Juan Dixon’s Spanish Steroid Suspension Grips Wife, A Few Maryland Fans

Juan Dixon’s name should ring out on all corners, in Baltimore and elsewhere, as the definition of a great college player who simply could not catch on in the NBA. Rail-thin, he was ill-equipped to slash and score, and his shot, so pretty at Maryland, was not quite as good in the Association; he never shot better than 38.2 per cent from three. So when he got cut by the Hawks last fall, anyone who noticed probably concluded it was the last that Americans would hear of Juan Dixon. Not so fast, mi amigo.

Dixon was suspended from his Spanish team, Unicaja Malaga, for testing positive for Nandrolone. Predictably, his wife is not too happy about that turn.

⇥⇥[Dixon] “took an over-the-counter supplement and had no idea it had any type of steroid in it. It’s not like he was injecting steroids,” Robyn Dixon, his wife, said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. Juan Dixon has remained in the Spanish city of Malaga and could not immediately be reached for comment.⇥⇥⇥⇥“Playing seven years in the NBA and not having this issue, you don’t think there’s a problem with any of this stuff that’s sold over the counter,” she said.⇥⇥

⇥⇥⇥⇥⇥... Robyn Dixon said she has been researching the cases of other athletes who have tested positive for Nandrolone. She e-mailed an article that she said was “pertinent” from active.com, a sports Web site, headlined “Knowing your supplements can help you avoid a positive nandrolone test.”⇥⇥

So I suppose it’s good that Dixon’s wife is working as a one-woman PR firm for him. She’s unintentionally doing some PR work for the House of Representatives, too, if she clears his name: in 2005, Dixon spoke before a House committee about his clean living, saying he and other NBA players succeeded “through hard work and dedication to our dreams, not through the use of steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs.”

That statement, Dixon’s if-this-guy-is-using-steroids-he-may-be-doing-it-wrong frame, and the very plausible scenario that something in an over-the-counter supplement in a foreign country might have a banned substance all conspire to suggest to me that Dixon is innocent. His urine will be re-tested next Monday, and we’ll know for sure.

But the mere fact that I’m writing this post makes a couple of things clear: one, pretty much any athlete failing a steroids test still makes news, and two, athletes should probably never take anything over-the-counter beyond an aspirin.

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