Something smelled in the pig barn.
Officials of the Illinois State Fair were pretty sure they had a case of cheating on their hands. Several of the champion pigs in this summer’s livestock competition had traces of an illegal steroid-like drug in their bloodstreams-or at least that’s what preliminary testing by agriculture analysts indicated.
But as it turned out, it was the tests that were foul, not the pigs’ young owners who were wrongly suspected in last week’s debacle. Agriculture officials describe the preliminary urine tests as akin to home pregnancy tests and said they are just about as reliable.
The biggest shock after officials announced Wednesday that they were investigating the possibility of drug use had been that the teenagers under suspicion spend the typical summer evening shampooing pigs and taking them for walks.
The news Friday that all competition animals were clean still left champion pig raisers and scores of other farm youth feeling a little wounded.
“I didn’t agree with the way they put it in the paper,” said Josh Ifft, 12, of Fairbury, whose 247-pound crossbreed pig, Clubber, was the overall swine grand champion.
“They made it sound like all the overall champions had used it,” Josh said. “I didn’t think that. After the first test, they shouldn’t have talked about it like that.”
Josh’s father called their local paper to complain, as did other parents and 4-H advisers.
“It makes us look bad,” said Kristy Armstrong, 17, of Downstate Rushville, whose pigs won several ribbons at this year’s fair. “Especially the people who aren’t in competition, who are just reading it in the newspaper. They just look down on the people who are doing it.”
But state fair officials said they did the right thing by raising red flags about all 42 pigs, two cows and two sheep in question and keeping the animals on the fair grounds after they were sold.
As part of new safeguards against the cheating and drug use that have taken place at state fairs in Ohio and elsewhere, Illinois officials this year required a urine specimen of every animal that was entered into competition. The samples of all 42 hogs that went on to win championships were tested, along with those of the grand champion steer and the grand champion sheep.
That’s how state fair officials got the idea there had been cheating. Five pigs tested positive for clenbuterol, a muscle-building, steroid-like drug, and the test results for 10 others were inconclusive.
The controversial call came when Becky Doyle, state fair agriculture director, decided to keep all animals on the grounds until after more tests could be run. She called a news conference to report the early findings, and news of the possible cheating shocked contestants, their families and agriculture leaders.
“We knew the department could end up looking foolish,” Doyle said after final results invalidated the earlier test results. “But we were much less concerned about that than about finding out some of our kids had tampered with an animal or had their animals tampered with.”
The biggest concern, officials said, was that tainted meat might end up in the food chain. Clenbuterol is illegal in the U.S., and its use is strictly forbidden for any veterinary uses by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Although clenbuterol’s health effects are not fully known, studies have shown that people who ate meat with traces of the drug became sick.
But the results of the animals’ urine tests were flat wrong, researchers said. The urine tests are meant only to indicate a possibility that drugs are present, so that more extensive tests can be taken, they said.
A polypeptide produced by the animals’ bodies may have triggered the first results, a pork industry source said.
Doyle said she misunderstood the dependability of the tests when she told contestants and reporters that the preliminary tests almost surely indicated some use of illegal drugs.
Now, with an exhaustive battery of tests complete and all the animals pronounced safe, the animals have been taken from the fairgrounds for butchering.
And now that the fracas is winding down, farmers and some contestants say they’re actually glad that state officials made such a big deal out of the whole thing.
“The thing is, we don’t want animals going into the food chain if drugs have been used on them,” said Roger Brown, president of the Illinois Pork Producers Association. “If there are even rumors out there, that can be very damaging.”
It was the pork producers who had asked for the more extensive tests, and the group provided money earlier this year to help pay for testing of all winning swine. The group also had urged Doyle and the Department of Agriculture to err on the side of caution after the early test results came in.
For her part, Armstrong said she believes that the drug scare at least shows that state fair officials take the possibility of cheating seriously.
“I wouldn’t want them to just go along with it,” she said.
