Thursday, July 28, 2005

NHL attention down south

The good news: prominent Americans are publicly paying close attention to hockey.

The bad news: those prominent Americans are congressmen determined to impose a draconian and ineffective drug-testing regime in the NHL along with other leagues.
A bill introduced in May by Davis, Waxman and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain would suspend offending players for two years for a first offence and ban them for life if they fail a second drug test...

While Davis and Waxman also criticised the NHL's drug program because it doesn't consider "designer" steroids — created in a lab specifically to evade detection — it's unfair to suggest that the league could create a program free of loopholes, Collins said.

"Human-growth hormone has been a popular performance enhancer for two decades but a reliable test to detect its presence in urine remains elusive," he said.

The fact all too often left out of articles on steroid testing is that the tests themselves are based on ratios of naturally-occurring substances within the body, meaning that some players with a naturally-high testosterone level (or who have merely trained particularly well) will test positive despite having not taken a performance-enhancing substance. And thanks to the NFLPA, the required level for a "positive" finding is dropping - making the punishment of innocent players all the more certain.

Combined with government-mandated suspensions of the proposed length, the end result of a stricter testing regime in any sport is to bar players for life who have done nothing but train to the best of their ability. If avoiding that situation is reason for criticism, then good on the NHL for being criticized.

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