Scorin' with Orrin

At last summer's Olympic games in Sydney, Australia, Norwegian wrestler Fritz Aanes suffered two heartbreaks: He lost the bronze medal, and then he was banned from competing internationally for two years, after testing positive for the potent anabolic steroid nandrolone. Although he couldn't do much about losing his medal, Aanes protested vehemently about his drug test, arguing that he had not taken steroids. The problem, he claimed, stemmed from another source: mislabeled dietary supplements manufactured in Utah.

Aanes made a compelling case. Nandrolone had been banned since 1975, and because it was easily detected for up to a year after only one injection, it had largely disappeared from pro sports. Athletes really bent on cheating had much better (and harder to detect) drugs to choose from. Later, a lab in Cologne, Germany, confirmed that there were trace amounts of nandrolone in Aanes's Utah supplement that weren't listed on the label.

Aanes wasn't the first athlete to blame tainted American dietary supplements for a positive drug test. Three others headed for or competing in the 2000 Olympics also tested positive just for nandrolone. And the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been getting reports about the possible supplement-steroid link since 1999, when more than 350 athletes competing around the world tested positive for the curiously pervasive compound.

Researchers suspected that not only were dietary supplements being mislabeled, but many of the U.S.-produced supplements called pro-hormones actually behaved like steroids, even though they were legally sold over the counter. The surge in positive tests for nandrolone also coincided with the spike in pro-hormone use after St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire admitted to using androstenedione -- or "andro" -- while chasing the single-season home-run record in 1998. (Banned by the IOC, andro is a steroid that the body converts to both testosterone and estrogen.)

After the controversy in Sydney, the IOC warned athletes to avoid American supplements, particularly those manufactured in Utah, the "Cellulose Valley" of the U.S. supplement industry. The IOC also blasted the U.S. for poorly regulating supplement producers and asked then-White House drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey to review the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act (DSHEA), which had deregulated the U.S. supplement industry in 1994.

Then Olympic officials, increasingly frustrated with the U.S. response to their concerns, went one step further and blamed the surge in nandrolone tests on a single U.S. senator: Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.). Hatch was the chief architect and sponsor of DSHEA, which among other things, prompted supplement makers to flood the market with vitamins, herbal remedies, amino acids, and other "natural products" like andro without any federal safety or purity guarantees. "[Hatch] is directly implicated in this affair," said Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission.

The IOC criticism was particularly biting given that Hatch's home state will be hosting the next winter games in 2002, and that one of the games' major sponsors is, in fact, a supplement company. Utah had already produced a major Olympics bribery scandal; all it needed was a reputation as the world's steroid capital just as the IOC was arriving with its drug-test lab.

So Hatch fired back at the IOC, saying that athletes could not blame their bad drug tests on him, or on the supplement industry, which he claimed was properly regulated in the U.S. "I am tired of this childish finger-pointing," Hatch said. "The last time I checked, neither the prince nor the athletes were experts in food and drug law."

The pressure from the IOC didn't seem to faze Hatch, who reiterated his belief in personal responsibility and the right of consumers to care for themselves using supplements. Gen. McCaffrey, though, did get the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to study the possibility of declaring andro a controlled substance much like narcotics and anabolic steroids. The move prompted a group of pro-hormone makers to pay a lobbying visit to Hatch's Washington office to express their concerns. The group represented a rather unusual constituency for the well-respected senior senator, a pious Mormon drug warrior who abstains from tobacco, coffee, and booze and makes Christian music CDs in his spare time.