Gal tested positive for the drug finasteride, which is the active ingredient in the hair-loss treatment Propecia and Proscar, a treatment for enlarged prostate gland. Gal was the favourite to win the gold medal for sailing, so the ban would come as a massive blow, not just to him personally but to the whole of Israel’s Olympic Team.
Why, you might ask, is Propecia, a treatment that is intended for the treatment of male pattern baldness, a prohibited drug? Propecia possesses no performance enhancing qualities that could aid an athlete. The answer lies in the fact that finasteride, the active ingredient in Propecia, can make the presence of other drugs, which do enhance an athlete’s performance, impossible to detect. Basically, Propecia may be used to mask illegal drug usage, particularly steroids, and it is for this reason that it has been banned.
If you Google Udi Gal you will see that, for a man who has turned twenty nine only a couple of weeks ago, he has thin hair and signs of male pattern baldness. He has admitted to using Propecia and has strenuously denied any wrongdoing or attempt to mask other illegal drugs. Finasteride has, however, been on the list of banned substances by the World Anti-Doping Agency since 2005. Surely an athlete who competes at Gal’s level would think extremely carefully before putting any medication into his body and would check that it did not contain active ingredients, which might contravene the list, even if it seemed something as ‘harmless’ as Propecia, which is, after all, used by millions of men around the world.
The American skeleton racer Zach Lund was banned from competing in the 2006 Winter Olympics when he tested positive for finasteride during the 2005-2005 Skeleton World Cup. Lund admitted that he was using Propecia and claimed that he had been since1998 as a treatment for his baldness. This was not seen as an acceptable excuse, however, and he was banned for a year.
If you were a potential Olympic athlete would you not pay attention to these kinds of stories? Was Gal so desperate not to lose his hair that he was prepared to forfeit his place at the Olympics? Was his hair loss a good excuse to take a drug, which would conceal steroid use? Was taking Propecia an opt-out clause if he was caught? These are question to which only Gal can know the answer.
Something we can be sure of is the immense media scrutiny under which athletes are placed. Sportsmen and women are often more famous than film stars. After all, whilst Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie have to be dubbed to be understood in some countries, Michael Jordon, David Beckham and Rafael Nadal have no such problem, their appeal lies in their talent as athletes, talent which can cross the boundaries of language and race. The sponsorship deals to be garnered by top sportsmen are the stuff of headlines and the fact that most of these athletes are extremely photogenic is surely no coincidence. Perhaps athletes are hoping that a good head of hair will make them more attractive to sponsors and that is why they have chosen to take Propecia. It has to be remembered that many professional athletes do not have a lot of money, they have to train and therefore don’t have money making capabilities other than grants or sponsorship deals.
Last year the Anti-Doping agency was looking at the whole Propecia issue with an aim to removing it from the list. As the most popular and widely used hair loss medication in the world, surely it seems unreasonable to maintain the ban on it? Over four million men around the world take Propecia. Let’s hope Gal is not another name on the ever growing list of sportsmen banned for taking something which is only intended as a treatment for hair loss. Perhaps the Anti-Doping Agency needs to look at this situation again.
Harvard is a former medical practitioner and a registered user of
The Online Clinic. For more information on Propecia he recommends you to visit
at www.theonlineclinic.co.uk