The baseball world was shocked when Sports Illustrated reported that New York Yankees superstar third baseman Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 season, for which he was named the American League's Most Valuable Player.
But while there's been much talk of how this positive test--since confirmed by Rodriguez in an interview with ESPN--will affect Rodriguez's place in the baseball history books, there has been little discussion of what he took and how he might have benefited. Here's a closer look at the drug--Primobolan--that was reportedly discovered in A-Rod's urine samples.
What did Alex Rodriguez take?
According to the Sports Illustrated report, he tested positive for both Primobolan and excess testosterone. Primobolan is the trade name for a steroid called methenolone enanthate, which is essentially a modified form of the sex hormone testosterone. (Rodriguez's elevated testosterone levels may be a result of the primobolan, rather than of actually taking exogenous testosterone.) "It has the steroid backbone of testosterone," explains Anthony Butch, Director of UCLA's Olympic Analytical Laboratory. Primobolan is available in both oral and injectable form, and is not approved for prescription use in the United States. According to elitefitness.com, a Web site dealing with the nuts and bolts of steroid use, the injectable version of the drug is frequently sourced from Turkey, where it is manufactured by Schering-Plough, and the street price for a dose is approximately $15.
All steroids work to increase the levels of testosterone in the bloodstream, and have two kinds of effects--androgenic and anabolic. The androgenic effects--deepening of the voice, increased hair growth, changes in sperm production--are largely considered unwanted side effects. "They put you through a second, third, fourth or fifth puberty," says Charles Yesalis, professor emeritus of exercise and sport science at Penn State University. Steroids are modified (or combined with other substances like human growth hormone) to minimize these androgenic effects.
The anabolic pathway is where the performance enhancement comes from. "It causes muscles to grow, increases protein synthesis and can stimulate or inhibit bone growth," Butch says.
That said, steroids are not a magic bullet. While modest effects might result from taking the drug alone, maximum gains in muscle mass come about only when drug use is combined with strenuous workouts.
What happens when an athlete stops taking steroids?
The performance-enhancing effects of steroids are surprisingly short-lived. Butch estimates that even for a relatively long-acting steroid such as Primobolan, which has a half-life of only 24 hours, most of the effect will be gone within five or six half-lives--a loss of strength similar to a weightlifter who stops working out. The drugs do have significant long-term effects, though, Butch says.
"You're turning off your body's natural ability to make testosterone," Butch says, an effect that can last several weeks.That's why many steroid users who are discontinuing or tapering off the drugs will take hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) which stimulates the production of testosterone. For long-time steroid users, even this pharmaceutical fix isn't always enough. "If you've been taking it for years, you can get to the point where your body will never recover and make normal levels of testosterone."
Why did A-Rod get caught?
Yesalis suggests that the take-home lessons of recent steroid scandals such as the BALCO investigation is that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is widespread. "The cheaters are ahead of the testers," he says. "The best track team in the world passed hundreds of drug tests before they were found to be dirty."
He adds that while many Olympic athletes were using designer steroids, in which the drugs are modified to elude detection by conventional testing, in 2003 baseball players were only beginning to face the prospect of testing and were still on the early part of the learning curve on how to beat the tests. While steroids were technically illegal in the major leagues six years ago, there was no testing program and there were no formal penalties for their use. That's why 103 other baseball players--yet to be named--also tested positive during that season. Furthermore, the results of the drug test that Rodriguez and the others failed was for fact-finding purposes only; the results were supposed to remain confidential.
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