With a Little Help, Officials Identify Designer Steroid

An “oily, transparent” liquid seized last year at a U.S.-Canada border stop turned out to be a new designer steroid, but there is no evidence it has been used by athletes, anti-doping officials said Tuesday.

Olivier Rabin, science director of the Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency, said the substance -- called desoxymethyltestosterone, or DMT -- was identified after an e-mail sent to the agency from an anonymous whistle-blower.

Christiane Ayotte, director of the Montreal WADA-accredited anti-doping lab, said thousands of tests turned up no evidence of DMT. In addition to Olympic athletes, the lab also tests major league baseball players and athletes in other professional sports.

She and Rabin hailed the discovery of the substance as a preemptive strike against would-be cheaters. “Probably in this case we are ahead of the dopers,” Rabin said in a conference call. “This shows to the dopers how serious we are.”

The announcement follows the discovery in 2003 at the UCLA anti-doping lab of the designer steroid THG, or tetrahydrogestrinone, the substance at the center of the steroid investigation focused on the Burlingame, Calif.-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

Four men, including BALCO founder Victor Conte, face multiple felony counts in federal court in San Francisco of distributing THG and other banned substances to elite athletes.

Who developed DMT -- as well as how and why -- remains unclear. Ayotte and Rabin said Tuesday they were impressed with the sophistication of the manipulation required to produce it, calling DMT more chemically complex than THG.

The substance was seized by officials in one of Canada’s western provinces; details have not been made public. Loretta Nyhus, a customs department spokeswoman in Winnipeg, declined to comment.

Rabin said there appears to be no need to retest samples from the Athens Olympics or other events for DMT. “We’ve got the clear impression that this drug, DMT, has not been used,” he said.