THE BALCO CASE
Cyclist appeared to be shaving face, drug tester tells jury
Former cycling champion Tammy Thomas seemed to be in the midst of shaving her face when an Olympic drug tester paid her an unannounced visit in 2002, according to testimony Wednesday in her trial on perjury charges.
Tom McVay, a tester for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told a jury in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that on March 14, 2002, he was assigned to locate Thomas at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, east of San Diego, and collect a urine sample for a steroid test.
The visit was memorable, McVay said, because of Thomas' appearance when she answered his knock on her apartment door.
"It appeared to be like shaving cream on the left side of her face around her ear," he said.
Thomas is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying when she told the grand jury that investigated the BALCO steroids scandal that she had never used banned drugs.
Her lawyer, Ethan Balogh, has argued that her testimony was technically true in part because the designer steroids she obtained weren't illegal at the time.
Prosecutors have called Thomas a "hard-core" steroid user who underwent a physical transformation while using banned drugs. On Monday, a Colorado endocrinologist who examined Thomas in 2000 said the cyclist's use of the steroid depo-testosterone had caused "severe virilization."
Thomas had a deep voice, full beard, chest hair and even signs of male pattern baldness, Dr. Margaret Weirman testified. In court Wednesday, McVay said he barely recognized Thomas as the woman whose drug test he had supervised six years ago. Today, she is a slender woman with long black hair.
The woman he remembered was "a lot larger, about 50 pounds heavier," McVay testified.
Earlier Wednesday, Kelcey Dalton, a former girlfriend of confessed steroid chemist Patrick Arnold, testified that the founder of Burlingame's Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative had once confided to her that he was supplying banned drugs to former Giants star Barry Bonds.
Dalton said that until they broke up in 2002, she sometimes helped Arnold distribute the steroids he created in his Illinois laboratory to customers including Thomas. She said she also traveled with him to body-building events.
Once, Dalton said, while at the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas for the Mr. Olympia contest, she met BALCO founder Victor Conte. Conte paid Arnold for some drugs, she said, and began to talk.
"Victor Conte indicated he had distributed banned drugs to Barry Bonds," Dalton testified. Conte also named former American track stars Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery as his drug customers, she said.
In testimony Tuesday, Arnold also quoted Conte as saying he had provided banned drugs to Jones, Montgomery and other stars. But in his testimony, Arnold didn't mention Bonds.
Like Thomas, Bonds has been indicted on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, accused of lying when he denied steroid use to the BALCO grand jury. Bonds' trial may get under way this year.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/26/BAP4VR1RP.DTL
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