Honest, the steroid monster bit me

Someday soon, you, too, could test positive for a performance-enhancing drug. You scoff at the notion? Don’t be so sure.

Look at all the things that can cause positive drug tests these days. A massage. A night of drinking beer and Jack Daniel’s after riding your bicycle. Popping flaxseed oil under your tongue, immediately followed by running to the mirror to watch your muscles magically expand like Popeye’s. Eating bad vitamins. Sitting on a syringe. Using spiked toothpaste.

If it could happen to world-class athletes the likes of Justin Gatlin, Floyd Landis, Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro and Dieter Baumann, it definitely could happen to you.

Over the past few years, it has become clear that we have entered “The Dog Ate My Homework” phase of the sports world’s Steroid Era. Have you noticed how the excuses have become more entertaining than some of the athletes’ performances?

Illegal steroids have been around since the late, great, overjuiced East Germany was a mere pup, and, for the longest time, it seemed athletes who got caught tried two simple approaches.

They either claimed ignorance (“I have no idea how that horse steroid found its way into my body”) or cried the universal word used by most cheaters when caught: “Sabotage!” A despised rival did it, spiking the water bottle, or, in the case of German distance runner Baumann, his toothpaste.

This requires some explanation. Baumann, the 1992 Olympic 5,000-meter champion, tested positive twice for the steroid nandrolone in the fall of 1999. He appealed, saying he was the victim of a plot when traces of the drug were found in the toothpaste he supposedly used.

You’ll be relieved to know the authorities didn’t buy the “Pepsodent Plot” defense and kicked Baumann and his clean teeth out of track and field for two years.

If Gatlin and Landis know about the fate of Baumann, they’re not letting on. On the contrary, they are giving us a fine lesson in the value of naivete – theirs, and ours.

Landis, the Tour de France winner, originally said his night of drinking must have led to the elevated testosterone levels in the A sample of the urine test he took after his scintillating Stage 17 last month. Then he came up with another idea. It was his body: It naturally produced elevated levels of testosterone. Why only one of his minimum of six tests during the Tour showed this “natural” high, he didn’t say.

Fans, observers, the public at large – they all so want to believe our heroes are not cheating that they’ll believe almost anything. Give them a story and they’ll buy it. Better that than the awful truth that the athlete we once cheered just might turn out to be the next Ben Johnson.

At least that’s what Gatlin’s coach thinks. Trevor Graham, the coach of the 2004 Olympic 100-meter champ and co-world record-holder, attributed Gatlin’s high levels of testosterone to a massage. He said the trainer giving Gatlin the massage used a testosterone cream, and that’s how his guy tested positive.

We’ll know it’s true if this starts happening: Person goes in for a massage looking like a 98-pound weakling, comes out looking like Charles Atlas.

How preposterous is this? Even Gatlin and his lawyer have said they don’t buy his coach’s defense.

But it’s not just Landis and Gatlin’s coach. It was Palmeiro saying he must have taken his steroid by accident. Maybe someone got to his One-A-Days. Perhaps a prankster set a needle full of stanozolol on his locker room chair and he happened to sit down on top of it. Anything is possible, these athletes will tell you.

Batting cleanup on our All-Excuse team, we have Bonds and his power-packed creams and oils. Bonds’ lack of curiosity about why his body was changing so completely is exceeded only by the gullibility of those relatively few remaining Bonds fans who really must have been born yesterday.

For the rest of us, it’s been possible to learn a thing or two since testing for performance-enhancing drugs began in earnest at the 1972 Olympic Games. Amid the excuses and stories over the past 34 years, we actually have been able to figure out the No. 1 reason people test positive for a performance-enhancing drug.

Because they took it.