Smoothie chain that bought Pelicans naming rights tests positive for steroids, no really

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t even know what to say about this, except that it’s incredibly not a joke:

Before New Orleans Arena naming rights deal, Smoothie King had to pass a banned substance test

To save you the trouble of scrolling through and boggling, as I did, here’s the key section:

Smoothie King CEO Wan Kim, who purchased the company from founder Steve Kuhnau in July 2012, said the NBA wanted to make sure its athletes could eat and drink Smoothie King products and still pass the association’s mandatory drug tests.

“Say we become the official smoothie of the NBA,” Kim said. “If a player consumes one of our products and then fails the drug test, he could go to the NBA and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ All of a sudden it’s the NBA’s fault.”

That sort of makes sense, I guess, but what the hell kind of smoothie contains banned substances? None, it turns out, but Smoothie King does sell certain “nutritional substances” that turn out to contain two steroids: dehydroepiandrosterone and androstenedione. The company says it will now stop selling them.

NOLA.com presents all this as a sort of amusing sidelight to the Pelicans‘ already-plenty-amusing naming-rights deal, but really the big news should be you can fail a drug test by consuming stuff you buy at the local smoothie outlet. This is something we all might want to consider before decrying as evil any athlete who now uses or has ever used (or is rumored to have used) banned substances. Except for A-Rod, anyway, because you just have to hate that guy, right?

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2 comments on “Smoothie chain that bought Pelicans naming rights tests positive for steroids, no really”

  1. Oh please. The days of athletes getting by on beer & hot dogs is long gone. They’re all a bunch of gym rats aided by the science lab. They will use anything to get an edge & guys like A-Rod & Ryan Braun proved they will throw anyone under the bus to save their own hides. The human body isn’t designed to play sports at the level of today. You have to view athletes with a skeptical eye. The old adage: if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

  2. A popular smoothie being spiked with the gas has to be the least surprising news of the day.

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