A bitter pill to swallow

It is a bitter pill for Dane Boswell to swallow: prescribed antibiotics effectively ended his elite rowing career.

It was not an outcome Boswell ever imagined when the crisp, white letter from Drug Free Sport NZ turned up in late 2008 notifying him of a failed drug test.

He was initially a bit confused, but once the former New Zealand rower realised the source of the banned substance in his system, he figured it would be sorted out quickly and painlessly.

An out-of-competition drug test had revealed traces of probenecid in Boswell’s system. Probenecid is a common antibiotic, but is among the 300-odd banned substances or methods on the World AntiDoping Agency’s prohibited list as it can also be used as a masking agent.

Boswell had a perfectly clear reason for taking the drug – a doctor had prescribed him the medication to treat an infected hand.

Boswell, who won bronze with the men’s coxed four at the 2006 world championships, had been taking part in a trial for the Rowing NZ summer squad. It’s a gutbusting trial process, and over the course of the week he’d racked up more than 100km on Lake Karapiro.

By the end of the week, his hands were a mess.

‘‘Basically I had a blister that had gone septic, but it was underneath a callus. My whole arm had swelled up and I couldn’t hold an oar or anything,’’ says Boswell.

He informed the Rowing NZ selectors of his injury and went to see the team doctor in Hamilton, but could not get in before office hours closed. So he took himself off to a nearby A&E clinic, where he was put on intravenous antibiotics and sent away with probenecid tablets.

‘‘I thought it would be cleared up really quickly considering there were medical records that went alongside it. It was physically very obvious that I was carrying a nasty infection in my hand, so I thought it would be a straightforward case.’’

The Sports Tribunal agreed Boswell had obvious medical grounds to take the drug and the breach was inadvertent. Regardless, he was banned for two months.

Boswell is one of 13 athletes to be suspended from sport in the past decade for taking a prohibited substance that had been prescribed by a medical professional. Two other athletes were banned in almost identical circumstances, where probenecid had been prescribed to treat a severe infection.

In all these cases, it was a failure to follow a strict set of procedures that led to the bans.

Sportspeople who are subject to drug testing can apply for a therapeutic use exemption (TUE) if they have a genuine medical need to take a prohibited substance.

In cases like Boswell’s where urgent treatment is required, an athlete can request a retroactive TUE. But he would had to have known first that what he was taking was on WADA’s prohibited list.

Even though he says he told staff at the clinic he was a carded athlete and was subject to drug testing, the anti-doping rules place strict liability on the athlete.

DFSNZ’s position is that the athlete is ultimately responsible for what is in their system. They argued Boswell should have taken his own steps to ensure what he had been prescribed was not on the prohibited list.

‘‘When you’re in a position where you’re in pain, you just want to get it sorted so that you can continue with your trial, but also get it fixed before it gets way out of control,’’ Boswell explains.

‘‘You kind of put your faith in the doctors that everything would be above board and sorted.’’

Boswell does not think it is reasonable to place the responsibility for procedural failures squarely on the shoulders of the athlete.

‘‘Our job was to sit in a boat and haul on an oar – it’s not to be a chemist,’’ he says.

‘‘There was no real support [from Rowing NZ] around that particular side of it. I notified the selectors at the trial that I was going for medical treatment for my hand and at that point they perhaps could have sent someone along who was up to play with that sort of thing.’’

If Rowing NZ let Boswell down in failing to make the appropriate checks on his injury and treatment plan, they abandoned him completely in the wake of his suspension.

Boswell, whose late father Darien won silver for New Zealand at the 1962 Empire Games, believes the incident placed a black mark against his name.

‘‘It pretty much pumped the brakes on my career. I think Rowing NZ tried to steer pretty clear of me after that,’’ he says.

‘‘The ban kind of worked in so I missed nationals and then trials, so that took me out of action for that whole year. Then the following year I came back and was progressing pretty well. I was fit and we were winning a few races during the summer and then it all came undone from there. I wasn’t given the opportunity to even trial.

‘‘There was automatic trials that were dished out if you hit certain erg times or you won certain races at nationals. I beat the erg time and I won one of the races and I was not named on that list, so that was kind of surprising.’’

Boswell, who now works as a financial planner in Nelson, says he still finds it hard to come to terms with the premature end to his career.

‘‘I understand why there needs to be a robust system. You do want to put yourself against people on a level playing field, and you want a system that is going to ensure that the sport is clean,’’ he says.

‘‘But it would also be nice to think that if you’re innocent, you’ll be OK. It’s astounding the way that things unfold pretty quickly, even if you make a genuine mistake and quite clearly have no intention of cheating. It’s a pretty horrible thing to go through.’’

‘‘Our job was to sit in a boat and haul on an oar – it’s not to be a chemist.’’ Dane Boswell