Agassi wrote he used crystal meth to get a boost. Greg Rusedski was let off because his supplements were "contaminated" and there are lots of players who were hauled up and hit. But they keep it very quiet.Quote:
Originally Posted by Acornvilla
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Agassi wrote he used crystal meth to get a boost. Greg Rusedski was let off because his supplements were "contaminated" and there are lots of players who were hauled up and hit. But they keep it very quiet.Quote:
Originally Posted by Acornvilla
Been reading up more on this, McEnroe was on steroids for pain apparently, he pleads of course that he didn't know what they were, there's also constant questions hanging over Mr. Nadal.
There was a few more let offs and reduced bans I didn't bother to list from lesser known players also.
I've seen a good few interviews from Agassi on the matter, he says he used to have to take quite a lot of tests and can't understand how a lot of his peers seemed never to be tested.
Testing is terrible at best in tennis, it makes football look positively monastic by comparison. I don't know if it still exists, but there was a blog or article about it and while it was useful, they had an overload of info on it. It was about steroids in tennis. I'll have to check if I saved the link.
Sad thing is, young players quickly find out what they have to do and their parents go hand in hand with it.
http://tennishasasteroidproblem.blogspot.ie/Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudulika
Thanks for that CD, I'd forgotten the address and I just noticed it's .ie . I know they slam the head of testing for the ITF, though having spoken to and had contact with the man, I think some of it is unfair. Ultimately the local federations should control it, and tournament organisers. However ultimately it's the players themselves who are cheating. Heard a good one yesterday from my colleague (who still plays selected events on the tour, and quite well too). She was at a tournament in Germany 2 weeks ago, tester walked in. asked for x, y and z players, y was there in the locker room, z had lost the day before and was on the road to her next tournament (Egypt) and x was on the practice court. So he made some ticks and told another player she'd to do a test - she'd just staggered in from +32 degrees, 3 sets and was dehydrated.
Result - x and y did the tests, z was marked as having missed her test, and z1 spend an hour trying to give a sufficient sample and had to retire from her doubles match 2 hours later as she cramped up from drinking copious amounts of water to do the test.
I wouldn't read anything into that. I think blogspot addresses just default to whatever country you're in, so if you googled it it'd show up as .ru or whatever.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudulika
Didn't know that, thanks though. It's a pretty interesting read though some of it is a bit stretched. It's a losing battle with tennis at the minute.
Surprise, surprise, global superstar and new Barcelona signing Neymar has apparently been diagnosed with anemia. Now, we all know Spanish sport, football and Barcelona in particular are squeaky clean, but who knows the standard treatment for anemia? If you said EPO and blood transfusions, you might just be right!
There are other treatments of course, but we all know how he's being treated. Barcelona have refused to comment on the specific treatment.
edit: news just coming through that NBA's highest-paid star Alex Rodriguez has been banned for 211 games for doping offences. I don't know much about baseball season but I believe that works out at around 3 hours. Another 12 players have been banned for 50 games apiece.
How dare you disparage against the great team that is Barcelona. Some say you might be cynical Charlie! Not I!Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Darwin
Also A-Rod plays MLB not NBA. You really know nothing about baseball! :P
Really?Quote:
Originally Posted by AP/FCB/ESPN
I'll never make it in Major League Basketball with errors like that :(
If anyone heard overnight Marion Bartoli retired after losing in Ohio. I think the WTA will smother the story in lashings and lashings of creamy hot bull, but from the locker room it appears she quit before she was hit. Met her a few times, father was/is a nutjob and she has some serious problems. This year she got working with a very "recognised" strength and fitness coach. I believe more will come from this.
She's the lady who said earlier in the year that tennis players get tested too much. Interesting.
Meanwhile.. Neymar signs for Barca. They send him to have his tonsils removed as a "preventative procedure". Now they claim he has anaemia, one of the main treatments for which is ...drum roll.. EPO. The Brazil coaching staff have rubbished the suggestion he has anaemia and doctors have said the chances of becoming anaemic after this operation are remote. All very, very dodgy.
Was thinking the same thing when I read about it this morning. Going from Wimbledon champion to being crippled by long-term injuries within the space of weeks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudulika
CD, it was the strangest thing to see her perform so well at Wimbledon, for sure she had the game for it, but then she hooked up with a specialist coach who has worked with (amongst others) Ferrer and Serena Williams, who also happens to be a best mate of Mouratoglou (Serena's bf) and works at his academy in France. Something wasn't right as soon as it came out and I'd be pretty sure some deal was made.
