The case of the positive doping test in Kona just escalated from curious to comical, if that's your idea of an escalation.

As reported last week on Slowtwitch the news of Kona's "positive test" originated from the International Triathlon Union (ITU).  The ITU – triathlon's international federation (IF) -- receives news of all positive tests, as all IFs do, from the labs that generated these tests.  But the lab sent the result "by mistake," the ITU's folks are quoted as saying, because it is no longer the IF for Ironman and other races (as a result of its own action at its annual rule-making Congress in 2004).

By not keeping Kona's anti-doping test results a secret the ITU opened itself up to criticism, because it's simply the "raw" result its officials made public, prior to any considerations that might render the adverse finding moot.

But there's a new twist.  The ITU is now claiming that the test in Kona was its own out-of-competition test of the athletes in ITU's points pool, not the Ironman's in-competition test, as the ITU first thought.

"It was an out of competition test conducted on one of the athletes in the ITU testing pool," says the ITU’s executive director Loreen Barnett of the "positive" result.  "However there were no adverse findings," she continued. "Upon further investigation we have discovered that all levels were within the various thresholds."

In other words, there were two groups of people rushing about the village of Kailua during Ironman week with plastic cups in search of samples.  One group was sent by USADA to test the athletes in the race, and one group sent on behalf of the ITU, looking for athletes "out of competition."

To me, this explanation generates more questions than it answers.  First, why was the ITU looking for an triathlete "out of competition" who was about to compete in a triathlon?  There were at least five athletes competing in either the Ironman or the following week’s XTerra who are still in the ITU’s top-75 in short course rankings.  The idea of out-of-competition tests is that you catch an athlete in his or her "doping" phase, before he or she gets a chance to clean the system of any traces of banned substances.  One cynical anti-doping expert we spoke to conjectured, "It’s a way to pad the results; you catch a bunch of your athletes out of competition and you can trumpet this to the world... but you know these athletes are less likely to get caught than at any time of the year."

While I don't ascribe such motives to the ITU, it certainly is a curious time to round up the usual suspects.  Yes, your athletes are technically out of competition in your sport (triathlon) but they do happen to be competing in another sport -- XTerra or Ironman -- that is pretty danged similar.  While this might be a financially economical way to round up a gaggle of athletes in one fell swoop, it does seem to defeat the purpose of testing out of competition.

But that's not the Shakespearian twist to this story.  We are to understand, from several direct sources, that it was the ITU's president, Les McDonald, who offered the information of Kona's positive, and it appears he got this info in some way other than through his organization's doping director.  We know this because the latter, Leslie Buchanan, said she heard it from McDonald, and did not see the paperwork prior to her leaving for the ITU World Cup in New Zealand.  It is typical -- though lamentable for privacy's sake -- that WADA labs simply fax the results through to their intended recipients, but that's what they do.  Did McDonald come across the fax, note the words, Kona and positive and, with this information in his hip pocket, board his flight to New Zealand, where he was to divulge his information at the ITU World Cup race?  I don't know, but I'm casting about for an alternative explanation and I'm not coming up with anything more plausible.

The ironies -- and there are several -- unfold too quickly to appreciate fully the resolving justice of each.  The defense, according to the ITU's Barnett, excusing McDonald's telling of these positives, is that, "We're trying to differentiate ourselves from the races we do not control,"  a thinly veiled accusation of the Ironman athletes' guilt, to the exclusion of the clean athletes racing the ITU circuit. If it's true that this really was the ITU's test, and not the USADA-authorized test of Ironman athletes, then McDonald certainly did achieve his goal of differentiation: His ITU athlete, apparently to the exclusion of all the other Ironman athletes as of this writing, tested positive.

You might protest that this is unfair; that the ITU's athlete is not in fact positive; that this was just the raw adverse lab finding; that upon further inspection the athlete's results were within normal limits. You would be precisely correct. This is why you don't blab results prior to the results management process.  When one considers the actions of a man who leaks the raw results, only to find out it was his own athlete's results, if there was ever a more royal hoisting by one's own petard I have not seen it.

This is not the end of the story, and it gets more byzantine at every turn.  The head of UCLA's anti-doping lab, Dr. Don Catlin, the dean of the world's anti-doping researchers, writes to me yesterday and says, "I do not know if we did the testing but if we did it would have been under USADA. We send positive notices to the client, the IF and WADA."

What can we take from this?  First, that the ITU might be mistaken, and it really was the USADA test.  If it is, then perhaps some at the ITU will now know what others are the ITU have long known:  that you don't parse between the ITU's athletes and other athletes before you know whether or not these athletes are "different" than your own.

We also know -- whether or not it is USADA's test -- that it is clear that UCLA did not get the memo saying that the ITU is not the international federation of many or most of triathlon's most visible events.  So the ITU can expect to keep on getting these Candygrams from the UCLA lab, as well as from the world's other 33 WADA labs, in clear breach of WADA's privacy protocols.

Finally, if it is the ITU's test, it is instructive to inquire into the wisdom of an IF being both the testing authority and the results management authority (the ITU is the testing authority of many of its athlete's tests).  Understand that this athlete in question, last week, was the poster boy (or girl) for, "...the preconception these [Ironman] races generate -- the [bad] press reports that we're fighting against." [My inserted words].  This athlete then went at warp speed from that status to having all levels, "within the various thresholds." One could suffer whiplash. How can an athlete go from dirty to clean over the weekend? Certainly that must be an anti-doping results management speed record. Though the test and results management might've been done correctly, that raises eyebrows, and it strongly suggests a hole in the processes set up by WADA.

This is a teaching moment.  WADA needs to examine many of its procedures.  The IOC needs to look hard at WADA, which it does not appear to have been doing.  But I’m railing in vain, because neither entity cares a whit for what I write.

Closer to home is what our sport's leaders can learn.  The ITU -- at least certain elements of it -- needs to examine its motives when considering what it says about drugs in triathlon.  The sport needs to examine the wisdom of having a "world" governing body that only governs part of the triathlon "world."  I strongly suspect the only reason the IOC has allowed triathlon to get away with this is because it doesn't know about it yet -- heck, most of triathlon doesn't know about it yet. When the IOC does figure this out, there will certainly be hell to pay.

Doping in triathlon is generally a bad thing. But in the case of Les McDonald -- a man capable of very heroic things, and very childish things -- if there is a pill that can keep the bad McDonald in its box, then that's the sort of doping many might welcome in our sport. That's the one case where doping in triathlon might be a good thing. I feel bad for Ms. Barnett and for the other folks in the ITU's Vancouver office who must provide cover for the man who they admire so much, but who they know is certain to commit counterbalancing acts. From what I hear more and more inside the ITU are growing weary of their heroic, toe-stubbing president absent the quelling of his worse angels, and this case illustrates why.