athletes either cheated or they didn’t, and if they ever crossed that line there was usually no going back. They weren’t necessarily simpler times, but there was still a certain innocence and romance about the place, as long as you went looking for it.

Nowhere was it more evident than at the Irish Schools track and field championships in Tullamore, the subject of that first column and one that draws me back this week every year. I described it then as “a crystal ball for anyone wondering where the future of the sport lies” and this Saturday’s championships will be no different, eight hours of running and jumping and throwing over 122 events and no one for one second having to worry about what some of them might be on.

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Some of those future athletes, some day, may well cheat, but what is certain is that no athlete ever sets out in their career thinking they will. Not even the Russians.

Those that do cross the line are in some way all victims of circumstance, whether they do so willingly or otherwise. I’ve tried to understand that over the years with Irish athletes, mainly Cathal Lombard and Martin Fagan, and in both cases got a little burnt, because no matter what you say or think about it some people believe a doping case will always be black and white.

I think it was the Canadian sprints coach Charlie Francis who first suggested that any athlete who fails a drugs test is also failing a basic IQ test. Francis always had a somewhat callous attitude towards doping, and always said anabolic steroids were not banned because they were unethical; anabolic steroids only became unethical because they were banned.

This was his way of justifying why he encouraged many of his athletes, particularly Ben Johnson, to take steroids, and not worry about what is right and wrong, or indeed black and white. Johnson, incidentally, most likely tested positive for doing a ‘runner’ on Francis, prior to those 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Banned list

Today, so much of doping in sport appears to operate in that grey area, or between the black and white lines line laid down by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) code.

Any substance can be added to the banned list if it fulfils two of the following three criteria: 1) it is performance enhancing 2) it is harmful to the body, or 3) it is detrimental to the ethics of sport. And it doesn’t matter if the athlete is amateur or professional or somewhere in between. Once a country or a sport signs up to the Wada code, the same rules must apply for all.

Equally important is the idea the Wada code is there to protect the sport and the athlete, not just from those who dope, but from some of the harmful effects of doping.

This is just one of the worrying things about the anti-doping violation of Kerry footballer Brendan O’Sullivan.

At 5.30pm on Thursday evening, over 13 months after he returned a positive test in Kerry’s league defeat to Dublin in Croke Park, Sport Ireland identified the caffeine fat-burning supplement Oxyburn Pro Superthermotech as the cause of his violation, which is openly sold in capsule form and may well fill all three of Wada’s criteria of a banned substance.

In the full reasoned decision of the case, Sport Ireland accepted O’Sullivan’s claim he had inadvertently consumed the banned stimulant methylhexaneamine (MHA), which wasn’t listed on the label of his particular batch of Oxyburn Pro, and that he “bore no significant fault or negligence”, even though he appeared to leave a trail of exactly that.

He chose to act on the recommendation of a casual friend with no purported expertise and accepted her recommendation to purchase Oxyburn Pro; he did not heed the warning on the container that it was mandatory to consult a physician before using the product; he did not consult with or check with the Kerry team nutritionist before ingesting the tablet; he did not seek the advice of his own general practitioner whom he had seen within two weeks of the test, etc.

O’Sullivan, as part of his defence, also pointed to his apparent lack of any anti-doping education, although worryingly the one piece of advice he did get – to “check out” anything he took on his own – he ignored.

Adverse effects

Also worrying is the insistence the supplement was simply contaminated with MHA: this is not like leaving a slice of salmon on the bread board for too long.

O’Sullivan also claimed he only bought the Oxyburn Pro because the caffeine gels distributed by the team nutritionist didn’t agree with him: yet in his declaration as part of his anti-doping test, he admitted he was still taking the caffeine gel, along with Augmentin, an antibiotic prescribed two weeks earlier for a cold, along with whey protein, Pharmaton, Pre-Fuel, vitamin C, krill oil, and Magnesium (all described in the reasoned decision as evidence of “poly-pharmacy”).

Numerous adverse effects and at least five deaths during sport or exercise have been linked to MHA use since 2010, and in his evidence, O’Sullivan admitted he took one capsule before the game on the day of the test and another at half-time, before making an appearance as a substitute.

At 11.15am on Friday morning, I walked into a health food shop in Dundrum and purchased Oxyburn Pro Superthermotech, no questions asked, and certainly no advice given.

What is most worrying is not the thought that another player might have done something similar in the 13 months since O’Sullivan’s test but that the GAA has also lost itself in the grey area of doping, and there’s no turning back now.