Least surprising sports story of 2017

[Long Run]

Justin Gatlin, Coach Under Doping Investigation; Agent Claims Sprinter Uses PEDs
Rob Goldberg
December 18, 2017

American track and field star Justin Gatlin and his coach, Dennis Mitchell, are under investigation for use of performance-enhancing drugs, according to Claire Newell, Hayley Dixon, Daniel Foggo, Callum Adams and Luke Heighton of the Telegraph.

Members of his team in the training camp in Florida reportedly offered illegal substances to undercover reporters.

Gatlin's agent, Robert Wagner, claimed the sprinter had been using PEDs.

According to the report, Mitchell and Wagner admitted in a recording that drug use was still widespread in athletics and they knew ways to avoid failed tests.

Gatlin has denied any wrongdoing and has fired his coach, offering up clean drug tests from the past five years as evidence.

The 35-year-old likely won't get the benefit of the doubt thanks to his checkered past. He earned a two-year ban for illegal substances in 2001 and then received an eight-year ban in 2006, which was later cut down to four years.

The 2004 Olympic gold medalist returned to action and surprised Usain Bolt and others with a first-place finish in the 100-meter dash at the 2017 World Championships.

Reporters went undercover to his training camp explaining that an actor needed human growth hormone to train for a film. The drugs were reportedly ready to be provided from a doctor in Australia.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2749 ... -uses-peds

[Guinevere]

I might include this one, too:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/ ... -drug-test

Britain’s most successful road cyclist Chris Froome is fighting to salvage his reputation after a failed drugs test during his victory in the Vuelta a España in September.

Following a joint investigation by the Guardian and Le Monde, which revealed that the 32-year-old had double the permitted levels of the asthma medication salbutamol in his body, the four-time Tour de France winner admitted that he had upped his dose of the drug during the race – but insisted he had not broken any rules.

However, unless Froome can provide a sufficient explanation for the abnormal finding, or challenge the result, he is likely to be stripped of his Vuelta title by cycling’s governing body, the UCI, and could be given a ban from the sport of up to 12 months.

Given that Team Sky also operates a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to failed tests, Froome’s future role in the team may also come under consideration.

The Guardian understands that Froome and Team Sky have recruited a team of medical and legal experts to seek an explanation of the findings. In particular, they are examining whether Froome was dehydrated at the time, or whether there were other physiological factors that may have led to the failed test.

One of the possibilities that will be offered to Froome is for a simulated test where he takes salbutamol and has his urine regularly assessed. However, informed sources expect the case to drag on for several more months – meaning Froome could still be under a cloud when he begins his season next spring.

It is certainly a far cry from the elation Froome was feeling in September, when he spoke of his joy after becoming the first Briton to win the Vuelta, which also made him the first cyclist to claim the Tour de France/Vuelta double in the same year since 1978.

Later in September he also won a bronze medal in the world time trial championships in Norway – a result he described as “an amazing end to an unforgettable season”. That period of sustained success led to him being nominated for this Sunday’s BBC Sport’s Personality of the Year award, where he was one of the leading contenders behind the boxer Anthony Joshua. But by then he had already failed a drug test, the result of which threatens to damage his reputation as one of Britain’s most successful athletes.

[RayThom]

The Guardian understands that Froome and Team Sky have recruited a team of medical and legal experts to seek an explanation of the findings. In particular, they are examining whether Froome was dehydrated at the time, or whether there were other physiological factors that may have led to the failed test.

One of the possibilities that will be offered to Froome is for a simulated test where he takes salbutamol and has his urine regularly assessed. However, informed sources expect the case to drag on for several more months – meaning Froome could still be under a cloud when he begins his season next spring."

This sounds like a job for Doctor Lance. He can fix almost any doping scandal.

Calling Dr. Moe, Dr. Curley, Dr. Lance...

[Lord Jim]

Froome and Team Sky have recruited a team of medical and legal experts to seek an explanation of the findings.

An explanation other than the bleeding obvious...

ETA:

In other news, Mr. Fox has recruited a team of medical and legal experts to seek an explanation for the sudden disappearance of chickens from the hen house...

[Guinevere]

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/lance-a ... d-forever/

Lance Armstrong has weighed in on the recent scandal surrounding Chris Froome, saying that, no matter the result of the case, Froome’s reputation has been tarnished forever by the intense media reaction.

Armstrong, who had all seven of his Tour de France titles scratched from his palmarès after he was handed a backdated ban for doping, also said that next year’s Tour will be ‘complete mayhem’ for the Team Sky rider.

Froome is currently under investigation from the UCI after an adverse analytical finding for the asthma medication salbutamol. The test, which was taken during the final week of the 2017 Vuelta a España, recorded twice the permitted levels of the substance, which is not banned outright. Froome has not been suspended during the investigation, is cooperating with the UCI, and has said that he did not exceed the dosage allowed for his asthma medication.

"He could be completely exonerated and he is tarnished forever. Damage is done," Armstrong said in his Stages podcast. "You might think I am talking about him caring about whether they write negative articles about him - he may or may not. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. But, come next July, when this all gets cleaned up, it is already unpleasant for him, this is going to be complete mayhem and I know exactly what that fucking feels like. And it ain’t any fun."

Armstrong also criticised the response by some media outlets to the controversy, saying that cycling was given a raw deal when it came to the reporting of these issues. However, he admitted that he had to shoulder much of the responsibility for that.

