MLB, NFL, USOC funding anti-doping research
DENVER -- Major League Baseball and the NFL agreed to join the U.S. Olympic Committee to fund anti-doping research, contributing $3 million each to create the most extensive drug-fighting partnership between America's biggest pro leagues and its Olympic federation.
The USOC is also giving $3 million and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is giving $1 million to the new Partnership for Clean Competition, a collaborative that will use the initial $10 million to fund grants for research to combat performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
"Major League Baseball's support of this important new effort by the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency continues our commitment to fight the use of performance-enhancing substances among our athletes," MLB Commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.
Baseball and the NFL have long distanced themselves from anti-doping programs endorsed by the USOC and USADA, saying their programs are tailored specifically for their sports and the management-union issues unique to them.
While this collaborative isn't a shift in the testing protocols of those leagues, it is significant because of the USOC's partnership with USADA, which is widely perceived as running the most effective anti-doping programs.
It's especially significant for baseball given the Mitchell Report and Selig's vow to clean things up in the sport.
The idea was spearheaded by the USOC, which has pledged to do more in the anti-doping fight, and has become more vocal on the issue in the last two years, which have included a barrage of steroid stories ranging from track to cycling to baseball.
"It is vital that the major sport organizations in America work together to combat a problem that, left unchecked, has the potential to destroy the value and integrity of sport," USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth said.
Up to now, the research part of the anti-doping fight has been underfunded. Scientists and pharmacists have been able to come up with new, undetectable steroids more quickly than agencies like USADA have come up with tests to fight them.
The initial $10 million, to be spent over the next four years -- the USOC expects the amount and the time commitment to increase if the program is a success -- will go to researchers who have ideas about finding and detecting designer substances and also toward further development of a better and cheaper test to detect human growth hormone.
Baseball recently gave scientist Don Catlin $500,000 to find an effective urine test for HGH and Catlin has said he's making progress. But it didn't change his overall view on the fight against doping in sports.
"But let's say we get that contained tomorrow," Catlin said last month. "The next day, there's going to be another one."
The NBA, NHL and PGA are also participating in the research collaborative, and the USOC is seeking more funding from sports and non-sports corporations.
The Partnership for Clean Competition will have a board of governors, with one member from each of the founding partners, and that board will appoint a scientific research advisory board. The scientific board will review grant requests and track results of research projects.