Two days ago, USADA announced that jillion-time US National Cyclocross Champion Katie Compton tested positive for anabolic androgenic steroids. To say this took the US cycling world by surprise is an understatement.
Between top-level results, ready availability for fans and media, and just generally being bad-ass, no other US cyclist comes close to matching the good vibes Compton gathered over her 19-year career.
But for me, all of that went out the window this week. Not necessarily because Compton tested positive, but because she—and especially her husband—did such a terrible job responding to the news.
Response #1: Compton’s Statement
Compton’s statement—visible in full at the bottom here—is a mess. It’s a heartfelt, emotionally-resonant mess, but ultimately doesn’t present a compelling argument or leave the reader with a particularly innocent impression.
Passports, Please
After leading off with a statement about being a clean racer, Compton gives case specifics at the top of the second paragraph.
I provided a sample for USADA in September 2020 that came back negative for any banned substances, it was not even atypical.
Except that it very clearly was atypical, as Compton’s own statement admits later.
In early February of 2021…I learned that the same sample from September was re-analyzed due to a bio-passport irregularity and found to be positive for an exogenous anabolic steroid.
OK, so let’s stop on “bio-passport irregularity”, a phrase that is full-term pregnant. It’d be like saying your DNA didn’t match the crime scene but then there was “this thing with the police” and now you’re being charged with murder.
The bio passport guide is long and dense. But if I’m reading it correctly, this sounds a lot like an Atypical Passport Finding (ATPF), backed-up by Confirmation Procedures [Section 3.3, p.36]. Basically, USADA saw something in Compton’s September sample that looked wrong next to her other tests. They then performed a specific, more expensive test that confirmed a doping positive.
So while I think Compton means to make this seem suspicious, she’s actually describing the correct protocol. She’s even own-goaling a bit by highlighting that there are two separate data points indicating her guilt.
Unreliable Narration
Still, Compton doesn’t question the test result. The next step is generally the athlete trying to show they didn’t intentionally ingest the substance. Compton at first appears to be no different.
I have never intentionally or knowingly put anything like that into my body
But then she starts the next paragraph by abruptly declaring that that she “decided to retire in March”. This feels deeply incongruous—she didn’t announce her retirement in March, after all.
And as Compton very well knows, Denise Betsema got barely a six-month vacay in a very similar case. If Compton could manage to track down the source of her positive for a similar sanction, she’d have been back in competition well ahead of a planned farewell season. So why make the retirement call in March?
In the same breath, Compton also mentions she’d “hired a lawyer” and done her best to “investigate how the substance got into [her] system”. Forgive me for thinking that seems like an awfully expensive and time-consuming thing for a now-retired athlete to do for the sake of pride.
It sounds a lot more like Compton initially decided to fight the charge, and just couldn’t find a reasonable source for the substance in question. Testosterone (as the offending substance seems to be) doesn’t survive oral consumption well, and doesn’t come on taco trucks, making accidental ingestion a tough case.
Dating the retirement decision to March feels like a transparent attempt to take less of an “L”. Maybe Compton wants to avoid “officially” ending her career with a suspension. Maybe it’s her way of saying “you can’t fire me, I quit”. But regardless, it’s someone making a case for her own trustworthiness not being fully honest with her audience.
I’m Not Unsympathetic
And I mean, I get it—this is tough emotionally. Compton’s statement carries the disordered anguish of someone who cannot fully accept their fate. She mentions the end of her career repeatedly, seemingly re-forgetting she’d already announced it each time.
There are similar double-backs on not wanting to compete anymore, and on the supposed inability to explain how the substance got into her body. She even drops an “allegedly” while describing the presence of a substance she’s ostensibly not challenging.
…trying to figure what allegedly got into my body proved to be impossible.
Rather than a lawyer, Compton might have been better served by spokesperson. Or a grief counselor. Or, as 90’s MTB legend Alison Sydor suggests, the efforts of an investigative journalist. “I caught a raw deal, but we’re double-checking the system to protect others” is a much more heartening note to go out on.
Response #2: Mark Legg’s Facebook Post
I can’t tell you how much I wish this had ended with Compton’s statement. It didn’t make a great case, but I feel for her. Then the next day, her husband Mark Legg showed up to yank that sympathy tubular right off the rim.
Hole Shot to Crazy Town
Legg’s response is a Facebook rant of MyPillow level unhinged-ness.
Katie was tested in September 2020 using the last ball bearing bottle aka the Beringer [sic] bottle which was taken out of use due to the Icarus documentary on Russians swapping out urine samples which came back negative. This contrasts what [sic] USADA has stated.
