Each and every year, dozens of athletes from around the world are found to have tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs across all areas of competition.
The international athletic community, made up of Olympic athletes in Olympic hopefuls alike, is usually hit pretty hard by these performance-enhancing drug allegations and the positive tests. At the same time, it’s easy to see why athletes that are going up against the best of the best around the rest of the world are interested in taking advantage of chemical cocktails that can give them a bit of an advantage.
When athletes test positive for performance-enhancing drugs they almost always come out with some sort of excuse behind why they were surprised that they tested positive in the first place, with some being quite a bit more plausible than others.
At first blush, the story from American long jumper Jarrion Lawson sounds like one of the most far-fetched PED positive excuses anyone has ever tried to pass off – but upon closer inspection it might strike a lot closer to the truth than most people would have expected at first.
A fantastic athlete and an Olympic hopeful at the long jump competition, Lawson was able to get the silver medal at the 2017 IA AF World Athletics Championships in London. Like all other athletes competing at the event, Lawson was given an in-competition performance-enhancing drug test – and it turned out (later on) that he had in fact tested positive for trace elements of the Trenbolone metabolites.
Now, right off the bat it’s important to highlight the fact that this is in fact a chemical substance banned by the IOC and most other sport sanctioning organizations around the world. Athletes have been known to take advantage of this substance to increase their muscular strength and their endurance, their speed and their frame, and it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Lawson was trying to do the same thing.
However, Lawson has maintained throughout the entirety of this process that he is a 100% clean athlete and went on to blame his positive test for these trace elements on eating tainted beef that he had consumed while training in the United States before leaving for competition in London.
It turns out that he and his agent had done a considerable amount of research and discovered that trenbolone is used as a USDA approved steroid throughout the United States when it comes to the production of beef. It is regularly injected into cattle to get them to produce more beef than they would have on their own, and Lawson was eating a considerable amount of beef in the lead up to his competition.
Now, it might not seem all that reasonable to believe Lawson – especially after you recognize that a lot of athletes use this substance to bulk up. But combined with the laboratory results (that have now been released) showing the amount of trenbolone in his bloodstream to be ridiculously small the US ADA and the IAAF are both looking more closely into this particular case.
Each and every year, 20 million head of cattle receive this specific anabolic steroid injection in the United States alone. Trace amounts of trenbolone can be found in commercially available beef but they are usually destroyed during the digestive process.
It’s impossible to know exactly how this appeal is going to shake out, but Lawson stands by his 100% clean reputation it wants to make sure that he isn’t suspended for competition before his Olympic dreams become a reality just because he ate a lot of steak while he was training for competition across the ocean.