Make sure contaminated supplements don't put your health and athletic career at risk

Athletes, you know pressure: you’re expected to excel, win and keep on winning. So you train hard, you push yourself to your limits and you look for ways to give you an edge. You probably know athletes who are taking food supplements in the hopes of enhancing their performance. You might be doing it yourself. At the very least, you’ve probably thought about it. The reasons athletes and trainers give for taking supplements include improving endurance, decreasing recovery time, increasing strength and being sick less often—all worthy goals. On the surface it sounds like supplements are the way to go, but it turns out there are significant risks related to contamination of these supplements.

Before you make the decision to supplement, it’s wise to look at the potential impact of contaminated supplements on your athletic career.

What Supplements Won’t Do Food supplements for athletes include a wide range of products, from sports drinks to energy bars to tablets and pills such as vitamins, amino acids, creatine, minerals and various herbal products. A lot of hype goes into marketing these products to athletes, but the fact is poor athletic performance will not always be solved by supplementation. Supplements will not make up for poor training or practice habits. They will not compensate for nutritional deficiencies or toxicities caused by a generally inadequate diet. And they cannot fundamentally change your physique.

(Only anabolic steroids can radically change your muscular makeup, and you know how we at BFS feel about the dangerous effects of these drugs.) What supplements can do is give you the edge you need to pull ahead of the pack. On the other hand, they can create a world of trouble for an unsuspecting athlete.

Norwegian weightlifter Stian Grimseth was a favorite to win a medal in the 2000 Summer Olympic Games. Grimseth is a legend in his home country, and at the time of the Olympics he had numerous sponsors and product endorsements contracts, earning him hefty fees. Everything looked good for Stian until he was suddenly thrown off the team, escorted from the Games and sent home. He subsequently lost sponsorship and endorsement deals, as well as his reputation. Grimseth’s previous drug tests had all been negative, and this time he insisted that he had not taken any illegal drugs and that there must be another explanation for the positive drug test result.

His suspicion immediately fell on a supplement called ribose that he had begun to take shortly before the Games. The supplement was manufactured by Universal Laboratories and was expected to improve his performance. The ribose Grimseth took allegedly stated on the label that it was “Guaranteed Quality— Laboratory Tested.” Even with that clear assurance, Grimseth checked the ingredients with his coach and a doctor on the Norwegian Olympic Committee.

Encountering no objections, he took the supplements. After he was thrown out of the Games as a result of his drug test, Grimseth had the supplement tested by an independent International Olympic Committee (IOC) laboratory in Germany. The lab determined that the supplement contained 19-norandrosterone, which is a metabolite of a banned hormone and is an indicator of use or ingestion of the banned drug. As a result of this finding, Grimseth filed a lawsuit against the ribose manufacturer in August 2002, claiming substantial damages due to the unlisted and banned ingredient in the supplement. While this situation might strike you as farfetched, it is not.

It has long been rumored in athletic circles that supplement manufacturers put powerful, but banned, performance-enhancing substances in Chris LeRoux proved that you can be a great weightlifter without drugs when he clean and jerked an American record of 337 pounds at a bodyweight of only 132 pounds. This record had stood for 27 years, and was a world record at the time. Chris is an active coach who advises all his athletes to be cautious about taking any supplements than may be tainted with banned substances.

From BFS Magazine — March/April 2005. Part of the BFS Magazine Archive (1980–2014).