Two years ago, I was asked to come to Montreal to meet with WADA. They were looking to find out more about the information I’d published in The Juice, mostly about my meetings with some of the chemists. One of the people at that meeting was Dr. Olivier Rabin, WADA’s lead chemist and the mirror image of Patrick Arnold. He’s just as smart, just as intense, and just as passionate about his side of the fight.
After the meeting, I asked Dr. Rabin about hGH testing and he said that he thought there might be a valid blood test sometime later in the year. (Note - the “HGH test” at the Olympics in 2004 and 2006 were nothing more than experiments and wouldn’t have stood up had they found positives.) Now in 2007, we’re still at that stage with a valid test still just beyond the reach of smart guys like Rabin and MLB’s lead tester, Dr. Gary Green of UCLA.
The fact is that HGH has been and likely will be used in baseball and other sports. The thing is that it’s expensive, hard to get, and not very effective. Steroids are easy to get and effective, but easily tested for, yet we still have players in every sport getting busted, precisely because their cheap and effective. With HGH, the smart players have moved on. There’s IGF-1, insulin, and MGF. There are new designer steroids like Havoc and Furagano. There are more effective legal supplements like 6- and 11-OXO, Halodrol, or GAKIC.
If we do get a blood test for HGH — and blood test are another issue entirely — then we’re going to see the same thing that we did with steroids. It will virtually eliminate usage of that product, but will simply push those that want to have that type of product a bit up the chain or down the chain, getting the next new thing from the next BALCO or the next new thing on the feature shelf at GNC.
Baseball is once again focused on the past, looking to test for a drug that was used widely in 2004. As the Dandy Warhols might sing if they were baseball fans, “HGH is so passe.”
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