Blood Testing (Finally) Comes To The PGA Tour

Rex Hoggard explains for GolfChannel.com how the PGA Tour's new blood testing will impact the players and perceptions of the sport.

Hoggard says most players he spoke to felt the time had arrived for this more complete program, an amazing shift compared to a decade ago when Tim Finchem was resisting testing and players generally declared golfers clean and therefore not needing testing of any kind.

This was interesting:

“Why can’t we do hair samples, because then you can actually trace further back?” asked Casey, who is also an amateur cyclist. “There are certain drugs that are flushed out of the system within a day or two days, hair actually holds that drug in the follicle longer.”

Golf’s return to the Olympics last year will ensure the game remains vigilant when it comes to testing and officials haven’t ruled out new tests as the science and doping evolves. But for now, the circuit is content with the new testing methods.
“There is a lot of alternative testing methods, including hair, but the efficiency of these tests is really not at a level that would warrant use in a sport anti-doping program at this time,” Levinson said. “Urine is the most effective method of detecting most of the substances we are looking for.”

Scott Stallings & The Absurdity That Is The PGA Tour Drug Policy

This week's Tour Confidential got me to read Pete Madden's excellent piece about Scott Stallings' PGA Tour drug policy violation.

Needless to say the breathtaking hypocrisy of Commissioner Tim Finchem, once opposed to drug testing, now personally notifying Stallings of his suspension in a weird New Orleans hearing, stands out. But so does the oddity of Stallings self-reporting instead of being caught by the tour lab, yet earning no special consideration. And there's the secrecy of violations such as Dustin Johnson's alleged suspension for use of recreational drugs, while a Stallings' case is made public.

This part is just creepy and pathetic that Finchem--vehemently opposed to drug testing at one time--personally dishing out the punishment that does not fit the crime:

The golfer reviewed his talking points in his head. He had made a mistake, but he also had immediately reported himself, as golfers are supposed to do, and apologized. Surely, the Tour would forgive him for acting hastily when his health was on the line. Finchem, he thought, would understand.

"I walk into a room, Finchem is there with a few other guys, and before my butt hits the seat, I'm handed a piece of paper telling me I was suspended for three months," Stallings recalled. "I was very much in shock."

The decision to make Stallings the newest member of the most exclusive club in golf had already been made. He joined Doug Barron, Vijay Singh and Bhavik Patel as the only players known to have run afoul of the Tour's Anti-Doping Program since its inception in 2008, his name forever etched on a public naughty list in perhaps the only sport that prizes integrity over success. That culture is so strong that golfers routinely add strokes to their scores for missteps both real and imagined rather than risk the perception that unfair advantages were gained over the field.

Gary Van Sickle summed up the reporting by Madden this way:

DHEA is a hormonal supplement you can buy off the rack at CVS. The fact that it is somehow illegal is ridiculous. It is not a PED. I took it for several years with the understanding that it helped middle-aged guys have the energy to keep moving and maybe lose weight. Not sure that worked. The Stallings case, like Shaun Micheel’s, shows how much the tour just can’t wait to crack down to prove how effective its drug policy is, even if it is unrelated to reality. Stallings got hosed; Micheel got hosed. The guys who went to rehab over the years—whoever they were—for substance abuse, they got nothing. It’s just not a level playing field.

Former WADA Chief On Golf: "There’s a problem there."

Moira Gordon quotes former WADA chief Dick Pound, hosting a lecture at Stirling University, explaining golf's attitude toward drug testing.

Long opposed by PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, he recounted this conversation.

“We have all seen the shape changes in golfers and the distances they are hitting now and we know that the equipment is better and the balls are better but it isn’t just that,” said Pound, who recalled a conversation with the commissioner of the PGA Tour, Tim Finchem, stating that the sport which “has a great reputation for calling faults on yourself” could set an example to others by outing the cheats. But, the reply he received was disappointing. “He said: ‘Ah, but if I do that then they are all going to think my guys are just like those baseball players and football players and I don’t want that’. But if you follow some of the shape changes in the golfers and follow how, at a certain point, if they happen to come off them, you see how many more injuries they get. There’s a problem there.”

Vijay! "Singh's battle against the Tour comes into focus"

The lawyers are racking up big billable hours right now in Vijay vs The People Who Helped Make Me Rich, with the PGA Tour and the legendary golfer filing motions for a voluntary, non-binding dispute resolution hearing with a mediator.

As Rex Hoggard reports for GolfChannel.com, "the lawsuit reached a milestone last week with a flurry of filings," with over 130 filings posted to the public record with no shortage of redactions. Still, Hoggard was able to go through the filings to find some intriguing elements to the messy case brought by Singh.

There was this:

Some of the discovery offers a glimpse into the nuanced world of anti-doping, like an email exchange between Ty Votaw, the Tour’s executive vice president of communications, and a golf writer from the Associated Press who asked, among other things, if deer antler spray was on the Tour’s list of banned substances.

Votaw responded that, yes, deer antler spray is on the Tour’s banned substances list, when in fact it is not. The substance IGF-1, an ingredient found in the spray, is on the banned list, but not the product itself. It’s a nuanced distinction but central to Singh’s claim that the Tour was negligent in its handling of his case.

