Better to go bald than get busted
Feb 2008
Baldness may harmful to a young jock's
social life, but the treatment for it is harmful to an athletic
career.
That was the message implicit in a warning issued yesterday by
both the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and the athlete
organization Athletes Can. They warned athletes to avoid using
finasteride, a prohibited substance sold under the brand names
Propecia and Proscar.
Finasteride is used as a treatment for both male-pattern
baldness and enlarged prostate, but is suspect in sports because
it can mask the presence of other performance-enhancing drugs.
It led to doping violations in Canada and the United States, the
most notable being Colorado Avalanche goaltender Jose Theodore
and top U.S. skeleton racer Zach Lund. Both said they used the
drug to combat hair loss.
Theodore's two-year suspension from international hockey ended
in December. Lund's positive test cost him a berth in the Turin
Olympics in 2006, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport
believed he was not an intentional cheat and trimmed his
sentence to one year. But he missed his prime season and a shot
at an Olympic medal. Lund was third on the World Cup circuit
this season.
"There's no particular reason for the timing of the warning,"
said Rosemary Pitfield, the director of communications for the
Centre for Ethics. "There haven't been a flurry of positive
tests, but we have received phone calls from concerned parents
of CIS [Canadian university] athletes."
This substance has been on the World Anti-Doping Agency's
prohibited list since Jan. 1, 2005. It is prohibited not as a
steroid, but as a masking agent. It can interfere with sample
analysis.
