The Balco steriods story has just broken bigger, with the San Francisco Chronicle reporting that Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Marvin Bernard, Benito Santiago and Bill Romanowski all apparently having received steroids through Bonds' longtime friend and personal trainer, Greg Anderson.
Anderson allegedly obtained a so-called designer steroid known as "the clear" and a testosterone-based steroid known as "the cream" from BALCO and supplied the substances to all six baseball players, the government was told. In addition, Bonds was said to have received human growth hormone, a powerful substance that legally cannot be distributed without a prescription, investigators were told.
But what's different this time, is the tenor of the denials coming from a number of the athletes involved with the accusations:
Sheffield's attorney Paula Canny said, "Gary Sheffield has never knowingly ingested a steroid ... and Gary Sheffield has never knowingly applied an anabolic steroid cream to his body."Santiago's attorney, David Cornwell, declined specific comment but said: "Based on my involvement in this matter, I know that many of the athletes involved did not know they were being given a banned substance."
Anna Ling, an attorney for Anderson, said the trainer had "never knowingly given any illegal substance to anybody."
That's a significant change, and one that I've written about before. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Jason Scavone sees some humor in all this, and he's right. Dave Pinto wants more proof.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge is fronting the Chronicle piece. ESPN.com's Daily Quickie points out the non-denial, denial line that Shefflield and Santiago are are hewing to. Hold on tight.
Naming Names
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Sheffied, Bonds, Giambi, Santiago, Marvin Benard and Randy Velarde all received steroids. The baseball stars allegedly got the illegal performance-enhancing drugs from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative throug…
I thought Carl Lewis had come under fire for steroid use? Maybe I’m just dreaming that up.
Not Carl Lewis; Ben Johnson, the guy who beat him in ‘88 but was then disqualified for ‘roids.
Marvin Bernard? One of those names is not like the others… and Benito Santiago looks way too scrawny to have used steroids. Then again, so did McEnroe.
No, Lewis has been accused of steroid use too, within the last 2 years.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/17/1050172709693.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/18/1050172756680.html
Lewis tested positive for a banned substance in 1988, 2 months before Seoul, but his initial 6 month ban was overturned on appeal.
If it turns out the Chronicle’s information was leaked by a government source (and it’s not clear to me at this point that it was), then that source should be publicly outed, fired, and prosecuted for obstruction of justice.
Read in tandem with the Jamal Lewis prosecution, it is clear to me, however, that these cases are purely political in nature. Remember, every FBI agent and U.S. attorney working on ferreting out drug use in sports is an agent and attorney *not* working on protecting America from terrorist and other violent crime organizations.
Re: Lewis (Carl). Any reporting of U.S. Olympic athletes in drug scandals must be read with the following things in mind — the international press (at least the English and Australian press) is rabidly anti-American on the subject, and AP is genuinely clueless.
I found a good take on the Lewis situation here (ironically, from the Chronicle): http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/04/27/SP137379.DTL
A lot of people — including WADA chief Dick Pound — know full well that reporters aren’t paying attention to the details and won’t challenge them if they twist a BS drug allegation to settle a political score.
Everyone in the world is clean if you compare them to Ben Johnson.
Christie wasn’t stripped of his silver but he’s still labelled as a doper. Lewis is hardly innocent and his indiscretion is all the more glaring because he has spent so much time pointer his finger at others.
Remember when Linford Christie was disqualified in the ‘96 Olympics and he tossed his shoes in the garbage can? that was great.