Reports that FIFA and WADA decline to take action on soccer players due to food contamination
The topic of Clenbuterol positives in sport became more complicated today with the news that football’s governing body FIFA and the World Anti Doping Agency WADA have decided not to take cases against a huge number of soccer players testing positive for the substance.
The incident in question relates to the Under 17 World Cup matches played in June and July. Press reports stated that 109 of the 208 urine samples taken showed traces of the growth promoter, with players from 19 out of the 24 teams being positive.
Mexico is a country with known problems with illegal Clenbuterol use in meat. Ironically players from the national team, which won the competition, didn’t test positive; they are said to have eaten only fish and vegetables. That precautionary measure was taken after five of its senior team tested positive for the substance at a training camp earlier this year prior to the Gold Cup.
Many of the cyclists who competed in the recent Tour of Beijing also avoided red meat. China is another country with known contamination problems with the substance, and so those riders didn’t want to take any chances.
According to the FIFA medical officer Jiri Dvorak, the soccer players in the Mexican tournament are not suspected of deliberately ingesting banned substances. “It is not a problem of doping, but a problem of public health,” he said, according to AP.
The World Anti Doping Agency’s anti-doping director Olivier Niggli spoke about the agency’s concerns. “It’s extremely serious for WADA,” he stated. “Now it’s known it’s an issue, warnings are going to be sent.”
Last Wednesday WADA said that it had dropped the case relating to those five earlier positives, saying that research carried out by FIFA had shown that there was a legitimate problem in the country. It is believed that research corresponded to the latest spate of teenage positives.
Implications for cycling:
Alberto Contador and his legal team will likely underline these most recent cases as reasons to strengthen their defence against the positive test returned by him during the 2010 Tour de France, which he won. It has said that food contamination lies behind his own case, which saw his sample show levels of 50 picograms of clenbuterol per millilitre. The majority of the soccer players had levels between one and six times this amount.
WADA previously questioned any link between the South American and Asian cases plus those in Europe. Statistically, random tests carried out on the latter continent showed that the amount of clenbuterol contamination in meat sold in Europe is essentially non-existent.
“I don’t think we can generalize from what is happening in one specific country,” Niggli told AP. “It is an illusion to say Mexico is the only country, but definitely there is a big difference depending where you are coming from.”
It is understood that farmers have been arrested in Mexico and some slaughterhouses have been shut down.
The latest incidents follow an announcement last week that WADA had dropped the case against the Danish cyclist Philip Nielsen, who tested positive during last year’s Tour of Mexico. A WADA spokesman said then that he was sure that there was an ongoing problem in Mexico.
Contador is due to appear before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) between November 21st and 24th. His defence may hinge on trying to convince the CAS adjudicators that the meat he blames for his positive originated from South America.
There have been some whispers that WADA may pursue a case based on a possible blood transfusion as the source of the positive, although this remains to be seen. When Contador tested positive with the July 2010 control, reports at the time stated that his sample showed high levels of plasticizers, and tied this to a possible transfusion.
No test has yet been officially validated in relation to correlating plasticizer levels with blood doping. Laboratories have been working at this, though, and so too on a separate test which seeks to detect transfusions via RNA changes in the cells of stored blood.
WADA has not commented recently on this aspect of Contador’s case. It is known that it has kept its appeal to CAS completely separate to that lodged by the UCI, which focuses only on the food contamination hypothesis.
If WADA is indeed pursuing a different approach, the Mexico ruling may be of less significance than it appears. If it is all about the Clenbuterol, though, then the soccer ruling will give the Spaniard hope.
Until the CAS ruling, though, it’s difficult to know where things stand. Only one thing is certain: cycling’s marathon Clenbuterol case will drag out a while longer before the full picture is known.