Mudryk doping case hits Chelsea Football Club - Town Square #6
As Mykhailo Mudryk tests positive for meldonium, a Chelsea club doctor will be reminded of a doping scandal involving two international athletes he worked with, and a contaminated supplement.
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“They are both slowly getting better but as we said the other day, it is a matter of weeks. The other one that is still ill is Misha Mudryk and the rest are okay.”
This was the reason given by the Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca last week for why the Ukrainian winger Mykhailo Mudryk had missed the club’s recent matches.
It has now emerged that Mudryk failed a recent doping test for the heart medication meldonium, and has since been provisionally suspended. Whether ill, injured or fit, Mudryk will now be unable to play at Stamford Bridge, or further afield, until his case is resolved or his provisional suspension is overturned.
In a statement released shortly after the news of Mudryk’s positive test, the player denied wrongdoing and remains hopeful that he “will be back on the pitch soon”.
Unfortunately for Mudryk, the fact his case has been publicly disclosed has perhaps statistically placed the player’s career in greater peril.
Under the Football Associations (FA) anti-doping regulations, provisional suspensions are not announced by either the FA or UK Anti-Doping. Doping cases involving Premier League footballers are dealt with behind closed doors, in a private arena with zero public scrutiny.
Between 2015 and 2020, 100% of Premier League footballers who failed doping tests avoided a suspension. Only the former Hull City player Jake Livermore’s cocaine case, which was also leaked, was made public. Livermore was also the only player to be sanctioned over the period although he avoided a ban.
In athletics however, a sport in which provisional suspensions have been publicly announced since 2017, 62% of athletes who failed drug tests were sanctioned by World Athletics between 2017 and 2020.
Regardless of this statistical anomaly, it is now Mudryk’s task to win over both anti-doping officials, and the wider sporting public.
Mudryk is reported to have hired the same legal team that recently helped Paul Pogba reduce his doping ban from four years to eighteen months at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Both Chelsea Football Club and the player are actively investigating the source of his positive test. For Chelsea, this is a procedure which the club’s medical staff has past experience of.
“This has come as a complete shock as I have never knowingly used any banned substances or broken any rules, and am working closely with my team to investigate how this could have happened,” said Mudryk in a statement on his Instagram.
Honest Sport has found that one of Chelsea’s principal club doctors had to face two doping contamination cases when he was a team doctor in another sport.
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