How can players like Bartoli go for 12 months or more (like Serena Williams) without being tested and the sport is deemed clean? Here at the world champ's in Moscow the jokes are fairly flying about different athletes and athletics in general. People are tired and they look at performances and say...are they clean? It shouldn't be like that. And tennis is worse. A player can make it into the top-200 on talent and good planning (and training), they can push up into the top-100 on a few lucky draws and a Grand Slam event run. But to break the top-50 and for sure top-20, it takes an unhealthy amount of training, stamina and reaction time on court. Just doing the physics calculations on timing, speed etc would have you miss a 140kmph serve!
That diagnosis does offer some possible explanation for his sudden frequent fainting fits on the field of play.Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Darwin
And imagine he got through the medical with almost flying colours.Quote:
Originally Posted by geysir
A baseball player, Taheda, is done for a 3rd time violation. Apparently he was caught using an amphetamine and his excuse is that he suffers from add. Would love to see tennis do the same, juicing up is not just about getting muscles and stamina, it's getting your brain and eyes flying so that a 160kmph serve slows for you. It's not practice, it's all reaction, and no human can be so fast so often.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-ne...robing-jamaica
WADA to probe Jamaican anti doping practises. Basically they didn't test any of their big stars in the run up to the Olympics. Other agencies did though, but this is still worrying.
A delusional Jimmy Magee is still clutching at straws in defence of Michelle Smith de Bruin: http://www.thescore.ie/jimmy-magee-m...35659-Oct2013/
She can't possibly have been engaging in doping because she later went on to pass the Irish bar, coming third in Ireland for her examination results in the process? :confused:Quote:
RTÉ SPORTS COMMENTATOR Jimmy Magee has defended his inclusion of Michelle Smith in his new book and insists she was ‘tested more often than Shergar’.
Smith won three gold medals and one bronze from her performances in swimming at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
However she was banned from swimming for four years in 1998 because a drug sample was said to have been tampered with.
Magee defended the disgraced swimmer when speaking to Miriam O’Callaghan this morning on RTÉ Radio 1 about his new book ‘Different Class: Favourite Sporting Memories’.
“Why not? I had Ireland’s best Olympians and to do that, Michelle Smith is one of the few Irish people who’s win a gold medal in the Olympic games.
“She was tested more often than Shergar and never ever anything negative. She was found to have tampered, or somebody had tampered with a sample taken that was taken of her, outside competition long after she had finished.
“In my opinion she should have finished after Atlanta and that’d be the end of the whole thing. One of my daughters was looking at the results and she like a lot of people said ‘you’ve put Michelle in there’.
“I said ‘there’s a list of the results of the last five Olympic swimming champions in that discipline’. She has an inferior time to all the others, the four previous winners. I said ‘if she’s taken something, she should get her money back, she’s slower than all them’.”
Magee conceded that his views are not in line with public opinion on the subject and described himself as ‘a one-man defense counsel’.
‘I know myself. I’m a kind of a one-man defense counsel. I’ll tell you this she did the barrister exam and she was third in all of Ireland.
“To those people that are complaining about her, do you think she was taking something untoward?”
Magee revealed he has not spoken to Smith for some time.
“I haven’t seen her or talked to her in a year and a half. But that doesn’t mean I forget about her.”
What planet is Magee on?
A piece on Pro Boxing. Not a pretty picture: http://www.maxboxing.com/news/max-bo...-mess-part-one
Paul Kimmage Tweeted today that Erik Morales and Alberto Contador must have the same Butcher!
Kimmage asking the questions the vast majority of sports journos simply won't. http://www.independent.ie/sport/inhe...-30409273.html
The willingness to look the other way is quite staggering.
No one can tell me that Barca and Real aren't dealing in some nefarious chemical activities? That's not to mention other teams.
And even closer to home there is of course a couple of inter-county players who we all know have suspicion hanging over them. One in particular's renaissance in 2009 still annoys me because of the shirt he was wearing was my own county's.
If Dublin's regime isn't clean I would want it exposed. So all the All-Ireland's in the world would never make it worth it to me.
Those willing to look the other way are always the cause of most societal problems. Drugs in sport is another example of this.