And then in the TMI HOF files, there was this image of Jason Dufner in the men's room reading the tour's warning regarding use of deer antler spray.

“[Dufner] said it was accidental how he read it,” Singh said in the deposition. “He was sitting in a can having a you-know-what and it was laying on the floor so he picked it up, and he was surprised that it was on it.

“He said if he hadn’t been in the can at that moment in time, he’d have never known that it was [on the banned list].”

Many items were redacted according to Hoggard. Just not that one.

IGF Responds To Golf's Not-So-Positive Test Results

Nothing like a little diuretics chatter to liven up the week!

Will Gray at GolfChannel.com reports on Ty Votaw's response to recent WADA-inspired stories about failed tests in golf exceeding the numbers in other sports. Most interesting here is that Votaw points out the failed test results are from non-PGA Tour testing.

“I think in a vacuum, these are just lab-level analysis. It doesn’t give you the circumstances,” Votaw told GolfChannel.com. “If most of the drugs are cortico-steroids or diuretics, there is a very real possibility that those have TUEs associated with them. We don’t consider them to be performance-enhancing in the first place. Now diuretics, I suppose, can be used as a masking agent of some sort to someone else, but we aren’t seeing a lot of diuretics in our testing.”

Votaw added that WADA does not have access to the test results or samples from the lab through which the Tour conducts its regular testing, meaning the 507 samples in question came from other corners of the game.

Golf Surpasses More Athletic Pastimes In Positive Test Results

As Wednesday kicks off the one-year countdown to the Rio Olympic Games, it is interesting that in all of the stories on WADA's findings into sports with issues, that golf registered the third highest score for the percentage of positive drug tests.

Johnny Waterson of the Irish Times explains.

An AAF identifies the presence of a prohibited substance or its metabolites or markers in any given sample.

The 2015 figures, which collates all of the samples analysed and reported by accredited Wada laboratories throughout the world in 2014, shows that golf scored a 1.6 per cent rate of positive drugs tests compared to 1.0 per cent for both athletics and cycling and 0.8 per cent for rugby.

More embarrassing for the sport is that golf came in with the third highest score for the percentage of positive tests.

It was worse than all of the other 21 listed sports except for equestrian sport and weightlifting.

There was good news though, the sample size was small and anabolic steroids were not an issue.

Of those 144 were positive which gave the 0.5 per cent positive reading. Athletics provided 25,830 samples and cycling 22,471 samples and both came out with the same reading of 1.0 per cent positive.

In athletics, cycling, soccer and rugby the most abused banned substances were anabolic agents, while in golf the samples returned no blood or urine that tested positive for those agents.

The drugs of choice for golfers are diuretics and other masking agents as well as Glucocortico-steroids.

U.S. Anti Doping CEO: Tour Drug Policy Has Loopholes

As the world's top golfers are about to be subjected to more stringent drug testing in the lead-up to the Rio 2016 Games, Rex Hoggard takes a comprehensive look at what players will experience.

The biggest changes: "Whereabouts Testing" that requires players to inform the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency where they will be for one hour a day, seven days a week.

USADA officials say a smartphone app will allow competitors to report their locations instantly, but the penalty for a missed test can be severe – three whereabouts testing “failures” will count as a positive test.

Also of note: blood testing. The only way to test HGH, the most likely substance that would be abused.

But regarding the PGA Tour's policy to date, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's Travis Tygart suggests the tour policy has loopholes.

“If you have the obligation to not give a sanction or to stick the file in the drawer and not go forward, I’m not in any way suggesting that’s what [the Tour] have done, but the policy allows for that. Without any accountability elsewhere it’s hard to know for sure,” Tygart told GolfChannel.com.

“We’ve certainly seen other high-profile sports, cycling in the past, where in ’99 with Lance Armstrong’s corticosteroid positive, that’s exactly what the sport did. After the report that just came out detailing that sad saga it was clear they did it because it was going to be harmful to them and to the sport.

“That’s the pressure and the tension that you have going back to the fox guarding the henhouse. It’s awfully difficult and in our experience impossible to both promote and police your sport because you have this inherent duty to make the brand look good and not have any bad news out there.”

Oh not our fox!

PGA Tour (Grudgingly?) Inching Toward WADA Compliance

Golfweek's Alex Miceli looks at the forthcoming need for the PGA Tour to button up some of its drug testing--namely blood testing and transparency--to be WADA compliant in the year prior to the 2016 Olympic Games.

As Miceli writes, WADA's director general David Howman isn't impressed with the tour's effort.

Though the Tour considers its program a success, the testing excludes certain substances, ignores most aspects of transparency and distinguishes among violations for performance-enhancing and recreational drugs, a distinction that WADA does not make.

“They are not a signatory of ours, so they don't belong to the WADA community,” David Howman, WADA’s director general, said in a far-reaching interview with Golfweek. “They are disassociating themselves from us but on occasions saying that they follow some of the rules that we have. So it's a bit of a mishmash at the moment.”

