Rio 2016: IABA shed little light on Michael O’Reilly drugs test result

In a brief press release yesterday the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA) said its president Pat Ryan would be arriving in Rio on Sunday.

The release suggested that Ryan was not going as a a result of the adverse finding in Michael O’Reilly’s sample but that it been a long-standing arrangement that as president of the association he would attend the Games.

It added that there was no official confirmation of an appeal for the ‘B’ sample of middleweight Michael O’Reilly to be tested or that the IABA would be holding a press conference in Rio to fill the information vacuum.

From the beginning that has been the IABA crisis management strategy, to put little information into the public domain but to react to information that then appears.

Michael O'Reilly has been suspended. He is not allowed to train with his Irish team and John Joe Nevin, a silver medallist from London 2012, has called for him to be removed from the athletes' village.

O'Reilly's first bout in his first Olympic Games is scheduled for the evening of August 12th, just six days from now. It is a matter of urgency to find a resolution to his problem, yet the IABA cannot confirm that he has asked for his 'B' sample to be tested.

Nor could they confirm that O’Reilly was going to opt for a hearing on the matter and contest the finding. That decision will be taken in consultation with his solicitor.

Plan ‘B’

But not testing the ‘B’ sample is a calculated risk. Escaping a sanction on the strength of ‘B’ sample results has happened in the past, though it is such a rarity that the

World Anti Doping Agency

(Wada) once considered dispensing with such tests because they almost always confirmed the ‘A’ sample finding.

Ryan is wearing two hats: one as the head of the IABA along with chief executive Fergal Carruth; another as O'Reilly's coach at the Portlaoise Boxing Club. Ryan has been one of O'Reilly's mentors along the way.

A wise man, Ryan will understand O’Reilly’s problem with offering the excuse of a contaminated supplement, the default excuse for athletes now for over 15 years.

In a positive sense what it may do is offer a perception that taking the supplement was dangerous and stupid, but an unthinking decision rather than the premeditated act of a drugs cheat.

Given the growing cynicism the latter view would be held by the minority, a measure of how much ‘excuse fatigue’ has crept into the issue of doping.

Strict liability

Still, supplements have been one of the most common reasons given by athletes. The problem with defending such a case is that the authorities apply a rule of ‘strict liability’.

That means the athlete is wholly responsible for what is in his body. The testers and law makers in sport don’t need to know how a banned substance arrived in the athlete’s system. Their only concern is that it is there and unless the athlete has a Theraputic Use Exemption, he stands to be found in breach of the Wada code and suspended.

In any case, supplements are becoming a less likely reason for contamination. Numerous studies have been conducted over the years and, while the substance that made O’Reilly’s sample positive is unknown at this point, often contamination is a serious rather than a minor breach of the rules.

Early studies showed the presence of low levels of Wada-prohibited steroid and stimulant contaminants in a quarter of supplements.

More recently, writing in 2015 Dr Mark Tallon, a UK food law expert, said modern research indicated food supplement contamination was falling.

He cited a 2013 Sports Science study, which looked at 12 EU countries with purchases of 114 products. The results showed 10 per cent contamination with steroids, stimulants or both.

Food supplements

In a 2015 follow-up to research in 2002 called the Cologne Study, Wada showed that, in an investigation of 565 food supplements from 17 countries for the presence of anabolic steroids, only 0.7 per cent (four samples) tested positive for the presence of 43 different anabolic androgenic steroids.

It is a long shot. But O’Reilly will not be the first Irish athlete to claim a supplement was responsible. Dozens along the way have claimed as much, including Irish athletes.

In 2003 1,500 metre runner Geraldine Hendricken received a two-year suspension after she returned a positive test for 19-norandrosterone, a metabolite of a banned anabolic steroid.

Following an examination of the ‘B’ sample the positive was confirmed. In her defence Hendricken contested that her dietary supplement had been contaminated.

Athletics Ireland commissioned the German Sports Institute in Cologne to conduct an analysis. It reported that the supplements contained an anabolic androgenic steroid.

The options for the young boxer are slim. Either way unless something was mismanaged in the testing procedure, his continued participation in the Olympics now seems unlikely.