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Opening arguments held in steroids court case
Opening arguments held in steroids court case, By: Ken Serrano
06/20/07
NEW BRUNSWICK — Guillermo Coria enjoyed a meteoric rise as a tennis player in 2000.
By mid-2001, he was threatening to break into the tennis world's top 20 players, a witness in Superior Court said Tuesday.
But Coria tested positive for steroids that year. And that performance-enhancing drug was linked to tainted vitamins manufactured by a New Brunswick company, Universal Nutrition, according to Coria's attorney, Will Nystrom.
The ATP, the governing body of men's tennis, initially banned him from the sport for two years, later shortening the suspension to seven months.
It cost Coria, now 25, more than $10.5 million in prize money, product endorsements and appearance fees at tournaments, according to the tally of lost income produced by one witness.
"Guillermo was seen as a cheater," Nystrom said.
"He was tracked by the tennis world since age 10," Nystrom told the jury. "He was probably the greatest tennis player you never heard of" because he was suspended for steroids.
But an attorney for Universal told the jury during opening arguments in the trial Tuesday that the tainted vitamins were not produced by his client.
Richard Grossman, an attorney from Brick, said vitamins produced by Universal for an Argentine company did not resemble vitamins in the same lot as the contaminated vitamins when examined by a high-end lab in London.
"When opened, they looked different; one was yellow, the other was brown," Grossman said.
The vitamins that Coria claimed to be his, which he turned over to the lab, were the brown ones and came from an opened container. Universal's were yellow and came from a sealed container. None of the yellow vitamins tested positive for steroids, Grossman said.
Universal did produce pro-hormone supplements, Grossman said. But they were contained in a room separate from the vitamins and the machines handling them were cleaned daily.
Nystrom said cross-contamination at the New Brunswick plant led to the trace amount of steroids getting into the multivitamin.
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