The Tour's response:

“We've never said we were going to be under the WADA program, just like other professional sports are not in the United States,” Votaw said. “I don't think he (Howman) could challenge the fact that we worked closely with WADA in developing the program. We told them the reasons we are going the direction we went, and they did not, in their conversations with us, express any disdain or concern about it.”

No, not to your face. Just to reporters!

PGA Tour Resists Blood Testing Due To Performance Effects!?

While one can make a case for the PGA Tour's aversion to drug testing over the years since image is sales point #1, their case for not moving to blood testing is tied to performance impact, reports SI's Pete Madden.

Without blood testing, there is no way to detect the use of HGH, easily the most attractive possibility for a golfer seeking to recover faster from injuries or simply to look as young as Dr. Galea, Tiger's rehab man of choice. Though as of May that testing will take place because of the Olympics. Still, the reason for no blood testing obtained by Madden from Andy Levinson of the Tour is pretty funny. Especially since drug testing occurs after rounds.

“Taking blood draws from golfers’ arms might impact performance if it caused a hematoma or a player suffered anemia given the fine motor skills required on certain golf shots,” Levinson said.

And WADA isn't buying it. Never a good thing.

David Howman, WADA's director general, was skeptical of the PGA Tour’s rationale on not blood testing athletes.

“We’re not talking about a transfusion,” Howman said. “It’s a very small amount of blood. If any of the arguments against collecting blood had strong scientific or medical rational, I think we would have heard about it long before now.”

Pettersen On Drug Testing In Golf: Clean Sport The Priority

The New York Times' Karen Crouse wonders if golf is ready for Olympic-style drug testing and is if to drive home her point that the answer is a big no, there were discrepancies in when players and administrators expected more demanding testing to begin.

What was not in dispute, however, was Suzann Pettersen's refreshing take compared to so many of her peers who wheel out nonsense about how there is no reason to use performance enhancing drugs in golf.

“The procedure that we’re facing is nothing compared to my fellow Norwegian athletes,” she said. “They have to report their whereabouts 24/7, and if you’re not at the spot you said you were going to be, that’s almost the same as failing a drug test.”

From her perspective, the more stringent testing for the world’s golfers cannot start soon enough. “I know some of the Swedish athletes have joked and said, ‘Why don’t you install a GPS in us, and you’ll know where we are all the time?’ ” she said. “The pressure of always being on top of your schedule can be a pain, but for me, clean sport has always been a top priority.”

"The Tour seems to be missing the key component of an affective testing program--transparency."

Rex Hoggard at GolfChannel.com explains why the revelation of Bhavik Patel's PED violation was not only unsatisfactory, but strangely lacking in the primary detail: what PED was used.

Since we learned that information in the Doug Barron case, why not in this one?

Although the Tour’s original PED manual in 2008 stated, "... the PGA Tour will, at a minimum, publish the name of the player, the anti-doping rule violation, and the sanction imposed,” for a performance-enhancing violation, that policy was amended in January 2009 when “the anti-doping violation” wording was removed from the policy.

However subtle the reworded policy may seem, it only serves to further extend a cloak of secrecy that has defined the anti-doping program since its inception.

Update on Thursday, January 15, 2015 at 09:01 PM by Geoff

**Here is the Mark Lamport-Stokes piece referenced in Hoggard's report and vital reading if you are an Olympic hopeful trying to keep the various drug protocols straight.

"What's going to be key is a full understanding of the differences, how that impacts a clean player and making sure a clean player has an opportunity to be successful," United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) chief Travis Tygart told Reuters.

"The WADA code has things like the beta-2s (agonists that are used to treat asthma and other pulmonary disorders) that are going to be different than what the current (PGA Tour) list looks like.

"So we are going to have a full and fruitful opportunity to educate those athletes that may fall under our jurisdiction, just like we do with the NBA (National Basketball Association) players who come in to play in the Olympics."

Lupica: "Guys like Finchem forget that they’re supposed to be caretakers of a public trust."

Mike Lupica takes the PGA Tour to task for their handling of the Dustin Johnson situation and scores some valid points in a mess that's long been coming for a Commissioner who never wanted drug testing in the first place. And, who believes golfers as never breaking any kind of rules, laws or codes of conduct, when they are just as human as the rest of the population.

In trying to cover up a rare situation with a golfer failing drug tests, Lupica says the tour has actually brought more bad publicity their way than had they handled this with more transparency.

He writes:

You know why they look like they’re hiding something? Because they are. Not in the interests of protecting Johnson or his reputation, but because they think that the truth about how everybody arrived at this moment is really, really bad for business. You can only imagine the hand-wringing from Finchem back in the day when they found out Tiger Woods had been treated by Dr. Anthony Galea.

These guys somehow think they can protect the Tour’s brand and image by acting this way. Only now they do the opposite. This is a sport that loves to talk, often incessantly, about its honor and its adherence to the rules, and how players routinely call penalties on themselves for infractions only they see.

How about Finchem does that to himself now?

Lupica took to the Sports Reporters to discuss this as well, but the video is not posted online.