Are athletes receiving fair treatment at the hands of anti-doping agencies?<\/b><\/p>\n
Gambling is the raging subject in the tennis world today and steroids are on the back burner. I\u2019ll get back to gambling soon enough but in light of the recent decision in the Floyd Landis<\/b> case, I want to look at the process of handing out drug suspensions to athletes.<\/p>\n
The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is currently 35-0 in cases brought against athletes suspected of using banned substances. In other words they\u2019ve haven\u2019t lost a case yet. If the athlete never wins, is the process fair?<\/p>\n
One way to answer the question is to compare an illegal drug case in a court of law to a case brought by an anti-doping agency against an athlete. Since the USADA is based in the U.S., I\u2019m going to use the U.S. judicial system for my example.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say a police officer finds you holding a bag of cocaine before you can flush it down the toilet or, heaven forbid, swallow it. The police officer arrests you but he trips over his drug-sniffing dog and sprains his ankle then forgets to give you the Miranda warning (\u201cYou have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law\u2026\u201d)<\/p>\n
When you get to court, the judge throws the case out because the police officer forgot to read you your rights. Now let\u2019s look at the Landis case.<\/p>\n
Landis tested positive for an abnormally high testosterone to epitestosterone ratio after stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France. Landis had given urine samples in previous stages of the Tour but the samples hadn\u2019t tested positive for any banned substances. After Landis\u2019 positive test, the USADA went back to those previous samples and ran more sophisticated tests which showed the presence of synthetic testosterone.<\/p>\n