Nadal to Sue Roselyn Bachelot, for Doping Allegations!

Do you think Nadal should sue Bachelot?

  • Yes

    Votes: 42 82.4%
  • No

    Votes: 9 17.6%

  • Total voters
    51

Smasher08

Legend
Not even North Korea would be stupid or corrupt enough to confuse a placebo like Meldonium with a PED, but WADA is.

Not sure if anyone's heard about the Blue Jays' Chris Colabello, and his recent suspension for testing positive for a metabolite of Oral Turinabol -- a steroid from the 1960s -- and tbh this may better fit with one of the threads about Sharapova.

He's saying he has no idea how the metabolite got into his system, but his appeal failed because there's pretty much no other way. He's protesting his innocence, saying he would never do this to the game of baseball. And last year he was a Cinderalla story -- a career minor leaguer coming to the majors and batting over .300.

I'd love to believe him but unfortunately, he ought to bear the burden of proving himself morally innocent here. His career fits the pattern of steroid use -- he was never good enough until suddenly, in his early 30s, he's far better than the average major leaguer.

In hindsight, perhaps further scrutiny should have been paid to him last year after he sustained that stellar batting average for more than a month. Just like people should have looked more closely at Roger Clemens when he "suddenly" reversed his decline in his 30s and began to pitch in Cy Young winning form.

There's a material difference between someone suddenly rising in form and rankings in their teens and early twenties, and someone making those leaps in their late twenties or thirties -- especially after more than a year of decline.

In the case of the latter, in this post-Armstrong, post-BALCO, post-Biogenesys age, I think that people should be skeptical. More importantly, I think federations and leagues should be skeptical.

No personal physicians: only physicians involved with sports bodies. Disclosure of medical records, anonymised. And when an athlete tests positive or is caught cheating, let the physician face repercussions too.

I'm sure that even then there will be people who cheat the system, but it'll be much harder than it is now. And if it's much harder to start cheating, hopefully more and more athletes will never do it.
 

Bartelby

Bionic Poster
You've got to test a lot, and do it full spectrum and do it anytime of the day or night. Fifty times a year for top ten tennis players might be adequate.

You've got to disrupt micro-dosing routines and that is difficult to the point of impossibility at the moment:

Eur J Appl Physiol. 2011 Sep;111(9):2307-14. doi: 10.1007/s00421-011-1867-6. Epub 2011 Feb 20.
Current markers of the Athlete Blood Passport do not flag microdose EPO doping.
Ashenden M1, Gough CE, Garnham A, Gore CJ, Sharpe K.
Author information

Abstract
The Athlete Blood Passport is the most recent tool adopted by anti-doping authorities to detect athletes using performance-enhancing drugs such as recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO). This strategy relies on detecting abnormal variations in haematological variables caused by doping, against a background of biological and analytical variability. Ten subjects were given twice weekly intravenous injections of rhEPO for up to 12 weeks. Full blood counts were measured using a Sysmex XE-2100 automated haematology analyser, and total haemoglobin mass via a carbon monoxide rebreathing test. The sensitivity of the passport to flag abnormal deviations in blood values was evaluated using dedicated Athlete Blood Passport software. Our treatment regimen elicited a 10% increase in total haemoglobin mass equivalent to approximately two bags of reinfused blood. The passport software did not flag any subjects as being suspicious of doping whilst they were receiving rhEPO. We conclude that it is possible for athletes to use rhEPO without eliciting abnormal changes in the blood variables currently monitored by the Athlete Blood Passport.

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Precisely. If it was the passport which caused his level of play to suffer, then how is he able to play at this level under the passport?

Don't get me wrong: the past two years are more than a little bizarre -- it doesn't take someone a year and a half to recover from appendicitis. But if he's playing to this level under the passport, then that's that.
Yah, right.

:D

Your word is worth it's weight in...

BTW, microdosing has been known and used for many years, not 6 months. It was used before the passport was introduced in tennis.
 

Bartelby

Bionic Poster
Maybe an athlete might have stopped their doping regime with the introduction of the biological passport, played on and then realised that they could not play competitively without doping?

So then they reworked their doping regime using micro-dosing. It's a technique that has to be done with great care to ensure no irregular tests. This is a perfectly plausible scenario.
 
Maybe an athlete might have stopped their doping regime with the introduction of the biological passport, played on and then realised that they could not play competitively without doping?

So then they reworked their doping regime using micro-dosing. It's a technique that has to be done with great care to ensure no irregular tests. This is a perfectly plausible scenario.

But highly unlikely
 
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