Anti-doping
The whole business of Mariano Puerta's eight-year suspension is frankly incredible to me. The tribunals at the hearings for both his suspensions -- the first for clenbuterol, the second for etilefrene, a kind of blood pressure medicine (more blood flowing? more oxygen?) -- said that he could not have derived any performance benefit in either case. In the first, he had an asthma attack; in the second he may or may not have drunk from his wife's glass.
The discussion of this case is all over the place, trashing everyone from Puerta himself to the anti-doping authorities. The anti-doping tribunal itself opted for whatever leniency it was allowed, giving Puerta "only" an eight-year ban instead of lifetime. But Puerta is 27...and no one's ever successfully come back to the tennis tour after eight years away, at any age. Borg is the only one who's tried it on the men's side, and he quickly concluded he should give up and play the seniors tour.
So Puerta is finished unless he can win an appeal. But so is any pretence that dope-testing has anything to do with protecting athletes, fairness, or ensuring "fair" competition. If the drugs whose traces were found in Puerta's body gave him no performance benefit (as both tribunals said), why are we destroying his career and publicly shaming him? It is graceless and inappropriate for Dick Pound, head of the world anti-dophing authority, to gloat publicly, as he has over this case.
Starting Sunday, dope testing on the men's tour will be taken over by the ITF. It's hard to know if that will improve matters or not. It's always hard to tell what's going on inside tennis because it's such a small, closed world, but after the mess with all those players testing positive for traces of nandrolone and the ATP's decision to exonerate them on the basis that its own trainers had given them contaminated sports drink powderIs is, it seemed as though the pressure was on the ATP to hand testing over to the ITF. The fact is there are too many interested parties in tennis: to whose benefit is it if a Grand Slam winner tests positive? Sponsors, naional federations, the player associations...no one wants it to come out, not really. Even the other players might legitimately fear that their own sponsorshyips might vanish if *other* players test positive. On the other hand, the problem with a single-purpose anti-doping authority is that it must justify its continued existence and expansion by catching players, the higher-profile the better. The ITF owns the Grand Slams. Maybe it's got the right balance of interests, maybe not.
Is it credible to think that individual athletes with millions of dollars at stake don't use performance-enhancing drugs, ever? With the unscrupulous agents and obsessed parents running around the tour? No. I find it extremely difficult to believe that none of them has ever used drugs to speed recovery from injuries at the very least. But punishing people for things that confer no performance benefit just makes the whole thing look like a hypocritical morality play. If Puerta were American he'd be sobbing his redemption on a talk show right now. That's *not* what the purpose of the thing was supposed toi be.
wg