This is, honestly, the least insane thing in the post.
Russian agents at Sochi did indeed overcome the Berlinger bottles’ tamper-proofing to swap samples. Following the success of German researchers in both cracking and completely duplicating newer Berlinger revisions, USADA announced last year it was switching to a different bottle entirely.
Their timeline to complete this changeover was “end of 2020”. So it’s entirely possible Compton got a Berlinger. But this doesn’t “contrast” with anything USADA has stated, and I’m extremely skeptical she got the “last” one.
And while Legg points all this out to raise the possibility of sample tampering, Don Catlin—founder of the LA lab at which Compton’s sample was processed, openly admits he’s not sure how the Russians did it.
Additionally, an investigation into the Sochi sample-swapping, which did duplicate the procedure used by the Russians, revealed it leaves “scratches and marks on the inside of the cap”. So if this is really the place Legg wants to go, we’ve got the technology to follow up. Why not just ask to examine the bottle?
Missing Receipts
In early January I contacted an ant-doping [sic] agency regarding issues in cyclocross. We had a video conference with the agency while we were in Belgium on January 19th.
Which anti-doping agency? What “issues in cyclocross”? How did you contact them? All of these details are critical both for testing whether your story is true, and for potentially bringing you justice in the event that it is. If you want people to not treat you like a raging lunatic, you need to bring receipts.
Hours after the call a lab in LA started re-testing Katie’s Sept sample that had previously been declared negative. The result of the retest was positive for exogenous testosterone. We received news of this test mid-Feb.
Again—receipts. How did you know this happened “hours” after your call with this unnamed agency? If there’s a letter or an email, you should post it.
The implication is clearly that, somehow, an unnamed anti-doping agency contacted the LA lab to secretly concoct a positive test. Most orgs in cycling aren’t exactly known for action at this level of speed, but without mentioning who Legg claims he talked to, no one can follow up.
Can’t Keep The Story Straight
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll also note that Legg’s post contains no mention of the “bio-passport irregularity” mentioned in his wife’s statement. It’s an important inconsistency, since it undercuts his implication of punitive retesting. It also represents a fairly serious change in the story between their two recollections.
And this is important. As I mentioned with Compton’s “retirement” announcement, self-serving revisionism hurts your declaration of honesty. And yesterday afternoon, Legg made a pretty huge revision to his Facebook post, deleting a claim about a “compromised UCI member”.
Granted, no one who knows that particular acronym will find this claim entirely outlandish. I’d love to have heard more, but again—without saying who, or even what role this “compromised UCI member” held, it’s all so much farting into the wind. And the mere fact of this deletion is yet another patch on an increasingly threadbare narrative.
Similar consistency issues come up around Legg’s claims of Compton using “the same supplements all year”. Barely 18 months ago, Compton was claiming she didn’t use any, and if she did, that still wouldn’t be an excuse for a positive test.
And this, in itself, is a pretty sharp contradiction with numerous articles mentioning her supplement use, in addition to some sponcon she churned out back in 2017. For people who keep citing their own honesty, Team Compton sure does seem to have trouble keeping their story straight.
The Simplest Explanation
If you’re willing to work hard enough, there are rebuttals to all this. Compton is only documented taking “unsketchy” supplements like fish oil and amino acids. Legg and Compton were too busy focusing on the legal fight to coordinate facts for a smooth media response. The McLaren Report taught the LA lab how to compromise samples. And on and on.
But at a certain point, the contortions get tiring. Undeniably, the most reasonable explanation for all of the evidence in this case is that Comtpon used testosterone. That doesn’t mean accidental consumption or the Thomas Crown hijinks of UCI whistleblower retaliation aren’t possible. Every so often one does actually fall on a Fusilli Jerry. But it doesn’t happen much.
I do genuinely wish Compton’s team had taken Sydor’s advice and contacted Seppelt. His investigations are crucial and unflinching, and have recently brought up the potential for weaponized testosterone positives. But I also think if Legg’s claims had merit, any half-decent legal counsel would have steered them in that direction.
A Graceful Exit Was Open
The sad part of all this is none of it really matters. Facts, evidence, all that—it’s terrible at changing people’s minds. A testosterone patch livestream still probably wouldn’t sway the stans on Legg’s FB post. Similarly, you don’t have to look hard to find people who always knew any pro cyclist was on drugs.
Plus, Compton’s competitive elite career was effectively over. She’s 42 and failed to record a single Top 10 result in world-level competition last season. It would have been easy to make a statement to the effect of “I’m getting a raw deal, I didn’t do this, but it makes no sense to fight.” Will Frischkorn, who managed a pretty reasonable clean career, basically said that’s how he’d go down after a certified mail scare from the UCI.
