SCOTT MacLeod is a lucky man. He may think himself unfortunate to have been caught up for so long in a controversy over a urine sample he gave in January, and some Scottish Rugby Union officials appear to believe that the drugs-testing authorities are to blame for the length of time his case lasted. But it is all too easy to conceive of circumstances in which – albeit unjustly – he would not now be free to resume his rugby career.
The sample MacLeod gave UK Sport at a Scotland squad get-together back in January produced two findings which led to an investigation. One was the presence of terbutaline, the other was a high level of testosterone (or, more precisely, of T/E – the
ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone).
In other sports, at other times, and even when the athlete has been found to have knowingly done nothing wrong, such findings have led to suspensions. The rule of 'strict liability' has been more rigorously applied, and even innocent mistakes have been penalised.
The terbutaline finding, for example, was reminiscent of the case of Alain Baxter, the Scottish skier who was stripped of his Olympic bronze medal after he tested positive for methamphetamine. Baxter said his result had come about because he had taken the American version of a sinus inhaler, which contained methamphetamine, instead of the British one he commonly used, which did not.
It was an innocent mistake, and the Court of Appeal for Sport agreed with him that in any case the type of methamphetamine produced was not performance-enhancing. The International Olympic Committee, however, stuck to its strict-liability stance and refused to give Baxter his medal back.
MacLeod was dealt with more leniently. Registered as an asthmatic, he said he had taken the inhaler which produced the terbutaline finding only when his normal inhaler had been unavailable. His mistake, he admitted, was to forget to fill in a new form declaring that he was taking a different inhaler.
That argument was accepted, and after the slightest of slaps on the wrist he was free to play for the Scarlets, his Welsh club, and for Scotland. A longer-term examination then began into the T/E finding, as UK Sport wanted to find out whether it could be caused by something which would not constitute an anti-doping rule violation.
Eventually, once MacLeod's agent had publicised the case of Northern Irish athlete Gareth Turnbull, it was accepted that alcohol consumption the night before the test was "more likely than not" the cause of the elevated T/E finding. UK Sport was happy, and a review panel of Scottish experts agreed.
Which is all fine and dandy, as far as this case goes. Even so, you have to ask what a professional athlete was doing indulging in the "acute ingestion of alcohol between the hours of 7.30pm and 3.00am the night prior to (his] selection for the doping control test", as MacLeod chose to word his explanation of the high T/E finding.
He has said he went out for a drink to mark the news that he was about to become a father for the first time. A lot of us might feel some sympathy for the desire to celebrate; indeed, a lot of us do not need anything like such news to send us down the pub for a few drinks with friends.
But then a lot of us are not professional athletes. And very few of us tend to keep up the consumption of alcohol from 7.30 in the evening until three o'clock the following morning.
MacLeod had a Scotland session to attend the following day, and even if it was not a full-on training session he should still have been in a reasonable state to take in whatever was going on. What is more, even if nothing at all had been going on the following day, with the Six Nations Championship set to kick off with a match against France just ten days later, MacLeod should have been ensuring he remained in the best physical state.
In a statement released by the SRU yesterday. MacLeod said he felt "very frustrated that my sample was not tested for alcohol at an earlier stage of these proceedings – given the severity of the charge that I was facing, I would have expected that the alcohol test should have been performed as a matter of routine".
Maybe so. But equally, given the nature of professional sport, we would be within our rights to presume that Scotland players were not out downing buckets of booze a week or so before a major international.
In the same statement, after calling for an urgent review of testing procedures, specifically for the routine use of an alcohol test in such T/E cases, an SRU official said the governing body would "be highlighting the importance of this case to all players and enhancing player education on the subject". Not before time. As excuses go, "I was drunk, not on drugs", is not the best from someone whose job it is to be in peak physical condition.
