Graham Kelly: FA has chance to make a stand on nandrolone

The Football Association can do the world of sport a great service as it investigates an alleged drug cheat, a Nationwide League player reportedly caught for nandrolone abuse by the government quango, UK Sport. Not only might Gordon Taylor's Professional Footballers' Association be co-opted to clear this unnamed player of any abuse, but also the Dutch international midfielder Frank de Boer, banned after a positive test playing for Barcelona against Celta Vigo in a Uefa Cup quarter-final in March 2001, could finally see a stain removed from his name should his lawyers wish to reopen the case.

Drug abuse in sport is abhorrent but, none the less, deep controversy has always surrounded the high-profile nandrolone positives which have marred other sports and European football, where those deemed to have committed offences have consistently protested their innocence.

The sprinters Linford Christie and Doug Walker, 400 metres runner Mark Richardson and hurdler Gary Cadogan all tested positive in controversial circumstances. There are many who find it impossible to believe that Christie, a man in his 40th year with nothing at stake (except pride in front of his young charges), would seek to improve his performance by artificial means.

The Italian football federation handed out bans to eight players who tested positive for nandrolone in the 2000-2001 season, including Lazio's Jaap Stam and Fernando Couto, Josep Guardiola of Brescia and Edgar Davids of Juventus. But when De Boer's nandrolone suspension, imposed by Uefa, was converted to a worldwide ban by Fifa, the stakes suddenly soared. He could not play for the Dutch national team for a period covering the qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup, which ended in their elimination at the hands of Mick McCarthy's Republic of Ireland at Lansdowne Road, Dublin in September last year, when Jason McAteer scored the only goal.

The current case puts the FA at the crossroads. Why? Because like Uefa and the Italian FA, its anti-doping protocol slavishly follows that of the International Olympic Committee. All are discredited because they have unjustly labelled honest sportsmen as cheats by failing to distinguish between nandrolone, a hormone which is produced naturally in the body, and nandrolone, the anabolic steroid which is actually nandrolone decanoate.

The player the FA's testers have identified could have been suffering from a slight injury or may have just completed an arduous training session which caused him to produce a higher than usual nandrolone sample naturally; it is hardly likely that he was injected with the decanoate as, in any event, the doctors' prescribing bible, The British National Formulary, states that even a full dose of 50 million nanograms would not enhance performance.

The body produces the hormone nandrolone in tiny quantities, possibly to aid the repair of damaged soft tissue. The advent of high-resolution analysis equipment in the 1990s led to the detection of such minute traces of the substance that the IOC was presented with a major dilemma.

Its then president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was confronted by so many positive findings that his cherished anti-doping policy lay in tatters, and he was compelled to announce, amid much ridicule, that as far as he was concerned doping was about jeopardising performers' health, not enhancing their performance. He therefore convened a special anti-doping conference in Lausanne in 1999.

As a direct result, the IOC's absurdly low limit for nandrolone of 2ng/ml was set in tablets of stone. Probably unknown to the IOC hierarchy, however, within days of the end of the Lausanne conference, an appeal in the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon was won by a Briton, Spencer Smith, who was eventually to blow apart the whole nandrolone issue.

When used in the body, the anabolic steroid and the natural hormone produce exactly the same three metabolites, none of which I will attempt to spell. How can the IOC, the self-styled supreme authority of the Olympic movement, decide that the metabolites detected in the performer's urine are from an anabolic steroid administered to or by him, and not produced naturally? Simple. It does not accept that the hormone has a separate existence from the steroid. Very convenient, if it can get away without legal challenge.

Smith had come fifth in the 1998 Ironman, but he then tested positive, not just for 2ng/ml but for 19ng/ml. USA Triathlon, having lost its case against him in lower commissions, took him to the final stage, the Court for Arbitration in Sport, in March 2000. Nobody gave Smith a cat in hell's chance for the main witness, on behalf of USAT, was to be the doyen of America's anti-doping programme, Dr Don Catlin, the head of the IOC testing laboratory at UCLA.

In this landmark case, which the IOC now studiously ignores, the doping charges were thrown out after Dr Catlin dramatically changed sides on the eve of the hearing and testified for Smith instead. He had found a crucial typographical error – 3ng/ml, the amount of the minor nandrolone metabolite, had been typed as 8ng/ml – and this, he said, had changed the analysis result from that of a drug cheat to that of someone making natural nandrolone: that is, more than the IOC believes possible.

Dr Catlin confirmed that the amount of the major metabolite had been 11ng/ml, thus making the total of the pair of them 14ng/ml. But, sadly, Uefa forced Frank de Boer to lose a year of his international career on a reading of 5.2.

The nandrolone issue, massive though it is, is only a small part of the whole question of how a drug developed for doctors to prescribe to restore normal people to health can also be one and the same substance which a drug cheat uses.

There cannot be any question of footballers being subject to a system where the burden of proof is anything less than "beyond reasonable doubt" or where the ruling authority does not presume innocence but guilt – as, it seems, is currently the case under the anti-doping regimes of world sport.

grahamkelly@btinternet.com