No Testing for H.G.H. Before Start of Season - Ingles

The N.F.L. told teams in a memo Friday that blood testing for human growth hormone, which was conditionally part of the new collective bargaining agreement completed last month, would not begin with the start of the regular season next week. The league said the players union had concerns about the validity of the tests used by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Until an agreement is reached on growth hormone testing, the N.F.L. will use the performance-enhancing-drug policy from 2010 — which does not allow drug suspensions to be appealed to an independent third party, a right the players won in the new labor deal.

The league and the union committed to include testing for growth hormone, pending the completion of details of the testing, on Aug. 4. At the time, there was broad optimism from both sides that there would be little trouble completing the agreement in time to allow testing — including, the league said, game-day testing — for the season openers next week. But since then, the union has dug in, saying that WADA has failed to provide information it has requested about the efficacy and accuracy of the tests.

The two sides met with WADA officials in Montreal last week, after which WADA officials said scientists representing the union appeared to be satisfied with the validity of the tests.

“We’ll continue to work with the league on implementing a fair and safe testing process and protocol,” the union spokesman George Atallah said Friday. “The integrity of the game is critically important to the players, but so are health and safety.”

The H.G.H. test that the league has endorsed is the same as those used for Olympic athletes and minor league baseball players. David Howman, director general of WADA, did not respond to an e-mail and a phone call.

In a letter from Commissioner Roger Goodell to the union’s executive director, DeMaurice Smith, sent Aug. 30 and obtained by The New York Times on Friday, Goodell said that he thought the sides had agreed on the main elements of testing but that just before finishing the collective bargaining agreement, Smith raised “for the first time your concerns regarding the reliability of the science underlying the tests.”

In his letter, Goodell listed what he said were the points of agreement between the sides, including that specially trained personnel would draw a tablespoon of blood from players who were randomly selected for testing. The tests would be unannounced and testing would be conducted by labs at U.C.L.A. and the Sports Medicine and Testing Laboratory in Utah. Results, Goodell wrote, would be based on the current test used for Olympic athletes and minor league baseball players with what Goodell called “conservative thresholds in place to guard against any meaningful risk of false positive.”

“Based on the data shared with us by WADA last week, while there have been thousands of tests for H.G.H., there has never been a false positive,” Goodell wrote to Smith.

He continued: “My own view is that we received substantial and valuable information at the meeting, which has led me to have even greater comfort with the science underlying the testing.” (source New York Times)