By the time Chris Benoit strangled his wife, suffocated his son and hanged himself last month in their home, he had been tested for drugs four times as part of World Wrestling Entertainment’s “talent wellness” program.
His last urine test, administered April 10 at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I., was negative for steroids and other drugs, but the W.W.E. would not disclose the results of the previous three tests.
After Benoit’s death, steroids were found by authorities in his home in Fayetteville, Ga., and court affidavits showed that his physician, Dr. Phil Astin, had prescribed Benoit a 10-month supply of anabolic steroids every three to four weeks from May 2006 to May 2007. Astin has since been indicted for improperly prescribing drugs to patients other than Benoit.
Whether Benoit’s final acts were related to steroids will not be known until the results of toxicology tests are announced, which is expected to happen today. But even as the W.W.E. trumpets its drug-testing plan as a credible deterrent to the abuse of banned drugs, questions persist about whether it is stringent enough to shield the organization from being hurt by the deaths of the Benoit family.
Some of those questions are emanating from the W.W.E.’s board of directors. One of the board members, Bob Bowman, is pushing the company to have an outside party re-examine the plan’s effectiveness.
“People feel something is amiss here — that’s within their right,” said Bowman, who is the chief executive of Major League Baseball Advanced Media. “Is it the right plan? Are no corners being cut? Is there no winking going on? Those questions need to be asked and reasked.”
Bowman wondered if the thresholds for a positive steroid test should be lowered.
“Dr. Black says the thresholds are comparable to other leagues, but I don’t know if they are,” he said, referring to David Black, the president of Aegis Sciences, a laboratory in Nashville that runs the program. “I want to know if the program is appropriate to the issues that confront us now.”
The board is updated regularly about the drug program, and has in recent weeks discussed the Benoit case by telephone. David Kenin, a board member and executive vice president of the Hallmark Channel, said: “There’s never a sense that it is good enough. We’re always looking for improvements.”
The image of the W.W.E. is largely that of well-built men of cartoonish and astonishing proportions, meeting in matches that serve as wildly popular soap operas starring human action figures.
Despite speculation that athletes whose physiques are so outside the norm of the American male must be chemically enhanced, the W.W.E. has grown into a $400-million, 52-a-week scripted, grappling circus, with Vince McMahon as its chairman. One of his television programs, USA’s “Raw” on Monday nights, is perennially one of cable’s top series, and another, “Friday Night Smackdown,” is the CW network’s biggest show. The ratings of both shows have been unaffected by the Benoit murders and suicide.
John Cena, the W.W.E. champion, said he was not surprised by what people think of wrestlers.
“If you’re obese, large or small, it’s human nature to judge,” said Cena, who said that he had passed seven drug tests and that he would submit to 100 a year to prove that he was drug-free. “When the subject is muscularity, the topic of steroids is always going to be thought of.”
Steroid use has been a regular subject in professional wrestling. Stars of the past like Hulk Hogan and Big John Studd, who died of cancer at 46, have testified in court that they used steroids.
The muscular McMahon, who plays an outrageous version of himself on his programs, was acquitted in 1994 of charges that he conspired to distribute steroids.
In November 2005, Eddie Guerrero, then only 38 and one of the W.W.E.’s biggest stars, was found dead in a hotel room in Minneapolis after he failed to respond to a wake-up call before an event. An autopsy showed heart disease to which steroids and pain medication might have contributed.
Three months after Guerrero’s death, the W.W.E.’s drug plan went into effect, with random tests of the organization’s 180 athletes at least four times a year.
“The intention is not to punish, but to get them to engage in a different lifestyle,” Black said during one of two telephone interviews.
Unlike the drug programs in sports leagues, the W.W.E.’s is also not intended to level the competitive advantages provided by steroids, human growth hormone or EPO.
“We’re not talking about fairness of competition testing, as in Olympic sports,” Black said, and added, “They’re not looking for performance enhancement in their routines in the ring. They know what the routine is.”
Tests are conducted mainly before events and lack the surprise element of unannounced tests given out of competition, wherever the wrestlers might be. Gary Davis, a W.W.E. spokesman, said that some samples had been collected away from shows. Still, David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said, “You need to be able to test at any time,” because some banned drugs become undetectable days after being used.
The initial testing was, like Major League Baseball’s first tests, only to create a baseline to show how many wrestlers were abusing drugs, including steroids.
“We had a good number of positives,” said Black, who did not give the specific number of wrestlers who tested positive. “A fair number were sent warning letters. The drugs included steroids and a fair number of others.”
Subsequently, Black said, the testing has yielded eight positives for steroids, including “several” wrestlers who tested positive a second time. He did not name them.
A first positive test leads to a 30-day suspension and a second positive leads to a 60-day suspension. A third positive yields a termination.
So far, no wrestler has tested positive a third time, Black said.
One element of the W.W.E.’s drug plan allows a wrestler who has damaged his endocrine system by abusing steroids to receive a therapeutic exemption to use steroids for testosterone-replacement therapy.
“They’ve damaged their ability to make testosterone, so we have to allow the therapy,” Black said. “It’s common medical practice. We’re dealing with a population of individuals who have harmed their endocrine systems. Is the point of the program to punish them or deny them a livelihood?”
Several wrestlers currently have such exemptions, he said. It is in Black’s discretion to allow testosterone therapy. The system differs from that of the many sports federations that have adopted the WADA code, which requires athletes to present their case for a banned drug to a medical board that will rule on its use. An exemption to use steroids, Howman said, “would be very rare for us.”
Dr. Gary Wadler, an expert on performance-enhancing drugs and a WADA consultant, said, “A therapeutic-use exemption is something you ask for before the fact, not after the fact.” To him, the W.W.E. is saying, “His testosterone is low because he took stanozolol, so let him take stanozolol.”
Wadler and Howman said the W.W.E.’s threshold for steroid testing should be tightened. The policy says that if a wrestler’s testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio is between 4 to 1 and 10 to 1, follow-up testing is required. WADA declares a positive test when the ratio is 4 to 1.
The W.W.E. policy says anything beyond 10 to 1 is conclusively positive. “You need a greater degree of specificity to hold someone accountable,” Wadler said.
Black said anyone testing over 4 to 1 in the W.W.E. has more than the average amount of testosterone naturally or has a replacement-therapy prescription, which Black is aware of.
