An athlete lies down on a table as a masseur gets to work to ease muscle tension. The athlete tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs and points fingers at the massage therapist. This story sounds like tennis World No.1 Jannik Sinner’s explanation for failing a dope test. It’s not.
Back in 2006, the fastest man on earth Justin Gatlin blamed his massage therapist for deliberately rubbing a cream that contained steroids to derail his career after they had had a fallout over a bonus payment. Gatlin was banned for four years.
Unlike Sinner’s physiotherapist who seems to have stood by the player’s version, this particular support staff of Gatlin denied any wrongdoing.
Sinner’s physiotherapist used a spray to heal a small cut on the finger, the player claims. The spray contained Clostebol, a performance-enhancer. The physio massages Sinner without wearing gloves; Sinner has skin lesions, traces of Clostebol found their way into his body. Sinner escaped a doping ban.
The chain of events he presented may sound outlandish to some but it’s not worthy of making it to the ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ list featuring excuses for a failed drug test.
A few calves a day
Petr Korda, the 1998 Australian Open champion, tested positive for Nandrolone, known to be used to bulk up calves. The former World No.2 men’s singles tennis player from the Czech Republic had a plausible explanation. He had eaten veal. But he was eventually banned for a year.
The reason: He would have had to eat at least a few calves every day for many years to explain the amount of Nandrolone in his system. One expert put the number at close to 40 calves a day.
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Grandfather’s dessert
Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was 15 when she tested positive for Trimetazidine, a medicine used to prevent angina. Valieva’s samples were collected during the Russian championships but the test results came out only during the Winter Olympics in Beijing, by which time she had helped Russia win a team gold.
During a hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Valieva argued that her grandfather had dropped a prescribed medication pill into the dessert by mistake while he was preparing it. The residue of her grandfather’s medicine on the chopping board as he cut the strawberries was also put forward as a reason. Nevertheless, she was banned for four years
A Craigslist post
Canada’s rising pole vault star Shawn Barber tested positive for cocaine during the Olympic trials in Edmonton. It started with Barber posting under Craigslist’s casual dating section that he wanted to spend time with a woman who was ‘drug-free’ and ‘disease-free’.
Later in a statement, the unnamed woman said that she had consumed coke before meeting Barber in his hotel room. The athlete said that the positive test for cocaine could be the result of a kiss. The cocaine ingestion was deemed to be inadvertent though Barber was stripped of his national title. This case was similar to that of French tennis player Richard Gasquet. Kissing a girl in a Miami nightclub was his explanation for a positive cocaine test. CAS bought the argument and cleared him.
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Nandrolone in toothpaste
Dieter Baumann, the 5,000m champion at the 1992 Olympics, tested positive for Nandrolone in 1999. Samples were collected during two training sessions. Germany’s track and field association got the supplements he used tested by a lab in Cologne. But no traces of Nandrolone were found.
After this, the shower gel, skin cream and toothpaste used by Baumann were tested. And the toothpaste turned out to be the culprit. An investigation was launched to find out who tampered with the toothpaste but it hit a dead end.
However, the International Association of Athletics Federations — the then governing body for track and field – banned him for two years.
A pigeon pie
When Dutch cyclist Adri van der Poel tested positive for Strychnine, a banned stimulant which can help delay the onset of cramps, he came up with an interesting explanation. His father-in-law was into racing pigeons and liked to cook as well. He baked a pie using one of his racing birds. Van der Poel said the particular pigeon, which became a meal, was doped.
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Enhancement product
American LaShawn Merritt, the 2008 Olympics 400m champion, failed three tests in two years. He blamed a penis enhancement product that he used which contained the banned steroid dehydroepiandrosterone. He called it an ‘immature and egotistical mistake’.
Merritt, however, was banned for two years. On his return, he won gold at the World Championships in 2015 and a bronze at the Rio Olympics a year later.
Castro and the CIA hand
When Cuban high jump great Javier Sotomayor tested positive for cocaine at the 1999 Pan-American Games, none other than president Fidel Castro jumped to his defence.
On television, Castro said that the United States’ intelligence agency CIA had got Sotomayor’s drink spiked.
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Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist party, also published articles that pointed to an American conspiracy. The International Association of Athletics Federations lifted the ban citing ‘exceptional circumstances’ and Sotomayor added a silver medal at the Sydney Olympics to go with the gold he won in Barcelona eight years earlier.
In 2001, he tested positive for Nandrolone and announced his retirement shortly afterwards.
Unborn twin
Chimerism occurs when a person has two different DNA cells. This can happen in the case of twins, when one embryo does not survive but the other absorbs the cells of the twin. When American cyclist Tyler Hamilton was caught for blood doping, he blamed the ‘vanishing twin syndrome’ for having two different types of blood. He was banned for two years in 2004. In 2011, in an interview to ’60 minutes’, he admitted to doping and blew the lid on the Lance Amstrong doping scandal.
“I saw (EPO) in his (Armstrong’s) refrigerator. I saw him inject it more than one time, like we all did, like I did many, many times,” Hamilton said.
