Allonzo Trier is practicing this week but won’t play for Arizona against Stanford on Thursday unless he wins a potentially difficult appeal with the NCAA.
Trier was suspended last week after testing positive for Ostarine, the same PED that resulted in his 19-game suspension last season.
Trier’s attorney, Steve Thompson, said Trier didn’t take any more since he inadvertently ingested some before a positive test in 2016. But that may be a difficult thing to prove to the NCAA, since several pharmaceutical experts say Ostarine has a half-life of only one day, meaning half of whatever is left should keep disappearing every day.
James Dalton, dean of the University of Michigan’s College of Pharmacy and the inventor of a patent for Ostarine, said the drug usually disappears from the system in “about a week.”
Dalton said that led him to suspect that either Trier is still using Ostarine, that there is a problem in the NCAA’s testing, or that the drug somehow lodged in a tissue or cyst and was released before Trier tested positive last month during a random drug test — a theory the UA will likely use in its appeal.
Alan Wu, a professor at the UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine and chief of chemistry and toxicology labs at San Francisco General Hospital, said it was highly unlikely that Ostarine would be detected in blood or urine for over a year “without recent exposure.”
However, Wu said it would be difficult to rule it out entirely without data to review, and neither the UA nor the NCAA have released the results of Trier’s tests.
David Ferguson, professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Minnesota, said the fact that Trier tested negative in January 2017, ending his first suspension, and tested positive again in January 2018 makes it even harder to prove.
“It would be quite difficult for that consistent passive diffusion to just stop magically for a month, or two months, or a day — and then start again,” Ferguson said. “I’m a professor. ... We wouldn’t teach it that way. I can’t say positively because we don’t know the numbers, but it’s going to be tough for any of the scientists” to determine.
Thompson told Yahoo Sports that experts say Ostarine can be stored in fatty tissues “for a long time,” and the UA has been in the process of appealing Trier’s case. The NCAA’s drug testing policy says an appeal will be heard within 48 hours of a request if competition is imminent, though Thompson declined to say Tuesday when an appeal was or will be filed.
“Allonzo Trier is not a drug cheat and never has been,” Thompson told the Star last week. “The NCAA has found that to be true in the past, and the idea that the reappearance of this drug in his system is somehow creating a competitive advantage and requiring him to be suspended is absurd.”
