Major League Baseball has taken some steps forward earlier this week and then backpedaled a few days later.

MLB announced early part of this week that they would be releasing the names of athletes who tested positive for amphetamines for the first time to the public on its report on its drug-testing program. But a few days later, the organization said it would not.

According to league’s VP Rob Manfred during his telephone interview with the New York Times the commissioner’s office and the players union would withhold the details of positive amphetamine tests since “under our program, first-time positive tests for amphetamines are treated as confidential, and because of that, those numbers will be kept private.”

“The report will detail the number of tests conducted this year, the number of positives for steroids, the names of the substances players tested positive for and the number of therapeutic-use exemptions but will not include the total number of amphetamine positives,” Manfred said.

MLB officials say it’s a case of internal misunderstanding; there are some people, however, who have this suspicion that elite sluggers could have tested for the banned compound, thus the cop-out.

They asked why release the names of those who tested for anabolic steroids and not for amphetamines? They’re both prohibited compounds, so why the bias for cases involving amphetamines now?

From the New York Times:

Baseball has tested for amphetamines since 2006. A player is not publicly identified or suspended the first time he tests positive, so few failed tests have been reported. Only two players — Neifi Pérez and Mike Cameron — have been suspended for testing positive, and two others — Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds — have been linked to first-time positive tests in published reports.

In January, baseball’s drug-testing administrator, Dr. Bryan W. Smith, is scheduled to release a report on the status of the program, including some testing data.

The decision to release some information came in response to a recommendation from George J. Mitchell, who had conducted an internal investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In his report, which was released last December, Mitchell said the testing program needed more transparency, including the aggregate data on testing results. In April, the commissioner’s office and the players union amended the drug-testing program in response to Mitchell’s recommendation and, as part of the new policy, said the program’s administrator would include aggregate drug-testing data in his report.

However, both sides agreed not to reveal the number of first-time positive amphetamine tests

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One Times Online article labeled International Olympic president Jacques Rogge as a “deluded individual” when Rogge expressed his displeasure of Usain Bolt’s celebration of his victory at Beijing. Usain earned Rogge’s rebuke when the Jamaican sprinter failed to shake hands with his co-competitors after his impressive win at the 100 meters.

However, Rogge’s recent interview with the BBC’s Inside Sport, as related by AFP, portrayed a very pragmatic man. The IOC president said those who aspire for a 100 percent drug-free Olympics were out of touch with reality. He added cheating will always be part of human nature.

“I think one has to be realistic,” Rogge said.

“Drug-free sport in general is Utopia. It will be naive to believe that no-one will take drugs.

“There are about 400 million people practicing sport on this globe, there are not 400 million saints on earth.

“Cheating is embedded in human nature and doping is to sport what criminality is to society.

“You will always need cops and judges and prisons and jails and rules and regulations.”

IOC is planning to catch more users of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancers as it’s currently implementing re-testing of the samples taken at the Beijing Olympics. The IOC head “expects further positive doping cases to emerge from these” up to 2016 Games.

Rogge said all the samples they obtained from Beijing – more than 5,000 screenings, including nearly 1,000 blood samples – will be available for retroactive testing. The blood samples will be screened for new generation performance-enhancing drugs CERA and insulin. And if new testing techniques will emerge between now and 2016, the same samples will go through re-testing.

“We are keeping the samples for eight years and we are going to re-test them,” said Rogge.

“And ultimately the judgment on the Beijing Games will be given in eight years’ time, because each time a new scientific test is coming up we are going to re-test.”

Rogge assumed the IOC position on July 2001, replacing Juan Antonio Samaranch. Rogge has his share of criticisms and the most recent of these were his disapproval of Bolt’s behavior (mentioned above) and his statement regarding Greek athletes. He allegedly stated that “Greece won the gold medal in doping” because of a spate of failed dope tests of Greek athletes.

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Cristina Perez is a woman scorned by the Spanish authorities and she threatens to retaliate.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” says the character (incidentally named Perez) of a William Congreve’s play, and Perez plans to get back at her husband’s defamers by revealing Spanish athletes’ usage of steroids and other prohibited compounds.

Perez’s husband, Dr.  Eufemianio Fuentes, was arrested in 2006 in Operation Puerto for his alleged role in the country’s biggest blood doping ring.

“To call a doctor dedicated to sports science who has killed no one a criminal mastermind seems shameful to me,” Perez said.

“I know what happened at Barcelona ‘92 and I’m a Pandora’s Box that, if opened one day, could bring down sport,” Perez she told a Spanish newspaper. “But out of respect for my companions, the people who sacrificed so much, I’m staying quiet. Although I could speak out and ruin all those caught up in this little world.”

Perez, who also ran on Spain’s 1,600-meter relay team at the 1992 Olympics, was referring to  Spain’s medal haul in Barcelona ‘92 wherein the host country won 13 gold, seven silver and two bronze medals. Four years earlier at Seoul Olympics, Spain was able to grab one gold, one silver, and two bronze medals only. The improvement in the medal tally, according to Perez, was largely due to the doctor’s work.

Operation Puerto has implicated more than 50 professional riders, including Francesco Mancebo, Alejandro Valverde, Oscar Sevilla, Jose Gutierrez, and Alberto Contador. Contador was the 2007 Tour de France champion.

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By next month, the Mitchell Report will be a year old.

In his interview with AP, George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic senator who headed the investigation on the use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in baseball, thinks something positive came out of that inquiry. He said doping in the Major League decreased as a result of the report.

“The impression I get is that it’s had a significant impact of reducing usage, although that still remains very difficult to measure with any complete precision,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell, who now chairs an international law firm and works as the chancellor to a university in Northern Ireland, has some regrets when it comes to the report’s impact on the lives of the people who got implicated in the drug scandal.

“Obviously as a human being, I regret and don’t take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune, whether I have any relationship to it or not,” Mitchell said. “What we did was to try to meet the obligation which we’d undertaken, and we did so. Each player involved made his decision on how to respond.”

The 20-month and 409-page investigative report have named 89 players in all, including Roger Clemens whom the AP article tagged as “the report’s biggest loser”.

Headed to the Hall of Fame with 354 wins before the Mitchell Report, his Cooperstown chances deteriorated when Mitchell made public McNamee’s allegations that the seven-time Cy Young Award winner had used steroids and human growth hormone before they were banned. It led to a high-profile congressional hearing in February in which McNamee accused Clemens’ wife, Debbie, of using HGH, and the Department of Justice was asked to investigate whether the pitcher lied when he denied McNamee’s account.

In addition, Clemens sued McNamee for defamation, a case still in its early stages. In the fallout from the suit, the New York Daily News reported Clemens had a decade-long relationship with country star Mindy McCready that began when she was 15. Clemens denied having an affair with a 15-year-old but didn’t specifically address whether he had a romance with McCready.

The former Majority Leader acknowledged that there still so much that needs to be done to eradicate use of PEDs in the sport.

“I would be very doubtful that it is completely clean in the sense nobody is using,” he said. “You don’t know whether this is a temporary response because of the attention it’s gotten and whether over time it will begin to resume an increase. I think that’s unlikely given the aggressive nature of the response, but it’s something you have to be continuously concerned about.”

“The most important thing is to create an attitude which reflects the awareness that this is a dynamic ongoing program,” he said. “You can never reach the stage where you can say, we solved it, that’s it. You may have solved this drug, but there’s a lot of money involved and there are a lot of people who are seeking to make some of that money by creating new illegal drugs. And so you have to have a constant attention, constant focus, constant effort.”

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