And there’d be value in that—a powerful narrative of accepting fallout from the Noble Lie, taking one for the team. Certainly the media was ready. Former CyclingTips and VeloNews editor Neal Rogers said Compton’s statement was “absolutely worth consideration.” Longtime Cyclingnews editor Laura Weislo responded to the news with Seppelt’s work on false positives.
Fans, other athletes, people she’s worked with—all expressed deep emotional conflict at the news. Commentary about what a good person Compton seemed like was everywhere.
A graceful exit isn’t necessarily rolling over. With six months between the positive result and now, Team Compton could have seeded some of this story to the press, and found something to better support their claims, or at least better present them. Some question-mark journalism (“Did USADA’s Bottle Transition Fail Katie Compton?”) in their favor. Emotional, think-piece exit interviews. A sad ending, but one an audience could have made peace with.
I Chose Violence Rage Quit
But they didn’t do that. Even with the gift of half-a-year to craft their contribution to their cycling story’s conclusion, the Comptons decided to go out with a typo-ridden, fuming rage quit. To a story now wreathed in the hazy miasma of doping, they chose to add the fetid stench of conspiracy theory as well.
And for me, that says a lot about this case. All efforts to mete out justice are inevitably flawed, and sometimes those flaws result in unfair outcomes. For someone burned by such an outcome, but who also believes that a system of enforcement is necessary, the instinct would be reform. How do we make this work better so that dopers are caught and clean riders aren’t?
We didn’t get that here. We got excuses, self-serving revisions, and an effort to disparage the legitimacy of the system rather than accept its facts. This isn’t the reaction of someone was punished unfairly; it’s the reaction of someone who’s just pissed off they got caught.
Outside the ratio isotope testing, the most compelling evidence against Team Compton is the testimony they gave themselves.
First thing I thought when I saw the story break was, here is someone who knows what it is like to be super successful and now at the end of their career they are grasping for straws, willing to do anything to get back to that level. Whether she actually doped or not, we may never know but usually when that positive test comes back, it’s certainly not a good sign. Throw in the excuses you pointed out and it doesn’t paint a good picture.
A fair and considered analysis. Unfortunately I suspect the dramatis personae in this saga will continue to shout at the moon and enough people will accept their flawed re-telling of events to give them the comfort and reassurance of being believed that they need.
What @soigneurs said: we’ve been around long enough not to take bike racers who have been caught with drugs in their bodies at their word.
Only Depression and Acceptance to go. They’re almost through the five stages of grief.
Bravo. Doing the work the fanboy media did not.
Minor point in the grand scheme of things: KFC said “…I don’t take supplements that would be tainted.” She’s saying that she only takes clean supplements or supplements that “couldn’t” be tainted like fish oil. She’s owning that she uses supplements.
And while I understand your arguments in general , I can’t help but think these ideas from KFC and Legg are statements developed by bike racers, not lawyers, PR people or strategists. Regardless of her guilt, being a privateer with no real team support is hard especially when the wheels come off the bus.
Again, regardless of her innocence or guilt, this is a sad development for cycling, cross and the fans that looked up to her.
It is cycling, why are we surprised? I am glad that USADA is still on the job, sad that another superstar bites the dust. At 42, what was she thinking? Going on like Diane Feinstein?
Thank you. An interesting perspective. I enjoyed reading. DB.
It’s a more believable conspiracy theory that mark has been hitting the vitamin T and KFC inadvertently got some, or he slipped it to her without her knowledge. Both are crazy theories without facts, but ring truer after this that ‘crazy oligarch did me wrong after I discovered evil scheme’.
I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “Low T” treatments of questionable medical necessity in masters-age men are far and away the most frequent doping positives at my own middling level of racing. And as Seppelt’s reporting has shown, it’s entirely possible physical contact with recently-applied testosterone gel could trigger a positive in someone else.
But unlike Mark, I don’t make wild allegations with zero evidence to support them. And honestly, if there were any chance Mark had accidentally contaminated Katie, they would have been crazy not to make that the story. So I’m going to say that theory is extremely unlikely.
Can you now see in yourself that good people often get suckered into these con jobs by the con artists? They create amazing scenarios that good-hearted people spend hours trying to prove (or lend credibility to). Why? Because good-hearted people always look for the good. They’re cheerleaders. We all love a good champion that wins 15-straight (or seven). Legg has planted the story for good people to run with. But he’s so lazy that he won’t even fill-in the blanks for you. It causes YOU to do all of the legwork. He’s getting maximum benefit for the least amount of actual investment. We’ve all been “Yada Yada Yada’d.”
