Better to go bald than get busted

Baldness may harmful to a young jock's social life, but the treatment for it is harmful to an athletic career.

That was the message implicit in a warning issued yesterday by both the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and the athlete organization Athletes Can. They warned athletes to avoid using finasteride, a prohibited substance sold under the brand names Propecia and Proscar.

Finasteride is used as a treatment for both male-pattern baldness and enlarged prostate, but is suspect in sports because it can mask the presence of other performance-enhancing drugs.

It led to doping violations in Canada and the United States, the most notable being Colorado Avalanche goaltender Jose Theodore and top U.S. skeleton racer Zach Lund. Both said they used the drug to combat hair loss.

Theodore's two-year suspension from international hockey ended in December. Lund's positive test cost him a berth in the Turin Olympics in 2006, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport believed he was not an intentional cheat and trimmed his sentence to one year. But he missed his prime season and a shot at an Olympic medal. Lund was third on the World Cup circuit this season.

"There's no particular reason for the timing of the warning," said Rosemary Pitfield, the director of communications for the Centre for Ethics. "There haven't been a flurry of positive tests, but we have received phone calls from concerned parents of CIS [Canadian university] athletes."

This substance has been on the World Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited list since Jan. 1, 2005. It is prohibited not as a steroid, but as a masking agent. It can interfere with sample analysis.