The Steroid Detective

There was no way to be sure what was in the mysterious vial that arrived in Dr. Don Catlin's Los Angeles lab last June. All he knew was that he had been told to find out what it was--and if it was what he suspected, it could mean big trouble for a lot of people.

That trouble arrived earlier this month when the Department of Justice announced that it was charging four San Francisco--area men with 42 counts of conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs--the charges stemming, in part, from what Catlin found in the vial. Things heated up further last week when the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco released affidavits from people involved in the case declaring that Greg Anderson, personal trainer for home-run king Barry Bonds, had given steroids to Major League Baseball players--though all the defendants have pleaded not guilty to all charges. So far, no athletes have been indicted, but more sneakers are expected to drop.

The determined prosecution is a bad turn for bulked-up stars packing dozens of pounds of suspicious new muscle on frames that never before carried such weight. But the news was even worse for them because it's not just G-men on the case--it's Catlin too, and when it comes to drug cheaters, he knows his business.

Professor of pharmacology at UCLA and head of the university-based Olympic Analytical Laboratory, Catlin understands better than almost anybody that the sports-doping war is essentially a pharmacological arms race, with chemists in illegal labs tinkering with steroid formulations so that the drugs can perform their muscle-building jobs while sidestepping tests designed to detect them. The testers, for their part, strive to discover the existence of the new drugs and develop ways to screen for them, driving the bad guys to modify them further, and so on. "By definition," says Rob Manfred, a labor-relations executive with Major League Baseball, "the people trying to catch users of performance-enhancing drugs are going to be one step behind." In the current case, however, they caught up splendidly.

The chemical at the center of the recent indictments is tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a substance that is manufactured, the government charges, by the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), a maker of nutritional supplements, based in Burlingame, Calif., whose president, Victor Conte, was among the indicted men. BALCO, which boasts a client list that includes the San Francisco Giants' Bonds and the New York Yankees' Jason Giambi, claims it traffics only in legal supplements. The Department of Justice questions that, and in June an unnamed track coach gave the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) a syringe said to hold traces of a new chemical that had hit the steroid circuit--and also said to have been supplied by Conte. The USADA turned the contents of the syringe over to Catlin. "All we were told was that it [contained] a drug that was being used by athletes," he says.