Frankie Sheahan is being punished too harshly for a technical offence

A FEW weeks ago I spoke with a woman who I’ve always regarded as the quintessential rugby mother. Her son played for one of the big Cork clubs, she never misses an international and for the life of her she cannot understand why Ireland doesn’t select 14 Munster players to partner Brian O’Driscoll.

I thought she'd have all guns blazing in defence of Frankie Sheahan, the Munster hooker in trouble over a drug test. To my surprise, she was holding her fire.

"I hope it's not true, but we'll see by the levels in his blood," she said evenly. "And if it is true, he should not play again. Ever."

It was clear that even before the drugs tribunal had found Sheahan guilty, the word was out that his case involved more than forgetting to declare he was an asthmatic. People were hearing rumours that the levels of the medication in his system were very high indeed. Perhaps too high to be explained away by an inhaler.

We now know that Sheahan's urine sample after the European Cup semi-final showed he had 1,644 nanogrammes per millilitre of Salbutamol in his urine. The permitted amount is 1,000ng/ml, and Sheahan was given a two-year ban for being over the limit.

He has had asthma since he was a child. Like most asthmatics, myself included, he uses an inhaler containing the drug Salbutamol. This helps widen constricted airways, but no matter how much you inhale, the airways won't become wider than if you'd never had asthma. You can clear the pipes, but you cannot expand them. In other words, there's no competitive advantage to be got from inhaling Salbutamol. It's not a performance-enhancing drug in its inhaled form, just a performance-enabling one for asthmatics.

Then there is the urine issue. Urine contains a mixture of water and whatever else the kidneys are trying to get rid of. If for whatever reason there isn't water in our systems, our bodies will retain what's there and we will urinate less.

My medical friends tell me this explains the difference between the transparent urine a body produces when drinking pints and the bright yellow water which is excreted the day after. Hung-over bodies are dehydrated, they need water and so their urine contains relatively less water and has become more concentrated.

Sheahan's urine sample gave a reading of 1,644 nanogrammes of Salbutamol per millilitre. But the crucial issue here is that ng/ml is a relative test. It measures levels, not amounts.

If, for instance, he was dehydrated and his body was retaining rather than passing water, there's arguably a chance that the amount of the medication vis-à-vis the amount of urine could be more concentrated. Nobody disputes that Sheahan was dehydrated after the match, an intense European Cup semi-final in the south of France in which he played his socks off. The interaction between medication and dehydration is complicated, of course. But quite possibly Sheahan's dehydration may have been a factor.

The heat and the magnitude of the occasion could also have affected the number of times he reached for his inhaler. Salbutamol takes several hours to go through the system. According to one scientific source, the half-life of the drug is about 3.8 hours after inhalation. Think of an asthmatic on a big, nervous day. A couple of puffs on the inhaler before leaving the team hotel, another before running out onto the pitch, one at half time, a few afterwards when dehydrated and fighting for breath. All that medication building up in his system.

And then the drugs test. The Munster coach says that Sheahan gave the sample immediately after the game. Presumably this was because his team was anxious to pack up and go home. But a man harbouring a guilty secret would surely have professed himself too dehydrated to urinate and sat drinking gallons of water, knowing that as the minutes passed the reading would be falling to safe levels.

Frankie Sheahan faces the problem that people are cynical about athletes who fail drug tests and claim innocence. The asthma story is particularly threadbare. Some 30% of professional cyclists claim the right to use inhalers and in 1994 70%-80% of the athletes at the Winter Olympics said they were asthmatic. Hardly the national average.

However it's not clear why they're going to all this trouble, unless it's to hide the fact that they are injecting Salbutamol a very different proposition to that of harmlessly inhaling it.

THERE'S a bucket full of scientific studies that conclude inhaling Salbutamol does not improve your performance. Declaring yourself an asthmatic and taking Salbutamol became a craze, like green tea or jellied fish or whatever nonsense people will swallow in the paranoid world of top-level human endurance. Like roller-blades and pogo-sticks, the fad is now over at least in mainstream athletics. Only 7% of competitors in the Sydney Olympics declared themselves asthmatic still higher than the reality, but a long way from the 70%-80% of 1994.

Rugby analyst Neil Francis wrote last Sunday that Sheahan's form had improved from the nadir of 2002 when he was hauled off before half-time in a match against England. The player had put on three-quarters of a stone, Francis noted, and become more effective both in loose play and in his lineout throwing. Francis gave him 7/10 for the Toulouse game.

"Now," wrote Francis, "we might have an explanation as to why he made such a significant impact in that game."

That's too much of a judgment, made far too soon. Three-quarters of a stone can be useful but it won't necessarily revolutionise a player's effectiveness. Nor is it a huge weight-change for someone of Sheahan's considerable bulk. Furthermore, no drug could improve Sheahan's lineout throwing, which was the Achilles' heel of his game. And lastly, even if Sheahan did want to cheat, the scientists indicate that inhaling Salbutamol isn't going to make an iota of difference.

Frankie Sheahan is now forced into a position where he has to carefully explain complex issues and as every politician knows, when you're explaining, you're losing. Many so-called asthmatics participating in the Olympics may have been injecting Salbutamol to bulk up, then claiming it had been harmlessly and legitimately inhaled. That's why the level of 1,000ng/ml is now allowed. If you're any higher, the thinking goes, you didn't inhale it. And Sheahan was 1.6 times over the limit.

But it is probable that Sheahan's levels did indeed come from inhalation only and as such would have given him no unfair advantage. His medication levels breach the letter of the law, but only the letter. A two-year ban for a technical offence seems a bum rap.