Time will tell, but right now it would seem that the vitamin B12 explanation isn’t working much better for Roger Clemens than the flaxseed oil defense did for Barry Bonds.
Clemens told Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes interview to be aired this evening that, contrary to allegations, he received injections of vitamin B12 and lidocaine earlier in his career, not steroids and human growth hormones.
Sports writers and sports columnists don’t seem to be taking Clemens at his word, in part because they’ve been down this road before.
“And now the B12 defense makes another appearance,” wrote Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune. “Whatever happened to the dog-ate-my prescription alibi?”
In Clemens’s defense, medical authorities say that vitamin B12, taken orally or injected, can be used to restore energy and that it many speed healing. So certainly it’s possible that an athlete would look to the vitamin for help.
In addition, there seems to be no physical proof Clemens took the now banned substances, just the word of his former trainer, Brian McNamee.
McNamee told former Sen. George J. Mitchell, whose report on the illegal use of performance-enhancing substances came out last month, that he injected Clemens first with steroids and then with human growth hormones n the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Mitchell named Clemens and about 90 other players as using the substances.
In a sense, Clemens is being tried in the court of public opinion, as he faces no legal charges. Unfortunately for him, the vitamin B12 explanation may not have much credibility now because of its past use.
In 2006, Olympic sprinter Justin Gatlin tested positive for excessive testosterone or its precursors. He said that two weeks before the test he received an injection of what he thought was vitamin B12 from a trainer.
Gatlin was banned for competition for eight years. The ban has since been reduced to four years.
In March 2005, baseball’s Rafael Palmeiro testified before Congress that he had never used steroids. In August of the same year, he was suspended for 10 days after testing positive for steroids.
Palmeiro told investigators that some of the injectable vitamin B12 he received from teammate Miguel Tejada might have been tainted, possibly causing the positive test for steroids. His reputation damaged, Palmeiro has not played since the 2005 season.
Bonds, baseball’s all-time home-run leader has not invoked the vitamin B12 defense to counter allegations of steroid use.
Rather, he told a grand jury in 2003 that his trainer told him he was being treated with flaxseed oil and other legal substances, not steroids, for his aches and pains.
“When he (the trainer) said it was flaxseed oil, I just said, ‘Whatever,’” Bonds testified. “It was in the ballpark…in front of everybody. I mean, all the reporters, my teammates. I mean, they all saw it. I didn’t hide it.”
Bonds now faces charges for lying before the grand jury.
After he won the Tour de France in 2006, cyclist Floyd Landis attributed a sudden spike in his testosterone level during the race to a variety of factors, including a possibly faulty test.
Stripped of his title and banned from the sport for until January 2009, Landis continues to proclaim his innocence.
Clemens has been requested to appear before a congressional committee on the issues raised in the Mitchell report. McNamee has also been asked to testify, as has Clemens’s friend and teammate on the New York Yankees, Andy Pettitte.
Pettitte has confirmed that he did received injections of human growth hormone as alleged in the Mitchell report. He said he regrets now that he took the injections, but he had wanted to speed his recovery from an injury and get back to his team.
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