The Tribune

NOTE: This story appeared earlier missing the first half - it has now been corrected.

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas has been implicated as a source from where some of the world’s top sports stars, including former world 100 metres record holder Tim Montgomery, allegedly received some of their dosages of banned performance enhancing drugs.

A report from Al Jazeera’s Investigation Unit screened on Sunday entitled “The Dark Side - Secrets Of The Sports Dopers” revealed how Montgomery, the former American sprinter, was caught in 2005, banned for two years and stripped of his world record.

Montgomery told British hurdler Liam Collins, who is writing a book on the once fastest man in the world and acted as an undercover reporter for Al Jazeera, how he met a doctor in the Bahamas and was supplied with his first dose of the banned substance testosterone and celebrated with a fish dinner at the Fish Fry.

“We went to Goldie’s Fish Fry and I was like ‘man, that’s the first time I had red snapper,” he said. “I wish I could get some of this fish back.”

That, according to Montgomery, was how he began smuggling the drug to the United States through the frozen fish.

As a result of what was discovered, the report went into an eight-months investigation in which Collins went undercover in an attempt to expose the widespread nature of performance-enhancing drugs in global sports. As a cover story, Collins tells medical professionals tied to the trade of performance-enhancing drugs - including human growth hormone (HGH), erythropoietin (EPO) and testosterone - and that he is hoping for one last shot at glory at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Part of his investigation took him to Nassau, where undercover video further revealed that two Bahamian doctors - Dr Cyprian Strachan, who once sat on a Caribbean-wide anti-doping body for bodybuilding, and Dr Nicholas Fox - were both involved in the allegations.

Dr Fox is shown on camera claiming that three of the Golden Girls, the Bahamian sprint relay team that triumphed in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney were “patients of mine”. Although he did not mention names, when asked if he helped them he said not with banned substances but with “more traditional medications”.

When challenged later he said he had been lying to the reporter, could not get banned drugs and had never seen professional athletes.

Dr Strachan later said he had never supplied banned drugs.

When contacted in the Al Jazeera report, IAAF Councilwoman Pauline Davis-Thompson - a member of the Olympic gold medal winning quartet - emphatically denied the allegations, saying that she condemned “athletes who dope” as “morally warped and gutless.” She also categorically denied that she had ever met Dr Fox.

Peyton Manning, the Denver Broncos quarterback, is one of many high-profile players the report names and raises questions about. He issued a statement on Saturday night strongly denying the allegations, claiming that “whoever said this is making stuff up”.

Collins’ undercover quest took him from the Bahamas, where he connected with a doctor that claimed to supply performance-enhancing drugs to Bahamian Olympic athletes, to Canada, where he met naturopathic physician Brandon Spletzer and pharmacist Chad Robertson, who devised a “cutting edge” drug programme for Collins that included up to 10 injections each day.

Collins then connected with Charlie Sly, a Texas-based pharmacist, who has “taken smart drugs to a whole new level,” according to Spletzer.

 “The Dark Side” paints a picture of an underground marketplace where athletes can easily obtain drugs that are hard to detect even with sophisticated drug tests like those implemented by Major League Baseball, the NFL and the Olympics. And it raises questions about how serious the owners of professional sports teams are about rooting out drug use, which can make the games more exciting and profitable, while doing damage to the bodies of players, not owners.

 “No one’s got caught, because the system’s so easy to beat,” Robertson, the pharmacist, brags to Collins. “And it still is, that’s the sad fact. I can take a guy with average genetics and make him a world champion.”

 Efforts to reach Bahamians mentioned in the report proved fruitless.