Goodell, Union to Meet with Congress on H.G.H. Testing

Representatives of the N.F.L., including Commissioner Roger Goodell, and the players union will meet with members of Congress Friday in Washington to discuss the holdup in implementing a blood testing program for human growth hormone.

In addition to Goodell, the league’s top lawyer, Jeffrey Pash, and Adolpho Birch, who oversees its drug testing program, are expected to attend the meeting. DeMaurice Smith is not expected to attend because, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was told, he is traveling overseas. The union will be represented by, among others, the Ravens’ Dominique Foxworth, who was a key player in the labor negotiations. But according to a person briefed on the committee’s thinking, they are disappointed that Smith is not available. Also expected to attend are members of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

The purpose of the meeting is to allow both sides to explain their positions on testing to Representatives Darrell Issa, a Republican from California and the committee chairman and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat. And the committee members are likely to ask the union what specific questions they want answered to allow testing to go forward in the coming months, or if there are other issues that would indicate a general reluctance by the union to implement testing.

While the parties agreed to start testing for human growth hormone as part of the collective bargaining agreement completed in August, testing has not begun because the union says it needs more information about the specifics of blood tests used by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Those tests, which are used on Olympics athletes, among others, determine the ratio of human growth hormone in the blood and compare it to the ratio that is naturally occurring. The union spokesman George Atallah said the union’s primary concern was how WADA established the baseline ratio for its tests and whether it was appropriate to use for professional football players.

WADA officials have said the ratio remains the same in nearly every subject it has studied. The union says it wants WADA to turn over the population study that led to the establishment of the threshold ratio; WADA has declined, saying that plenty of information about how the test works is available and that it fears the release of more sensitive information could help athletes figure out how to cheat.

Atallah, though, said he remained confident that there would be HGH testing in the N.F.L. “soonish” and that he could imagine a separate population study on N.F.L. players being conducted. Atallah said the union had not had formal discussions with the league about creating such a population study though.