Still no decision on HGH testing - Ingles

Negotiations between the N.F.L. and its players union over testing for human growth hormone continued to stall Wednesday, with the union upset that it did not receive the scientific documents it requested from the World Anti-Doping Agency regarding the test for H.G.H.

George Atallah, a union spokesman, said the antidoping agency refused to hand over documents detailing the validity and reliability of the H.G.H. test, which WADA uses and which has caught eight athletes since it was put in place in 2004.

Growth hormone, banned by WADA, is said to increase lean muscle mass and boost recovery. It is illegal to possess in the United States without a prescription.

“The documents WADA gave us were not adequate at all,” Atallah said in a telephone interview. “And we’re not going to implement another person’s test without looking at the scientific documents ourselves. We’re disappointed in the lack of transparency on WADA’s part.”

Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, and two other league representatives met with union officials and lawyers, as well as the union’s panel of science experts, at the antidoping agency’s headquarters in Montreal for more than three hours Wednesday to discuss the science behind the test.

David Howman, WADA’s director general, said scientists from WADA and the United States Anti-Doping Agency, as well as an independent scientist known as one of the world’s foremost experts on growth hormone, provided the union with all the information it had asked for.

“It’s total nonsense that the union is complaining, because all of its scientists accepted the tests’ validity,” Howman said. “There was no attack on the science, but we were under attack by a couple of their lawyers. They were looking at how to attack the test in a court of law, and that’s regrettable.”

Although the league and the union signed a new collective bargaining agreement this month, they left the drug-testing policy for growth hormone up for discussion and were hoping to start testing the players by the season opener on Sept. 8.

The league is still hopeful of sticking to that timetable. Brian McCarthy, an N.F.L. spokesman, said Goodell and other league officials were satisfied with the test’s reliability and were ready to move forward with it.

“We believe we can still get it done,” McCarthy said of instituting the H.G.H. test by the start of the season. “We want this to happen.”

The union, though, said it would have to regroup on Thursday to decide how to proceed. This article was written by Juliet Macur and appeared in The New York Times.