Dick Pound - Anti Doping Agency

It has been confirmed that Canadian athletes who tested positive for a new designer steroid were bodybuilders, and not Olympic athletes.

The Edmonton Journal reported in its Friday edition that a half-dozen urine samples sent to a lab in Pointe Claire, Que., outside Montreal, yielded a positive result for a performance-enhancing substance.

While the nature of the competition was not revealed in the report, the director of the lab has confirmed the results came from participants in an international bodybuilding event in western Canada.

Dr. Christiane Ayotte, director of the lab that is accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said the substance discovered has yet to be fully identified. The samples are numbered and not named.

"This was not a secret," she said. "I told people I found a steroid more than a year ago and that we are working on it."

WADA president Dick Pound said anti-doping officials have identified other designer steroids that are able to be tested, but have decided not to go public with them so as to prevent would-be cheaters from switching to other concoctions.

Ayotte admitted to the newspaper that the new steroid she discovered is probably already out of circulation as the cat-and-mouse game continues.

"I know that Dick Pound hoped that we'd find the structure in time to catch people in Turin, but I don't think that will be the case," she said. "We're not there yet."

Ayotte said she wasn't looking for the specific steroid she found, but an odd peak showed up in a profile during analysis of urine samples with a gas spectrometer.

She said she will soon be able to announce the chemical composition of the new designer steroid and confirm the positive tests.