The worst cheating excuse of all time?

Just reading that WADA are seeking a ban for Yannick Sinner after the tennis ruling body decided he wasn’t guilty and accepted his excuse that the reason he tested positive for anabolic steroids was due to his masseuse using a spray on a cut on their finger that contained the anabolic steroid and then giving him a massage. I can’t believe they managed to keep a straight face saying that.

Previous number 1 spot was held by Jon Jones and his tainted gas station boner pills story. Sinner is straight in at number 1 now

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/sep/28/wada-seeks-long-ban-for-world-no-1-jannik-sinner-over-positive-drugs-test?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I always thought Floyd Landis was right up towards the top of the list, not only for cheating so blatantly that even the rest of the doped-up peloton couldn’t come near him but then the grifting, lying and “I had some celebratory whiskies” excuses.

Tyler Hamilton’s “twin died in utero” excuse was pretty far fetched…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/05/usa.cycling

Benneton’s  ‘Option 13’.

“It’s there but we never use it”

I always thought Floyd Landis was right up towards the top of the list, not only for cheating so blatantly that even the rest of the doped-up peloton couldn’t come near him but then the grifting, lying and “I had some celebratory whiskies” excuses.

I thought that Landis’s initial excuse was even better, claiming that he had so much testerone in his blood sample because he had sex with his wife the night before. The reply from WADA was something like “he could have deflowered every virgin within a hundred miles with testerone levels that high”.

I was drunk, there was two of them…

the Russian figure skater who blamed her positive test on a strawberry dessert prepared by her grandfather on a chopping board he used to crush his medication pills on…

made Contador’s steak excuse look amateur

Tyler takes the win for me. Wasn’t it to try and explain different DNA in his blood?

“She was called Louise..”

We had an Irish footballer who’s gran died twice. Same gran.

Toyota’s “it flexes out the way? Oh my, we didn’t know…” has to also be up there…

Most people have two grans.  Not in Norfolk obviously, but elsewhere it’s pretty common.

Updated for clarity.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman

Daryl Impey’s,”oh the pharmacist sold me empty capsules that just happened to be contaminated with a banned masking agent before I used them to take bicarb” has always been a bit of a stretch for me.

At first Schumacher stood his ground, pointing the finger at Villeneuve. “I braked on the maximum. He braked even later. With this braking point I wouldn’t make the corner and he wouldn’t make the corner. So he used me a little bit as braking. I probably wouldn’t have done anything different.”

.

No. We gave you the benefit of the doubt three years ago…

We had an Irish footballer who’s gran died twice. Same gran.

I knew of a young rider who blamed his lack of performance every year on the death of a grandparent.

Oh I would have done some training / won some races but I was traumatised by the death of [grandparent].

Once he was on the 5th or 6th death, people began to suspect that he might just be a bit shit as a rider…

Thinking about it, Fenke van den Driessche’s excuse for motor doping was a cracker as well.

It wasn’t my bike, well it was my bike but it was actually my old bike and my brother’s mate had set it up with a motor so he could keep up with me but it just so happened to be identical to my race bike and it just so happened to be in my pits at the Worlds…

Not entirely convincing.

Neither was the argument that she’d never used it before when the footage emerged of her dropping Helen Wyman and the rest of the Elites up the Kopenberg, seated and effortless, when the rest of the pack are out of the saddle and struggling.

The Irish footballer story was a good’un

I think he got flown home by private jet for his grannies funeral

The FAI found out granny was still alive

He told them it was a misunderstanding, it was his other granny that had died

The FAI found out she was still alive too.

Frank Vandenbroucke. The dog ate my drugs:

Vandenbroucke made headlines in 1999 for the first of many drug problems, arrested by Paris police but then released.[27] In 2001 he was stopped on the E17 motorway in Belgium in a speeding car[28] shared with Bernard Sainz, the so-called Dr Mabuse of cycling. Sainz was jailed in 2008 for falsely practising medicine.[29][30] Sainz could not produce the insurance documents the law insisted he carry[28] and police searched the car and found drugs later identified as clenbuterol, morphine and EPO,[31] which is used in sport as a blood-booster.[n 6] Sainz insisted they were homeopathic products. After Sainz said he had spent the night at Vandenbroucke’s house, police acquired a search warrant from a court in Termonde and searched Vandenbroucke’s house[32] with drugs specialists.[20] There they found small quantities of more drugs which Vandenbroucke claimed were for his dog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Vandenbroucke_(cyclist)

Raimondo Rumsas. My mother-in-law was using the drugs:

The Lithuanian Raimondas Rumsas, who is under suspicion of using banned drugs en route to third place in the Tour de France, yesterday claimed that the large store of medicines found in his wife Edita’s possession by French customs on Sunday was destined for his mother-in-law

…

Customs officers stopped her car for a routine check at the Mont Blanc tunnel on Sunday morning and found a large temperature-controlled suitcase in the boot, containing “corticosteroids, testosterone, erythropoietin” – the blood-booster widely used in cycling in the 1990s – “growth hormones and anabolic steroids,” a police spokesman said yesterday. There were apparently a further 35 medicines in the suitcase, some of which were unknown to the police and are still being analysed.