"Cycling is the sporting world’s doormat. I have to say that I take a lot of blame for that," said Armstrong. "The article the day after in the New York Times was the biggest bunch of bullshit that I have ever read. If you are a fan of Baseball who gets the New York Times every day and you read that story, and it is just so harsh on Chris Froome, and our sport, and our sport’s history.

“I am sure we deserve a lot of that and I am trying to accept some responsibility here because I have sort of you know tainted the entire equation obviously. But you don't get an accurate depiction of this situation by reading that article. I read that and I was like, 'you have got to be kidding'. You had read that article and thought Chris Froome had a gallon of EPO for breakfast. And that is not accurate and fair to him."

[Jarlaxle]

In cycling, it's simple: everyone is dirty.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Chris Froome is apparently asthmatic which is why he is allowed to take this drug under a therapeutic use exemption (TUE). Leaving aside the argument that it does seem odd that so many world class athletes are asthmatic, we get to this absurdity. He know that X hits per day on his inhaler leaves him just below the maximum level allowed of 1 nanogram per mL. So he takes hits trying to stay under that level, I.e., up to a max of X per day. In competition he is found to have a blood level of 2 ng per mL. So what happened - did he take more hits than he should, or did he stay under his allowance but something else in his system (e.g., too much Chinese food) alter his physiology so that the drug was metabolized more slowly, or his urine production rate was altered, or is there some sort of lab error?

It seems to me that once a TUE is approved, then there has to be some sort of policing to make sure that the drug is not abused by taking more than the clinical dose. So either the drug is held by an authority who will dole out X hits (or pills or injections) per day - this seems totally impractical if the athlete is to have any sort of normal life - or there is a bright line level which is OK and anything higher is assumed to be the result of abuse. I think Froome is fucked. I also think it is possible that this was entirely above board in the sense that he really is asthmatic and he really did stay below the requisite number of tokes: but just this once the sauerkraut he had for dinner chewed up his metabolism to the extent that we see in his urine. Tough shit Froome - and this from someone who loves the TdF and his competitiveness.

[rubato]

Cyclists lose a lot of water by sweating in competition. if there is a difference between excretion through the kidneys vs sweat that might be a defense. I just checked and 72% and s excreted through the kidneys so it might be possible.


Yrs,
Rubato

[Long Run]

And in a more surprising story, the Lucinda Williams defense worked:

American Sprinter Used ‘Passionate Kissing’ Defense in Doping Case. And It Worked.
By Rebecca R. Ruiz
Jan. 25, 2018

The moral of this story is that it is perfectly O.K. to passionately kiss your mate, even if he or she has a sinus infection.

First, meet the characters: Gil Roberts is a world-class sprinter from Oklahoma who won a gold medal for the United States in a relay at the 2016 Summer Olympics. His girlfriend, Alex Salazar, was sick last spring.

When Roberts failed a drug test, he mounted one of the more novel defenses in the history of sports doping. He said that he had kissed Salazar passionately, and that her sinus medication had entered his body.

On Thursday, an appeals court sided with the passionate kissing defense. Roberts was exonerated.
Three arbitrators wrote that it was more likely than not “that the presence of probenecid in the athlete’s system resulted from kissing his girlfriend.” A different decision could have jeopardized Roberts’s Nike sponsorship, or his eligibility for the 2020 Olympics.

Professional athletes have attributed doping violations to contaminated beef, spiked energy drinks and vanishing look-alikes seeking to sabotage them. Rarely do their claims prove persuasive. But Roberts, with the help of his girlfriend’s testimony, dealt a blow to global antidoping officials, who had appealed a preliminary decision clearing Roberts last summer.

Even with such cross-contamination scientifically possible, regulators argued his account was implausible — including an antibiotic regimen his girlfriend had not seen through to completion, leaving one capsule as evidence. Regulators called him reckless and at fault for even an inadvertent violation.

* * *

Flown in from France to testify at Roberts’s arbitration hearing was the foremost scientific expert on the matter — Dr. Pascal Kintz, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, whose testimony also figured into the first precedent-setting kissing case in 2009.

In that case, Richard Gasquet, a French tennis player, successfully proved that traces of cocaine in his body had been transmitted by a woman named Pamela he had repeatedly kissed in a Miami nightclub on the eve of playing in a tournament.

A tennis doping panel found him at fault, ruling he had acted recklessly by engaging as he did with a stranger. But the Court of Arbitration for Sport — the ultimate arbiter of sports disputes, which issued Thursday’s ruling — overruled it with a more forgiving opinion, and no punishment.

“Even when exercising the utmost caution, the player could not have been aware of the consequences that kissing Pamela would have on him,” sports arbitrators wrote in their decision about Gasquet, who had sued the woman he kissed to obtain a sample of her hair to prove routine cocaine use, which his own hair sample had disproved.
Another athlete, the decorated Canadian pole-vaulter Shawn Barber, similarly avoided a multiyear suspension in 2016, successfully attributing a low-level cocaine violation to an intimate encounter with a woman he had met on Craigslist the night before Olympic trials.

Jonathan Taylor, a prominent global sports lawyer who represented the International Tennis Federation in its appeal of Gasquet’s case, said that athletes were strictly liable for any substance in their system — even if that substance was ingested completely unintentionally.

“They will only avoid a ban in very exceptional cases, where they can show that they took every reasonable precaution,” Taylor said, adding that the further removed an athlete was from training and competition — and the more personal the atmosphere — the lower the level of precautions he or she might be expected to take.

* * *

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/s ... ook.com%2F

[rubato]

All the world loves a lover.