Olympic Funniest and Worst Doping excuses in history

[Nabludatel']

WORST EXCUSES OF ALL TIME FOR FAILING A DOPING TEST

DENNIS MITCHELL

US sprinter Dennis Mitchell.

The drug: Testosterone

His excuse: ‘I had too much sex with my wife.’

He said he was getting intimate with his wife more than usual because it was her birthday.

Result: Banned by IAAF for two years

RICHARD GASQUET

France’s player Richard Gasquet is not the first tennis player to succumb to ‘white line fever’.

The drug: cocaine

His excuse: ‘I kissed a girl in a nightclub and it went into my system’. Frenchman says a girl called Pamela that he met in a Miami nightclub must have passed it on.

Result: A 2 and a half month ban due to the minute amount found in his urine … but a stern warning that another positive test is a life ban



SHANE WARNE

Apparently Shane Warne’s ‘mum did it’.

The drug: Diuretic

His excuse: His mum’s fault. She gave it to him because he was overweight.

Result? Stood down from taking part in the 2003 Cricket World Cup as part of a 12 month suspension.



LASHAWN MERRITT

Athlete LaShawn Merritt wanted to go faster and be bigger.

The drug: Dehydroepiandrosterone and Pregnenolone

His excuse: Not reading the ingredient to his penis enlargement medication. “[It was a] foolish, immature and egotistical mistake ... any penalty I may receive for my action will not overshadow the embarrassment and humiliation I feel,” he said at the time

Result: Banned for two years which was subsequently reduced to 21 months


PETR KORDA

Petr Korda loves a schnitty.

The drug: Nandralone (steroids)

His excuse: I just like veal too much … only problem was that level of the drug would have meant he’d eaten 40 calves a day for 20 years.

Result: Korda received a 12 month ban



TYLER HAMILTON

Cyclist Tyler Hamilton raised chimerism as a defence.

The drug: Hamilton was found to have a ‘foreign blood population’ a common sign of blood doping

His excuse: An unborn twin lives inside me. He said foreign cells were found in his system because he might be a Chimera — an organism with two or more populations of genetically distinct cells, produced by a twin brother who died before birth.

Result: Hamilton received a two-year ban



GAI WATERHOUSE HORSE ‘ LOVE YOU HONEY’

Gai Waterhouse paid the price for her staff visiting ‘a known drug den’. Picture Jay Town.

The drug: Cocaine

The excuse: Waterhouse pleaded guilty to the charge, however she told stewards the Regent Hotel, close to her Randwick stables, was “a known drug den” and that employee Roy Storch may have come into contact with the drug there (he denied using it besides two previous occasions he had admitted to).

The result: Gai Waterhouse was fined $15,000



DANIEL PLAZA

Daniel Plaza clearly believes in the saying ‘A happy wife — a happy life’.

The drug: Nandrolone

His excuse: Too much oral sex with my pregnant wife caused the race walker to absorb the steroid, which pregnant women may produce naturally.

The result? A two-year ban but he was then exonerated in July 2006




JUSTIN GATLIN

Justin Gatlin was banned in 2001 and 2006.

The drug: Testosterone

His excuse: My masseuse rubbed it into my buttocks without my knowing.

The result? An eight-year ban reduced to four years on appeal.


JAVIER SOTOMAYOR

Javier Sotomayor was the victim of the CIA ... maybe.

The drug: Cocaine

His excuse: He claimed sabotage by either the CIA or the anti-Castro mafia. “I know that every time there is a doping case, everyone generally says they are innocent,” he said. “But in my case I really am innocent”. This was followed by Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader going on national television to launch an impassioned defence and among his claims was that the CIA had spiked Sotomayor’s sample.

The result? A two-year ban — this was later shortened to one year allowing him to compete at the Sydney Olympics.



AMERICAN sprinter Gil Roberts,
who took gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics on the men’s 4x400 relay, won an appeal of his doping ban after a US arbitration panel agreed with his “passionate kissing” defence.


Roberts tested positive for trace amounts of probenecid, a masking agent, and was suspended for four years last May, but an arbitrator overturned the ban last July, backing Roberts’s claim that the positive test was caused by passionate kissing.
Roberts said his girlfriend, Alex Salazar, was sick and had taken sinus medication for her illness, drugs that entered his body after frequent passionate kissing.

A three-person arbitration panel sided with Roberts in denying an appeal of his overturned ban by the World Anti-Doping Agency, with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling it most likely “the presence of probenecid in the athlete’s system resulted from kissing his girlfriend.”

“There could have been tongue kissing, but it was more that she kissed me so soon after taking the medicine,” Roberts told the New York Times.


(c)

[Nabludatel']

О Мелдонии...

"Until banned, meldonium was just one of over a dozen drugs in WADA's monitoring program, a sort of watch list for substances the agency may ban in the future. The list is public and currently includes drugs ranging from antidepressant bupropion to telmisartan, a blood pressure medication.

WADA doesn't release estimates of the numbers of athletes currently taking drugs on its monitoring program list. For meldonium, the number was likely high. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that 66 of the 762 urine samples from athletes at the 2015 European Games tested positive for meldonium.

Whether athletes use drugs on the current watch list to treat legitimate medical conditions or gain an unfair edge on the competition isn't clear. An international team of scientists that make up WADA's Prohibited List Expert Group ultimately makes that distinction. (Athletes who have a legitimate medical need for a banned substance can apply for a therapeutic use exemption.)

What gets a drug banned? We asked toxicologist Olivier Rabin, WADA's science director since 2002, about the science behind the blackball.


What criteria do your scientists use when deciding whether to ban a drug?

Our decision to ban a drug is about more than just performance enhancement. That is one consideration, yes. But we also consider whether the drug could harm the health of the athlete and whether taking the drug goes against the spirit of sport. Two of these three criteria must be satisfied for a drug to make it onto the prohibited list. There are some substances where all three criteria are fulfilled. The hormone EPO, for example, is clearly performance enhancing. [It boosts production of red blood cells.] EPO clearly has a risk for health. And, of course, some athletes take it to get an edge.


"We've seen some illegal drugs that went directly from a test tube to humans without any safety tests, so we don't have the slightest knowledge of the drugs' toxicity," says Olivier Rabin, science director for the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Meldonium was on the monitoring program list for one year. How did your scientists determine so quickly that it should be banned?

There are 34 WADA-accredited anti-doping laboratories around the world that can help inform us when drugs on our monitoring program list are used by athletes. For meldonium, it quickly came to our attention that there were clear patterns of use by entire teams, which usually suggests a drug isn't being taken for medical purposes. How could every member of a team need the same medical treatment? A few studies in the scientific literature also showed that meldonium had a potential performance-enhancing benefit. These elements left our experts with little doubt that the drug should be banned. In terms of being a health risk to the athletes, meldonium is probably not a very toxic substance, although there have been a couple of papers recently questioning its safety.

Does WADA ever run its own scientific tests to determine whether drugs enhance performance?

Yes, we work with sport labs around the world to conduct studies with athletes who aren't currently competing. For example, Don McKenzie's exercise physiology laboratory at the University of British Columbia did some studies for us looking at the asthma medication salbutamol, also known as albuterol.

We were able to define a threshold that would allow people to take the drug if they have a clear need to treat asthma.


How long are drugs typically on the monitored list before you make a decision?

It really depends on the patterns of use we see and the kind of information we need to collect. Caffeine has been on the list for close to 13 years. Meldonium was on the list for only one. Sometimes we monitor a drug for two or three years and then realize there is no pattern of abuse and we remove it. The minute we have enough information, we make a decision. (c)

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...es-performance