American and international anti-doping officials on Friday disputed assertions by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that the league will be unable to test players for human growth hormone until a better test is developed.

Goodell, speaking during the NFL’s “state of the league” address on Friday suggested that American professional football leads other sports in drug testing, but said he doubted the league would be able to test for HGH because “there is no reliable test right now."

Goodell’s claim, however, was disputed by Travis Tygart, chief counsel at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, who said that anti-doping agencies world-wide are poised to begin using a blood-based method to test for precisely that hormone.

“The commitment was there to develop a test,” Tygart told VeloNews. “The [International Olympic Committee] and WADA put a substantial amount of money into the effort. It has been peer-reviewed, there have been several papers on that very subject and there is now a reliable test for HGH out there.”

“For someone to say that there is not an effective test that could be used within the near future is simply inaccurate,” he added.

Tygart conceded that the test won’t be widely employed until later in the year.

“It’s now simply a question of production of the [testing] kit,” he said. “That’s under way now and we can expect the test to be used by this summer.” This means the test could be available in time for the NFL’s 2007 season.

As of yet, said Tygart, the only positives for HGH “have come from the non-analytical side,” meaning that anti-doping officials use other forms of evidence, including confessions, to get a conviction.

One World Anti-Doping Agency official said Goodell’s comments are indicative of the need for the NFL and other American sports to hand off their doping-control efforts to an outside agency.

"The fact of the matter is that there is a test. There are several tests," Gary Wadler, a physician and member of WADA’s prohibited lists and methods committee, told USA Today on Friday.

Wadler suggested that for the NFL to ignore available testing methods essentially gives its players a “free ride for what is not an insignificant drug."

The NFL, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association do not subscribe to the World Anti-Doping Code and conduct most of their testing in-house. Earlier this week, NFL officials did announce a $500,000 grant to the Olympic testing lab at UCLA in an effort to develop a urine-based test for HGH. The NFL has backed the position of its players’ union regarding blood testing, which both have called “invasive.”