JUSTIN FAUTEUX
CUP Sports Bureau Chief

WATERLOO, Ont. (CUP) — Two players from the reigning Vanier Cup champions Laval Rouge et Or have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, according to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES).

On the afternoon of May 10, the CCES announced that linebacker Michaël Abraham tested positive for 19-norandrosterone, while offensive lineman Steeve Vachon was caught using methandienone — both of which are banned substances. Both players waived their right to an appeal and will now serve two-year bans.

Abraham’s positive test came from the 33 Laval football players who were tested on Feb. 7, while Vachon’s resulted from the testing of 25 players on March 6 at the Rouge et Or’s spring training camp in Orlando, Florida.

“I sincerely regret having implicated my team, the Rouge et Or, and Université Laval in this sad state of affairs,” Vachon said in a Laval press release. “I apologize to my teammates, my coaches and everyone in the Rouge et Or program as well as at Université Laval.”

Since the University of Waterloo’s steroid scandal rocked CIS football last March — where nine players tested positive for steroids and the university subsequently suspended the team for the season — the league, along with the CCES, has vowed to crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs. This has meant more frequent testing and a greater amount of larger-scale tests, such as those conducted with the entire teams at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Calgary as well as the 33 and 25 at Laval. Both the Laurier and Calgary teams tested clean earlier this year.

According to the CCES, since March 31 of last year there have been more than 500 CIS football players tested, with 14 revealing doping infractions.

“In the wake of the magnitude of doping violations we discovered at the University of Waterloo, we need to sustain the level and the type of testing we’ve been doing [over the past year],” said CCES president and CEO Paul Melia. “We need to continue to be able to test intelligently, doing no-notice testing when the athletes least expect it, because we know that’s going to have the greatest deterrent effect and it’s also going to give us the greatest chance of catching any athletes who are doping.”

While every steroid user caught by the CCES has been a deterrent to other athletes, this one at Laval is likely to catch a few more eyes. Although neither Vachon nor Abraham were dressed for the Vanier Cup game, the Rouge et Or are still the CIS champions — which they’ve been three of the past five years — and are undoubtedly the league’s highest profile team.

“Laval is a very highly regarded program and anything that they do, people pay attention to,” said CEO of the CIS, Marg MacGregor. “This is yet another message to student athletes from coast to coast that they can be tested anywhere, at any time.”

When it comes to what’s next in this continuing “war on steroids” in CIS football, according to Melia, while players can still expect to be tested at any time, the CCES is awaiting the results of a study they launched late last summer.

In August of 2010, the CCES and CIS launched an independent task force to investigate the root causes behind steroid use and different ways of preventing doping amongst athletes. Melia said that the report from this task force should be released in about a month.

“Firstly, we’re going to need to continue the level of testing we’ve been doing and that’s going to take a lot of commitment from each institution,” said Melia of the future of drug testing in CIS football.

“Secondly, we’re really going need to ramp up the education targeted at university, college or junior football players ”¦ We’ve got to do more to educate them about the short and long-term health effects because seemingly they’re willing to play Russian roulette with their bodies right now.”

The CIS, meanwhile, is also anxiously awaiting the results of the task force report; however, according to MacGregor, they’ve begun exploring potential alternatives that will be less expensive then testing mass amounts of players.

“Right now, cost is the big problem,” she said. “A code-compliant test is very expensive, so we’ve been looking at different methodologies that will enable us to perform a lower-cost screening process.”

MacGregor continued, saying that while adopting these lower-cost screening procedures is still far from becoming a reality, it would enable the CIS to perform more frequent screening and then pass positive tests on to the code-compliant method.

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image: Wade Thompson/The Cord