NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), has accused the National Football League Players' Association (NFLPA) of using stalling tactics to block the introduction of tests for human growth hormone (HGH) in America's most popular professional sport.
After years of pressure from anti-doping crusaders and the government, the NFL and NFLPA finally agreed to start blood testing for HGH when they signed a new collective bargaining agreement in August.
But Pound, an outspoken critic of North American professional sports that have been slow to embrace doping tests and impose punishments, said the players' union was now trying to delay the procedure by wrongly claiming the tests were unreliable.
"The NFLPA have turned to their ubiquitous lawyers to throw as much sand as money can buy into the gears of an effective testing program," Pound wrote in a column on the WADA website.
"So, the lawyers, in a feat of self-generated alchemy, have turned themselves into scientists and now spout supposedly principled concerns about the reliability of scientific tests for HGH."
Pound, one of Canada's members on the International Olympic Committee, said the tests were validated by independent scientists in 2004 and any suggestion they were unreliable was false.
"The knowledgeable scientific community is satisfied with the reliability of the HGH tests," Pound wrote.
"WADA does not approve anti-doping tests until there is consensus among experts in the particular field that the tests are scientifically reliable and replicable.
"No one wants any athlete to be sanctioned on the basis of a false positive test."
The NFL and NFLPA did not immediately respond to Pound's claims when contacted by Reuters on Tuesday.
Pound, who published his column less than two weeks before the Super Bowl, North America's most watched and scrutinized sporting event, said it was time to end the delaying tactics and start testing.
"It is time for the public at large to recognize that it is being manipulated as part of the effort to avoid testing for performance-enhancing substances," Pound wrote.
"If the NFL players claim they are drug-free, they should be ready to prove it and stop hiding behind phoney claims that good science is bad science."
(Editing by Gene Cherry)
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