Arizona's Alonzo Trier, a college basketball star, tested positive for ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM) with muscle-building and fat burning properties. His explanation--no, I'm not making this up:
it was left over from a previous positive test for the same substance more than a year ago.
This is bizarre, but may have relevance to Froome's case. Trier first tested positive for ostarine at the end of 2016, and at that time he claimed his step-father gave it to him without his knowledge in a drink to help him recover from injuries suffered in an auto accident. Apparently the NCAA bought that, and reduced his suspension to the period of time it took the drug to clear his system. The drug has a half life of about one day, and Trier tested negative for it several times after that initial positive.
So how could he test positive for it again after all this time?
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.
Notice the similarity of the bolded to what Froome's team was reportedly considering: the drug accumulated some place in the body, then was suddenly excreted. Only Trier's claim is even more dubious, because of the far longer period of time involved, and because he's arguing he didn't take any of the drug during the intervening period.
“Some people have different levels of enzymes to process drug molecules and things can linger longer, but even if he has deficiencies in his clearance, it wouldn’t go to zero and then come back,” [pharmacologist David] Ferguson said. “That’s highly unlikely unless there was something really odd going on.”
http://tucson.com/arizona-s-allonzo-trier-practices-as-he-awaits-results-of/article_79afc236-1c3c-11e8-9f21-8faf3671b0be.html
https://sports.yahoo.com/experts-allonzo-triers-explanation-latest-failed-drug-test-highly-unlikely-190802793.html
For college basketball fans, you could say the Wildcats are going through a tough period. Their coach has been caught up in the ongoing NCAA scandal. An FBI wiretap reportedly caught him offering a player $100,000, and that player and Trier are the two leading scorers on the team.