Her husband maintains that the entire affair is a mystery to him. “She has never hidden anything from me and if it is true that she was carrying all that in the car then she will have to explain it to me when she is released from custody.”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2002/jul/31/tourdefrance2002.tourdefrance

The Russian hurdler Shubenkov was acquitted for crushing diuretic tablets to dose his 3mo baby. In fact, the amounts needed for detection in urine are in the tens of nano grams range. For some perspective, that’s about a million times less than your clinical dose and you will not be able to see it. Hence such a source contamination in a kitchen is possible

https://www.espn.com.au/olympics/story/_/id/31685690/russian-hurdler-sergey-shubenkov-cleared-genuinely-exceptional-doping-violation

Exchange of bodily fluids with someone who is doping is enough to cause you to fail a drugs test. You’ve been warned and I will give no details but don’t swallow anyone else’s bodily fluids. Any of them.

The Daryl Impey case is interesting, because it is now well-established that capsules and over-encapsulation/coating of some medicines can have diuretic contamination. It helps to be able to provide the offending capsules, however. There have been multiple failures for ibuprofen, for example (coated due to taste – it’s about the worst tasting medicine ever and you are welcome to crushing before swallowing to test this).

For me, and this is my hobby as an expert witness in some notable cases, Floyd Landis wins. His explanations were both fanciful and laughable. But my what a performance on that day. Professionally, I would not be surprised if Contador was innocent and if you are an athlete and travelling to South America, don’t eat the meat! I mean that. About 1/200 meat samples in a study were sufficient to fail a doping test in a WADA sponsored study.

Exchange of bodily fluids with someone who is doping is enough to cause you to fail a drugs test. You’ve been warned and I will give no details but don’t swallow anyone else’s bodily fluids. Any of them.

Yeah wasn’t there an Olympian who tested positive for marijuana after kissing someone at a party?

Ross Rebagliatia claimed his positive test was second hand smoking…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Rebagliati#:~:text=The%20International%20Olympic%20Committee%20initially,entrepreneur%20in%20the%20cannabis%20industry.

Exchange of bodily fluids with someone who is doping is enough to cause you to fail a drugs test. You’ve been warned and I will give no details but don’t swallow anyone else’s bodily fluids. Any of them.

Thankfully, it’s been some considerable time since I’d be at risk of that happening – not that it’s likely to have made any difference from a performance-enhancing point of view…

Coming back to the OP:

his masseuse using a spray on a cut on their finger that contained the anabolic steroid and then giving him a massage.

Massuese should have had WADA training too.  No excuse.

I’d say the problem is the judgements not the excuses. Unless drug cases are different to legal cases.

Ian Huntley’s lawyer stood up in court and said that one of the girls fell over in his bathroom and hit her head. It was rubbish and he went to prison. That’s the system working

It seems reasonable if your career is going to be ended that you give an alternative explanation. The was a terrible case of a female runner who took years to prove that her sample had gone off generating steriod like compounds. Her urine had been stored for 3 days at 35C.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Modahl#:~:text=retired%20in%202002.-,Legal%20challenge%20against%20positive%20drug%20test,the%20results%20were%20returned%20positive.

Drug test failures are reported as adverse analytical findings. They require an explanation from the athlete. If contamination is one such explanation evidence is required. For the case of the physio, this explanation is one source of contamination. What matters is whether it is biologically possible. If so, does that introduce reasonable doubt? The standard of proof is at the criminal level.

Anyone who,s taken a steroid cream has absorbed drug through the skin (i had a lot of betnovate as a kid). i’ve not done any detailed sums to look at dose, but i imagine his urine levels were in the picograms per mL.

Hair Samples are now used routinely to establish or rule out past drug taking history. tricky if you are male and take as No 2 all over. Not seen testing of “other” hair.

EDIT. ITIA judgement says 121 and 122 pg/mL a week apart. those are about 1000x lower than doping levels. para 47 https://www.itia.tennis/media/yzgd3xoz/240819-itia-v-sinner.pdf

ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Dennis Mitchell

Mitchell’s excuse for his high testosterone level was a classic, when he noted that it was due to having several beers and having sex multiple times with his wife, because it was her birthday and she deserved it.

https://olympics.com/en/athletes/dennis-mitchell

Given how strong masseuse fingers tend to be, it doesn’t surprise me that they are using roids on their fingers to build them up!!!

