Will cricketers follow baseball sluggers down drugs path

Reports that Major League Baseball will introduce testing for synthetic Human Growth Hormone (HGH) in its minor leagues next season year prompt disturbing memories of the explosion in power hitting in the 1990s headed by Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds.

This year McGwire admitted he had taken steroids when he broke Roger Maris’s long-standing home run record in 1998.

Bonds, who bettered McGwire’s record three years later, faces charges that he lied to a grand jury about steroid use.

Although a blood test for HGH was introduced before the 2004 Athens Olympics, nobody had subsequently tested positive until British rugby league player Terry Newton late last month.

But anti-doping officials have long been convinced that athletes across a number of sports have been using HGHc steroids to increase their strength and endurance and to assist a swift recovery after injury.

A 2007 report by former Senator Majority Leader George Mitchell into drug use in basetball concluded that there had been a “collective failure to recognise the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on”.

Source : http://blogs.reuters.com/sport/2010/03/04/will-cricketers-follow-baseball-sluggers-down-drugs-path/