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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?