Doping in Sport - Bi-Weekly Press round-up #86
Ex-Chelsea footballer says he was offered performance enhancers by friends, a tennis player tests positive for meldonium and 'suspicions of mechanical doping' directed towards former cyclist.
© Honest Sport 2024: You must seek permission (honestsport@substack.com) if you would like to circulate this newsletter internally in your organisation or add it to any databases, programmes or software.
It takes considerable time and effort to run this newsletter, and paid subscriptions help greatly. If you would like a group subscription for your organisation please reach out directly at honestsport@substack.com.
Thank you to those of you who have decided to subscribe already.
Help grow this newsletter by sharing it with friends, athletes or colleagues, particularly anti-doping officials, journalists or sports lawyers, who you think would find it useful or interesting. Thank you, Edmund!
The next Bi-Weekly Press Round up will be published a week today (29th) as this coming Thursday is Boxing Day in the UK. Merry Christmas to all!
In case you missed it last week, I published a new article on the meldonium case involving the Chelsea footballer Mykhailo Mudryk. One of the club’s doctors had to face two contamination cases involving rugby players earlier in his career. “We've stopped all supplements until we get to the bottom of this, both our own supplements as well as those that players take individually,” (link).
The Daily Mail (link) and The Guardian have published articles about doping in football in the context of Mudryk’s case; “But football has long struggled to bring many successful or high-profile anti-doping prosecutions. For all of the FA’s testing, the last significant ban it handed out was for nine months in January 2022 for a player using a masking agent. The player’s name has never been revealed,” (link).
The president of Ukraine’s football committee Oleg Luzhnyi has commented on Mudryk’s case. “For now, we can only hypothesize about Mykhailo: whether he took something, whether it was contaminated, or whether it was a mistake. For example, he could have accidentally taken someone else's cup, and so on,” (link).
Meanwhile, the former Ukraine national team coach Yozhef Sabo has put forward an entirely unfounded theory. “We have never had anything like this in our time. I thought about it, and here is what I think. Maybe there are ‘fans’ who do not like something about the player and think: how to get rid of him so as not to have to pay a lot of money, his salary. Anything is possible. In the case of a four-year ban, they will not have to pay anything. So that is the situation,” (link).” Ukrainian football has however had doping cases in the past. For example, the Director of Football at FC Shakhtar Donetsk, Mudryk’s former club, tested positive for the anabolic agent DHEA in 2017 and was suspended for 17 months (link).
The former Chelsea player Mikel John Obi said on his podcast that he refused performance enhancers offered to him by friends during his career. Mikel also implied he has little sympathy for players who claim contamination. “People around will offer you stuff - friends, friends of friends - they will tell you that this will give you this or it will give you one or two more percent in your performances, and I’m like what is this? Is this legal? I tell them to go away, I don’t want to talk about it. We have to take responsibility for our actions and what we eat,” (link). You can watch a clip of Mikel’s comments here (link).
The Argentine World Cup winner Papu Gomez told Relevo that FC Sevilla left him ‘completely alone’ when he failed a doping test in 2022. “In my case, imagine, living the best moment of my career, for being in a World Cup final, I open my email and see CELAD. I see the email there: Alejandro Gómez, CELAD, antidoping, positive, terbutaline,” (link).
A footballer player in Ecuador’s first division has reportedly tested positive for a diuretic (link). Only last week the Ecuadorian player Oscar Zambrano, who is now on loan at Hull City, was banned for 16 months after also reportedly testing positive for a diuretic (link).
Given the recent doping cases in football, I gathered a collection of articles on doping in football in a X thread (link).
Der True Crime German-language podcast has published an episode on doping in football (link).
The Russian tennis player Daniil Savelev, who has a career high ranking of 1580, has been suspended for two years after he also tested positive for the heart medication meldonium. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) accepted that the player had taken his granny’s meldonium pills by accident. “In his interview on 17 September 2024, the Player's father stated that he has mistakenly put tablets of Meldonium into the Player's pill tray, thinking that they were another supplement which the Player had been advised to take. The Player's grandmother had used Meldonium which is why it was present in the family medicine cabinet,” (link). You can read the full decision here (link). According to Instagram (link), the player was coached in 2023 by the former assistant coach and hitting partner of Maria Sharapova (link) who also inadvertently tested positive for meldonium in 2016 (link).
The ITIA has provisionally suspended the 2022 Wimbledon Doubles champion Max Purcell from Australia, after the player admitted to a breach of article 2.2 of the WADA code related to the use of a Prohibited Method (link). The press release would suggest that Purcell has not failed a doping test otherwise he would have breached article 2.1 of the WADA code - ‘Presence of a Prohibited Substance or its Metabolites or Markers in an Athlete’s Sample’ (link).
Two of the three Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arbitrators, Kevin Lalo and Jeffrey Benz, have now been appointed for Jannik Sinner’s appeal hearing. “The heavy hand of the Israeli judge has also been felt in other proceedings, including the one against Mauricio Fiol Villanueva, a Peruvian swimmer, who was severely sanctioned,” (link). The article states that Lalo is known for his ‘rigidity’ citing his tough decision to increase the Italian tennis player Sara Errani’s suspension from two to ten months. Lalo accepted that the player’s mother had dropped her cancer medication in her tortellini (link). Benz, affiliated to Four New Square Chambers (link), was one of the arbitrators who recently cleared Simona Halep in her Athlete Biological Passport case after he placed evidential weight on the results of a private blood sample the player had provided. The sample, unlike traditional doping samples, had not been collected under the chain of custody criteria mandated by the WADA code (link).
The rest of the news (28 bullet points) now continues for paid subscribers