NHL Drug-Test Agreement Reached

A tentative agreement was reached Friday on drug-testing procedures NHL players will follow before the Salt Lake City Games next February, replacing a patchwork of policies with a basic structure for the first random, no advance-notice testing of professional hockey players at the Olympics.

As sketched out in a conference call involving representatives of the NHL, NHL Players Assn. and International Ice Hockey Federation, each Olympic team will announce eight to 12 core players, perhaps by the original March 25 deadline those groups had set. However, those players won’t be tested for performance-enhancing substances and drugs that mask such substances until after the NHL playoffs, a key victory for the league and the union.

Both had said they didn’t object to the U.S. Olympic Committee’s decision last month that U.S. players must submit to testing by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, but they didn’t want players distracted by the tests during the playoffs, the NHL’s showcase event.

As outlined Friday, teams would also submit a pool of potential Olympians this summer who would be subject to no-advance-notice tests, but the rosters wouldn’t be completed until later this year.

“It looks like we’re going to be OK,” said Bill Daly, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the NHL.

“We’ll be in a position to finalize this by next week. And we’re comfortable the teams should be in a position to make an announcement by March 25.

“It was never something where we felt we had to bridge a lot of gaps. We understood what the landscape should look like and we had to fit everything together. I think we’re comfortable we will have a coherent system that doesn’t treat NHL players materially differently.”

Chuck Menke, a spokesman for USA Hockey, was more cautious but agreed major progress had been made toward an accord that would subject players from each country to standard procedures. He also said it was not certain Team USA will announce its core players by March 25, but he didn’t rule it out.

“This is good news,” he said. “I think you can say it’s the framework for an agreement. We will meet as an organization Monday to discuss how this is going to affect our announcement.”

U.S. hockey players weren’t subjected to out-of-competition testing at Nagano in 1998, as other U.S. Olympians were. The USOC, eager to clean up its image after the disclosure last summer that world shotput champion C.J. Hunter had tested positive four times for the banned steroid nandrolone, decreed last month that professional athletes participating in the Games must undergo tests performed by the USADA up to a year in advance.