Dasse: She Wasn’t Trying to Enhance Performance

Bonnie Dasse, the U.S. shotputter who tested positive for a banned drug after competing in the Barcelona Olympics, took issue with a Times’ report published Sunday that she tested positive for an anabolic steroid.

Reached at her home in Irvine, Dasse stressed that Clenbuterol, the drug found in her system in a random test after the shotput competition Wednesday, is not an anabolic steroid. Although she has since learned that the drug has anabolic properties, Dasse said her intention for taking it wasn’t to enhance her performance.

“I’m not here to cover myself,” said Dasse, an alum of Costa Mesa High, Orange Coast College and San Diego State. “I’m here to make it clear that it definitely shouldn’t be categorized as a Ben Johnson-type thing. Intent is very important.”

Dasse, 33, said she was taking the drug as a training aid, a stimulant the same way someone uses coffee to perk up in the morning. Dasse, who has been ranked among the top 10 U.S. shotputters since 1983, said she sometimes takes over-the-counter medicines as a boost after her 8-to-5 job in Newport Beach and before working out.

“Sometimes I’m fine when I get off work but sometimes I take an Excedrin,” she said. “It’s like when people need to wake up in the morning with a cup of coffee.”

Although such medicines are banned for use during international competitions, the U.S. Olympic Committee provides guidelines for their use in other times, Dasse said.

Dasse was under the assumption that Clenbuterol was in this category of stimulants. She said she was given the drug, which is not sold in the United States but is available in Germany as an asthma treatment, by a friend she trusted and assumed it was the same as the stimulant Albuterol, which is available in the United States.

Believing she was following USOC guidelines, Dasse said she stopped taking Clenbuterol Aug. 8, three days before the preliminaries. But after she finished eighth in her preliminary Wednesday and failed to advance to the finals, she was picked for a random drug test.

Early Friday morning, when a coach told her the urine test had been positive, she said she immediately thought of Clenbuterol. She had heard that British weightlifters had been sent home before the Games because of the drug and that Jud Logan, the U.S. hammer thrower who had finished fourth, had also tested positive for the substance, but thought that they had been careless and had taken it too close to competition.

She never thought she was endangering her Olympic eligibility with a steroid.

“That was a bad assumption,” she said. “That’s where I made a big mistake, the biggest mistake of my track career. But it was an honest mistake.”

Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the International Olympic Committee medical commission, said Clenbuterol has been on the list of banned substances since 1975, but only recently has been singled out for systematic testing.

“It hasn’t emerged out of the blue,” he said. “Now it’s become more commonplace. But now that it can be tested, it probably won’t be used as much.”

De Merode said Clenbuterol acts as a stimulant and an anabolic agent, although it is not officially considered a steroid. In the United States, Clenbuterol has been illegally used to fatten up cattle. In Germany, it is marketed legally as an asthma treatment.

Clenbuterol is listed as an undetectable substance in underground handbooks on performance-enhancing drugs, de Merode said.

“Some athletes fall under the idea that they can use it,” he said.

Because Clenbuterol is listed as an anabolic agent, Dasse faces a four-year ban and if that happens, she said, she will retire from the sport. But she hopes that because it wasn’t her intention to gain an advantage, she might get a lighter sentence that would allow her to return to competition sooner.

Above all, she wants people to know that she isn’t a cheater and that she’s sad that her family has to deal with people asking if she is.

“When they have to deal with people coming up and saying, ‘I heard Bonnie took anabolic steroids,’ that’s just like saying I’m cheating and that’s wrong,” she said. “That wasn’t the case.

“If I had been taking an anabolic steroid I guarantee you I wouldn’t be talking to anybody.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.