Rough Rider starts in 10 mins...
http://www.rte.ie/tv/programmes/roughrider.html
http://www.goal.com/en-ke/news/4528/...ing-fight-wada
Some very worrying stats.
Basically you could be doping away with EPO, HGH and transfusions in those countries with very little prospect of testing catching you out.Quote:
The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) did more blood tests on footballers than any organisation in 2013 with 232 in-competition blood tests out of a total of 2896 doping tests conducted in total - just over 8%. Organisations in top football countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Brazil, meanwhile, failed to conduct any.
At least there's always tennis to make football look good.
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/tennis/i...925-2uczb.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr A
How does a professional sportsman, who is meant to be subject to drug-controls inadvertently take his mother's drugs?Quote:
Originally Posted by Sydney Morning Herald via Bloomberg
I have never ever managed to inadvertently take a drug in my life and I'm not subject to any limits. Absolute farce.
With Nadal pulling out again for the US Open you can't but help wonder at all.
Yes, such explanations are generally absolute horse poo- better to look stupid or naive than actually admit cheating. It's their responsibility to control what they ingest, even if you believe them.
Jonathan Tiernan Locke's defence recently was inventive at least- he claims his abnormal bio passport reading was due to getting absolutely hammered. 2 days before riding the world championship!
A piece on the joke that is testing in the NFL: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/.../#article-copy
More on Padova investigation in cycling: http://cyclingtips.com.au/2014/12/pa...ematic-doping/
Meanwhile- things are not looking great in Russia, to understate things massively: http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/...ssia-with-dope
The German documentary on Russian sports was a shocker, but it's nothing new. They also revealed a number of other athletes that are high profile and dodgy. In Kenya and East Africa it seems pretty rampant, and I still feel sick from the Late Late Show (okay, it's Tubridy, so it could be any) when Usain "I'm clean" Bolt's agent was on and not a single question was asked about doping - just when the scandal about the lack of testing in Jamaica broke. Kimmage is right to talk about journo's being fans with typewriters, worse is when a government facilitate (like Russia and the USA).
But nothing will be done. I reported my suspicions about a tennis player, for her own good, and I ended up getting threats and told to shut up by the authorities. Nothing new, but it was so clear that they were out to protect the good name and the other players she was in training with. When you see body changes in a person that go far beyond natural training, it's a joke.
And yet more on athletics: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/oth...g-scandal.html
Really? Are you in the sports biz or just a random fan?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudulika
I was in the sports biz, now thankfully just a fan. Don't really want to go back into the business as the more you think you're making a difference, the worse it gets.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crosby87
There are far worse things than drugs in tennis, but it is rampant. I know it sounds a bit twee, but it is almost impossible to break the top-50 women's without doing something. And as for competing at the top level, it really is something amazing. The sheer science of it, timing, reactions, stamina, they have moved to a point like cycling did/has.
So you might think that Serena for example is someone you would question? What about Venus though? She's a twig.
For the forum's sake I'd not name any people directly, there was the strange episode with Serena where she locked herself in her panic room and refused to be tested, and nothing happened. There are many suspicious performers, a lot of players changing bodyshape, especially when they train with, or in, certain clubs. Players like Kuznetzova failed numerous tests, other players have failed but gotten let off by their national organisations, or been let off. There are coaches still sought out, like Van Harpen, who have been banned from some countries for being caught with illegal substances. The ITF are a sketchy bunch, so nothing gets said.
One small thing that has had me wondering for a few months. Why did Paul Kimmage really pull out of writing a certain book. Was it really over an article, or something he found out? A player beefing up can be natural, but.....
I dunno, if Kimmage had found something out he'd come out and say it or at least make it clear what he couldn't say.
I thought the same Charlie, at the time. It didn't make sense, but....it just seemed very sudden. I watched the docu-film of Kimmage going back to the TDF and was both impressed and worried by him. I remember reading his book in a couple of days and it was just sad. The sad thing is that only the weakest or least profitable get thrown under the bus, or the ones bet protecgted by buddies in the meeja.Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Darwin
But wouldn't players in the WTF for example who clearly based on body type like say Sharapova are clean looking try to rat out the ones who dope to the press? I mean if there were concrete evidence here in the states that a certain someone was doping reporters like Filip Bondy for example would be all over wanting to print it...After Lance it all changed. Everyone knows Clemens is lying for example.
With MLB they aren't even voting in guys like Mike Piazza who is getting so screwed if he never did steroids.