Bearded belle can help bag Balco baddies

LOCKER ROOM:The trial of Tammy Thomas can prove a test case for US drug investigators as they target much bigger fish, writes Tom Humphries

SUNDAY AFTERNOON and struggling for a column. Blow the cobwebs off the laptop and there's an email from a friend wondering if I've been following the Tammy Thomas circus. Why, of course!

Tammy, Tammy, Tammy. Come on down, Tammy. And there's a link which we'll save to the end of the column so you can click on it and view Tammy from the privacy of your work station or cell.

What drew me to Tammy and her charms was the surprising testimony recently of Mr Tom McVay, a man who for his sins works as a doping-control officer for the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Mr McVay recently recalled how he had occasion to pay one of his surprise visits to Tammy, then a world-class cyclist, back in March 2002. Tammy was in Chula Vista, California, at the time. What confronted Mr McVay that day was an appalling vista.

Now Mr McVay is used to surprising people with his curt knock on the door and Tammy, one must assume for reasons which will become clearer, must have been used to hearing the rat-a-tat-tat of the doping-control chaps. Still, Mr McVay was shocked and Tammy didn't seem embarrassed when Tammy answered the door with shaving cream plastered down the left side of her face.

Mr McVay testified (he would be astute this way) that Tammy had been interrupted apparently in the act of shaving her excess facial hair. Subsequently Tammy (brace yourselves for this) tested positive for illegal substances and was barred from competition.

Steroid abuse had given Tammy her facial hair, male-pattern baldness, chest hair and a deep, gravelly voice. Tammy is being tried at the moment as part of the ongoing investigations into the activities of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), a sports pharmacy superstore or little shop of horrors, depending on your point of view.

In an unfolding plot which has already brought down Marion Jones and Trevor Graham and irrevocably tainted Barry Bonds, we can only see Tammy as a bit player but she is colourful as Mardi Gras and deserves her own little 15 minutes.

And Tammy will be important because her current legal troubles will serve as precedent. In terms of sport she was but a minnow compared to some of the big tuna caught up in the net of the Balco scandal, but certain people will be studying the outcome of her trial very closely. Tammy was indicted on almost identical charges to those Bonds is facing - that is, perjury and obstruction of justice in respect to testimony given to a grand-jury hearing in the Balco case in 2003.

There is a good movie to be made out of all this. Hollywood insists on uplifting endings and handing the laurels to the good guys at the end. The script people should write in a nice role in that case for the IRS special agent Jeff Novitzky, who has been working as the US government's top anti-doping enforcer.

It was Novitzky, six-foot-seven-inches tall and shaven-headed, who testified in federal court last week about Tammy's attempts to impede the Balco investigation. Novitzky led the Balco raid and if Ed Harris had the height I would give him the part. Arnold Schwarzenegger could leave politics to play the role of Tammy.

At the centre of the plot is a relationship between Novitzky and Victor Conte, the mastermind of the Balco wheeze. Novitzky says he first learned about Balco when he was a child growing up in Burlingame, California, the town where the laboratory was located. Having noted Conte in a pic of Californian athletes going to the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988 and noticed him again standing up for Marion Jones's ex CJ Hunter at the Sydney Games, Novitzky started sniffing.

He had been obsessively tracking Conte for a decade, an obsession involving the spectrum of detective work from picking through garbage (where expecting to find financial details he found links to top athletes) to analysing bank databases.

When the case finally broke and Balco were raided, Conte and his associates James Valente and Greg Anderson sang like the Three Tenors and fessed up straight away to manufacturing and distributing their by-now-famous designer steroids to prominent athletes. Conte has since served time and presumably was hurt inside by loose talk accusing him of being a stool pigeon. Since he came back out to the real world he has been accusing Novitzky (who kick-started the Balco probe in 2002 when while digging through the laboratory's trash in search of a financial crime he found documentation about famous athletes and strange pharmaceuticals) of making everything up.

Novitzky though is stern-jawed and implacable, the TJ Hooker of doping. This week he is in a manner of speaking nailing Tammy. Because of Tammy's, ahem, inconsistent statements it took several years before officials were able to successfully prosecute Patrick Arnold, the Illinois chemist who produced the Balco drugs.

Arnold was not indicted in 2004 when four others were originally charged in the case. But he pleaded guilty in 2006 to steroid distribution and had some jail time slung his way. He can sing quite well himself. Last week he cheerfully contradicted Tammy's prior evidence given under oath and testified he had given steroids directly to Tammy.

Arnold has testified that not only did he supply the drugs but also he helped Tammy to come up with an excuse when she failed a test for norbolethone.

"I suggested to Ms Thomas that a cover story could be contrived that involved telling the doping-agency people that she was on a morning-after pill," he said.

Tammy maintains that despite the beard, the chest hair, the baldness, the voice and the gain of sixty pounds she had no idea she had been given steroids. (Come to think of it, must send my own sample to be tested; those symptoms sound familiar.)

Tammy's troubles continue this week. Her case foreshadows that of Bonds, whose case is expected to begin no sooner than 2009. When they are done with Tammy, Novitzky and his colleagues will know a lot more about the strengths and weaknesses of the US government's case.

In the courtroom as Novitzky testified last week a quiet, studious woman sat intently at the witness table scribbling notes. Tammy Thomas is a law student now and has no desire to live in the past. She bears little resemblance to the mannish figure in a photo the assistant US attorneys repeatedly show to the witnesses they've summoned to the stand.

Check out the pic on http://flickr.com/photos/bike/322518981 next time you put down your pint and make the argument that all athletes should be allowed take whatever they like.