And then there were steroid hearings in Congress, and indictments in the BALCO case and all the other stuff.

Well, it turns out, as discussed in a specialty magazine for insurance underwriters, that the real story is quite a bit different.

McGwire had bad ankles.  He wanted to insure them, kind of like a pianist will insure his hands or a dancer their legs.  Makes sense - you can't play baseball (and can't make money) if you're ankles are a mess.

The normal insurance policy would not cover them - i.e., excluded them - because they were such a mess.  So, he had to get a special policy to insure what had been excluded.

Think of it this way.  Your car insurance will not cover you if, say, you want to drive your car for business.  That's an exclusion.  You want to drive your car for business.  You have to buy an additional policy to cover the exclusion, i.e., driving the car for business.

You get the idea.

Well, McGwire and his folks got Certain Underwriters at Lloyds to come in to write a specialized policy.  This article sets it out in a lot of detail.  From the article:

In these cases, Mr. Thomas said, finding a carrier can be difficult. There are a fair number of underwriters who write sports disability insurance, he said, but far fewer "who have the expertise and appetite for tougher exclusions to body parts. Not a lot are comfortable covering that."

To write these kinds of policies, the exclusion language must essentially be inverted, Mr. Thomas said. Underwriters will typically apply "very broad exclusions" to the body part in question. When writing back the exclusion, Mr. Thomas said it is possible to continue to exclude some conditions considered impossible to insure while still giving back a lot of coverage.

These types of policies are not cheap, Mr. Thomas said. While noting that in many cases the initial exclusion is often "more broad than it needs to be," he said there is still a reason the exclusion was put in place, so it is costly to write coverage back.

In one interesting story about this type of policy, Mr. Thomas talked about insuring Mark McGwire's problematic ankle during the baseball player's epic 70-home-run season with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1998.

Mr. Thomas said a lot of medical details had to be vetted before Lloyd's underwriters would consider writing a policy. Details included exactly how the ankle is strapped, types of orthotics used and any anti-inflammatory medications taken.

One substance used by McGwire at the time--androstenedione--was part of the regiment that Lloyd's said should be maintained to help Mr. McGwire recover.

At the time, the substance was not on Major League Baseball's banned substance list for performance-enhancing drugs, but it has since been added and is considered a "steroid precursor." And so, as Mr. Thomas noted, "something that was the start of all the steroid [discussions in baseball] was part of the underwriting interest for this policy."

In other words, Mark McGwire was required, by the terms of the policy of disability insurance covering his ankles, to use the andro which has made him a poster child for steroid use in baseball. If he had not used the steroids, he would not have been insurable.

Does the suit against the filmmaker have merit?  

A PAIR of rabid rabbits has been caught killing a series of snakes near Cairns.

For three weeks Armando Del Manso believed his dog was responsible for the dead snakes showing up with teeth marks all over them on his East Barron property's lawn each morning.

But it turns out it was a pair of rampaging rabbits killing the snakes.

LONDON - An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.

One expert said the treasure found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures. link

Get yours today!

Link

Yep, she suffers from depression. She claims she was "cured," I think she was having an episode this week.  I don't know about you, but I could see it in her dancing.  She wasn't "up to it".