Beauty Killed The Beast and Booing Killed The Bull

It’s male pattern baldness Dan, you’d have to look at the men on his mother’s side of the family. Didn’t Rafa take a medical timeout in the US Open final that he lost to Djokovic, or was it Novak who took it? I forget.

Mitch — I found a report on that 2011 US Open Finals match —

http://www.tennis.com/pro-game/2011/09/us-open-djokovic-d-nadal/42699/

Djokovic won 6-2 6-4 6-7 6-1

The report says Djokovic required back treatment at the beginning of the fourth. Well, Djokovic may have gotten worried after Nadal won the 3rd set and was looking good — and so probably took a (fake) medical break just to break the momentum.

Now that I think of it — most medical timeouts happen when the player is loosing. When he is being outplayed. In some cases, its genuine — that he perhaps he was being outplayed because he was not well — but I would say in the majority of the cases, the intention is just to break the momentum.

After staunchly arguing against Scoop — I think I am having second thoughts here. I hadnt thought a lot about this before — but it may be true that most injuries, esp the ones that are reported when the player has been loosing for the past set or two — are fake.

I’m not factoring it totally on Rafa losing his hair. But when you start adding up factors, I think there is certainly a strong case he might be taking steroids.

1. The guy is built unlike any other tennis player we’ve ever seen in terms of bulk.

2. He comes from a culture where doping is part of the sporting scene, i.e., cycling, I don’t know about soccer, but Dr. Fuentes.

3. It is a closed society, meaning, we found out who was on Tony Bosch’s list of dopers, but we never found out who was on Dr. Fuentes’ list.

4. Rafa has incurred a lot of injuries at a relatively young age and instead of seeing his body and condition deteriorate, he seems to come back stronger.

5. He’s the only major player who has skipped slam events with the possible reason of missing drug tests at these events.

6. He’s the only top guy who has kept his coaching in-family. No outsiders, no secrets revealed?

7. Finally, he’s losing his hair suddenly when he seemed pretty hirsute when he was younger.

Dan — the arguments you make to suggest Nadal might be taking drugs are very superficial to say the least. You can practically make such arguments for every player.

I think we should let ATP/ITF find out which players take drugs instead of us guessing. I mean, they do drug tests ALL the time. They dont warn players — “ok, we are going to do tests at the US Open” — so Nadal can drop out of the US Open due to knee injury. AFAIK, they probably do drug tests in ALL the major events, isnt it?

Regarding the other point that Scoop mentioned — that ITF may hide positive results — even if thats true — I dont think they will consistently hide it for a particular player. I mean, maybe they will hide ONE positive result. But if that player is coming out positive in every tournament, I dont think they will hide it.

Scoop, what’s wrong, let alone annoying, is that the regulation of pro-tennis actually provides for, encourages even, abuse of the medical timeout. We constantly see it with Rafa, and Djokovic too, but they are are only doing what they are allowed to within the rules. Rules which are open to such abuse ought to be changed, the sooner the better. I thought there was a basic rule of tennis that “play must be continuous”. What happened to that?

On the subject of possible Nadal doping, his personal physician, Cotorro, happens to double as a doping control officer of the Spanish Tennis Federation. That’s a blatant conflict of interest. It’s circumstantial evidence like that, his support of Contador and so on, that add to the level of suspicion about him which in my view, is well-founded.

Scoop the link to the Reuters articles appears to be broken..

All the dopers have been warned off by the ITF. That’s why the rankings are in a state of churn presently. The ITF blood passport is almost an irrelevance. It’s six years too late for one thing and there will still only be a couple of blood samples taken a year per player anyway. That provides scope for all kind of medical and legal Troicki/Cilic-style argument when the flag is waved. Contrast that with cycling where a rider might have fifteen samples taken over the course of a season. The way the ITF are doing it, it will take ten years to establish any normative data by which time a player will be safely sunbathing himself on a beach in the South of France counting his mega millions.

A good indicator of tennis doping is that of younger players not breaking through. The average age of an ATP professional is rising. Career longevity is sustained by doping as players extend their twilight years. That’s a known risk factor in ped use. When you get notorious doping doctors hanging around the tennis scene like del Moral doping becomes a given.

The biological passport may be late in coming but tennis is now the only major sport along with cycling doing it. So I’ll give credit to tennis for being more proactive than any of the major US sports.

MLB, NFL and NBA are filled with roids ragers amid the weakest drug testing in sports. The NBA players union still won’t accept synthetic testosterone and EPO testing which are the drugs du jour over traditional steroids.

Dan, don’t listen to me but rather listen to what those in the know know; like this man for example:_

http://www.dw.de/simon-all-sports-are-prone-to-doping/a-17391410

You have a very good anti-doping expert in the States, Don Catlin. He has positively ridiculed tennis. Your own Victor Conte Tweeted that doping in tennis is “likely rampant” due to the flimsy controls.

Those are the people to listen to. Then just look around and draw your own conclusions. Do you trust those performances you see, as entirely genuine?