‘I’m just so damn good I can ride away from all the best riders in the world regardless of ride type…again, and again, and again’…….said a certain Slovenian cyclist in his head 🙂

In Sinner’s case it is his second positive test.

I think someone in the top echelons of tennis thinks the sport could lose viewers when Djokovic retires and Alcaraz is left as the undisputed number one…

Sorry but I’m still trying to think of the joke that has ‘an a bollick’ as the punchline. That’s all I have to offer.

Mary goes to the doctors and speaks to a different doctor to her usual one…
‘How is your treatment going, Mary?’
‘Not great, the steroids I’ve been given is making grow a small pen!s…’
‘Anabolic?’
‘No, just the pen!s’

That one?

LOL!

Lizzie Banks’ case has made it a bit more complicated to know what to think when athletes blame contamination – obviously there is the “well they would say that” angle, but she makes her case pretty well, in lots of detail, and the process and reasoning from UKAD/WADA is pretty poor at best.  Main points being that with tests getting more sensitive, there’s loads of medication like paracetamol that has some degree of contamination, well within what’s allowed by pharmaceutical manufacturing standards, and which a few years ago would never be detectable. But now it is, at least at the labs with more modern kit, and while testing labs need to be able to meet a minimum detection level, there’s no minimum reporting threshold for some very common contaminants, even though the testing agencies know this is an issue

Podcast is worth a listen: https://audioboom.com/posts/8509557-an-interview-with-lizzy-banks

Or there’s the written version on her website: https://lizzybanks.co.uk/

But in the spirit of the thread – the first finisher in the 1904 Olympic marathon did 11 miles of it by car. Then claimed once caught that they only crossed the line as a joke and didn’t intend to claim the win. Slightly mad race for everyone else too, between the dehydration, hallucinations, brandy and strychnine.

…while testing labs need to be able to meet a minimum detection level, there’s no minimum reporting threshold for some very common contaminants, even though the testing agencies know this is an issue

I haven’t read any suggestions that drug testing is routinely returning adverse reports?

‘Routinely’ probably isn’t the right word, you still need someone to have taken contaminated medication shortly before the test. There’s a bit on the numbers on her website linked above, key points being:

From 2015 onwards, as the testing equipment became more advanced, the percentage of samples that returned a positive test for a diuretic steadily increased.

In the years 2014 and 2015, 0.14% of samples were positive for a diuretic. By 2019 that figure had increased to 0.24%.

In June 2021, WADA introduced their minimum reporting limit of 20ng/ml for 6 diuretics. That meant that any test at that level or below would not be reported at all. This limit was backdated for the 2020 and 2021 testing figures.

In 2020, with the figures adjusted for the new minimum reporting limit for the 6 diuretics, the percentage of samples positive for a diuretic suddenly dropped back down to 0.14%, the lowest seen since 2015. In 2021, that figure was 0.13%, the lowest since 2012.

The sudden drop in percentage of positive tests from 2019 to 2020 represented a 42% reduction in the number of athletes returning a positive test. Comparing the 2021 figures with the 2019 figures, we see a 46% reduction in positive tests.

But what does this actually mean? It means that at least 40% of the tests carried out could have been positive at a level indicative of contamination. I say “at least” because you must remember two things: the minimum reporting limit was only introduced for 6 substances (out of at least 37); contamination can cause concentrations well above 20ng/ml depending on the substance and its half-life.

Based on the 2019 and 2021 figures, it is possible that 316 athletes returned positive tests due to contamination in 2019 alone. This estimation is only for the 6 specific diuretics. The real figure is likely to be much higher.

Just here to point out that just one failed marriage & consequent remarriages could result in having 6 grandparents.

I haven’t read any suggestions that drug testing is routinely returning adverse reports?

You won’t. If they are explained by contamination, they remain confidential and are not released. The only reason for me to ever get started in this field was that someone leaked Chris Froome’s ADR and I offered my assistance to Sky, I was an expert in inhaled beta-agonist pharmacokinetics. I didn’t work for Lizzy banks, but I have worked with the lawyer who helped her.

That you can fail a drugs test for taking a contaminated ibuprofen and ruin a career, is outrageous (and now recognised). Professional athletes are professional (gasp) and record everything they take. Retaining supplements and batches of any medicine is sadly often impossible. There is a geographical distribution for clenbuterol failures; you are vastly more likely to fail a test in countries where the drug is routinely (and legally) used in meat production.

To be honest, beyond lab drug testing analytics, some of the science and statistics underlying WADA leaves a lot to be desired.