Written by T.J. Quinn at ESPN.com
Major League Baseball is expected to announce in the next few days that another player has tested positive for the steroid Turinabol, a drug that was commonly used by East German athletes in the 1970s. The positive test is one of a handful being processed, two sources familiar with the cases told Outside the Lines, meaning it’s all but certain that more announcements will follow.
Turinabol, whose chemical compound is dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHCMT), is not something that would likely be found in the tool kit of a modern PED guru. But it is showing up widely again: Toronto Blue Jays’ Chris Colabello and the Philadelphia Phillies’ Daniel Stumpf were suspended after traces of Turinabol were found in their systems. The two, along with the player to be named, tested positive during spring training. St. Louis Cardinals catcherCody Stanley was suspended in September after he tested positive for the drug.
MLB officials are examining what connections might exist between the players to explain Turinabol’s apparent resurgence but have not found any so far, a source told Outside the Lines. But two possible explanations exist for why positive tests are spiking, sources said: better testing technology and/or a supplement taken by athletes.
Testing for Turinabol took a major leap forward two years ago, and as anti-doping labs have adopted the technology, users apparently didn’t get the word. Any drug someone takes breaks down into metabolites, a residue of the drug that can stay in the system long after the original or parent drug has cleared. Turinabol, like most oral steroids, breaks down relatively quickly in the body and used to be undetectable after a week, and sometimes even less time. But two years ago, researchers found that by increasing the sensitivity of their testing equipment, they could detect some metabolites that stayed in the body much longer.
“The window of detection has moved out to, typically, several weeks, and in some rare circumstances up to months after administration,” said Daniel Eichner, the president of the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in Utah, which works with most major sports leagues.
As a result, players who might have used it without detection for years are finding themselves suddenly vulnerable to testing.
“That’s what makes the most sense,” one source close to MLB’s testing program said. “There really isn’t another theory right now.”
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