Good read. The only obvious error in your analysis is that her tweet you quote doesn’t support your allegation she says doesn’t take supplements, she clearly writes she doesn’t take supplements that could be tainted meaning supplements are used. You then even quote another tweet from her about using supplements too.
Thanks for this well done editorial. Great writing and interesting perspective, I’m so disappointed once again. One of these days I may have the courage to turn my back on bicycle racing but for now I’ll keep watching the train wreck.
If you look at Legg’s FB page, you can see they’re relying heavily on the knowledge that they have made a lot of friends in the racing world, and they can count on the large majority OF their friends to buy whatever story they’re selling. They’ve erected enough weak-legged stilts to prop-up their immediate needed friendships for the time being.
I actually responded to Legg’s FB post by asking some of the same questions that their friends would never dare ask. What anti-doping agency? What compromised UCI member? Etc. And the reason I asked them is that (if true) these wrongs need to be immediately corrected. But no, no, no. They’re emotionally and spiritually exhausted. They have no fight left in them. So exhausted that they summoned the strength to erect those lame-ass stilts underneath the house. And so exhausted that they had the strength to let everyone: know that she is innocent. To not buy their story is to challenge the friendship and contest their integrity.
It’s actually a really rotten thing to do to your friends and family.
Well written, yet I wish you would have also focused on the CIR test and T/E test, why they went back and retested. Fascinating read by Velo News and how Tom Danielson got caught helped me understand a few details.
Athletes can and do test positive for steroids after eating animals that have been treated with exogenous hormones. There have been peer reviewed studies done on this.
ex:
“50% of the samples collected 24 h after consumption of the intramuscularly dosed chickens were confirmed positive. Hence, eating meat containing small amounts of injected hormone may constitute a serious liability to the athlete.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7955383/
But Compton’s positive, by her and her husband’s own admission, was for exogenous testosterone—the study you’ve cited used methenolone. In addition to not being in Compton’s sample, methenolone also has an elimination half-life of 10.5 days, compared testosterone’s 5-7 hours.
If you can show me a study on this where various hormonal treatments caused *testosterone* contamination in meat, that would indeed be interesting. Also FWIW, the US has banned the use of hormones in US poultry since 1960, so chickens aren’t a particularly useful study subject.
In US agriculture, it is recombinant bovine growth hormone that is administered (intra-muscular injections) in beef production and a similar type of hormone (bovine somatotropin) that is used in milk production. These are synthetic versions of naturally occurring hormones. Poultry is not injected with hormones and neither is pork because the alternative method of increasing animal muscle mass and reducing boar taint is to castrate the piglets at a young age. The only animal that is really injected with growth hormone on a wide scale basis in the US are beef and dairy cattle. And those are not testosterone injections they receive. Other injections given in other countries might include clenbuterol which can show up in an athlete’s testing sample, as was the case with Alberto Contador. It is a substance that can increase lean muscle mass. There are substances used in other countries to increase animal muscle mass, but that meat generally does not enter the US food system because of import restrictions on unprocessed meat. You’d have to buy it as canned SPAM or other products, and even then it is not certain that synthetic hormones would be present.
Compton’s response is simply not compelling. She offers no scientific reasoning, and I believe it is because she is unable to find any science or endocrinologist’s opinion that would support her no doping claim. Testosterone is very hard to inadvertently ingest and have it show up in a biological passport or urine analysis, because it must be injected IM. If it is not, the acids in the stomach and digestive tract destroy it.
The most telling part of the whole article is her biotest supplemental pix. Look I’m in medicine. I can tell you right now unless the crap you’re taking is third part independently tested you are taking stuff that could have any random thing in it. Their website offers no verification of any testing. No cGMP NSF or TGA certs for sure. If you are a pro athlete ingesting anything not tested is a big mistake and dangerous for your health. I’ve seen peeps need kidney and liver transplants from supplements.
The responses are from Legg and Katie are becoming a bit ‘Lancian” Ne pas?
Why would youblame mark legg for anything related to katie’s actions or inactions? I’ve no doubt that family members of athletes who are banned for testing positive for steroids routinely make all sorts of statements. For good reason those statements are normally simply disregarded, unreported or ignored. For one, there is the issue of how one person can ever know for certain the actions or motivations of someone else. Another more important reason is relevancy. I would be surprised if anyone credited mark for katie’s race wins. So why should mark be subjected to media scrutiny that properly belongs to the athlete? She won the races. She tested positive. It is here career and actions in question not those of the family.