Lifetime ban, or just a bit of a ban?

fiddy3 wrote: »

Yes, and who paid for his treatment....... BINGO, FC Barcelona! I guess they just wanted a tiny Argie to have a better life for himself, right? Anyone who doesn't think Barca and Real Madrid dope players has their head in the sand. Interesting last week how Pep Guardiola was lauded as a hero in the media as he stepped down. This is a man who was positive for nandrolone during his own career in Italy. This is a man in charge of a club, who, in 2005, tried to hire Eufemiano Feuntes as their team doctor. Who's Dr Fuentes.... just the godfather of doping in Spain who was nabbed in Operation Puerto in 2007, and had hundreds of elite sportspeople on his books. Funny how only the cyclists on his books got caught, mainly because as bad as cycling is, they at least aggressively pursue the cheats. One of the cyclists who was doped by Fuentes and got caught, Jesus Manzano, reported that he saw several high-profile Real Madrid players at Dr Fuentes' clinic in Madrid when he was there. The French newspaper Le Monde also reported at the time that it got access to Fuentes's doping programmes when police raided his house in the canaries, and saw doping plans made out for players from Real Madrid, Barcelona, Real Betis, and Atletico Madrid. Due to the police case being conducted, they couldn't report any specifics.

Zinedine Zidane was reported to have had blood transfusions in Switzerland during his career. Didier Deschamps was reported to have a haematocrit in the mid fifties during one test, over 50 usually means EPO unless you have a rare genetic condition. Arsene Wenger has stated in the past that he has seen disturbing blood values in several of the players who transferred to Arsenal from Spain and Italy which almost certainly suggested doping, which then normalised after a period there. What's more disturbing is the lack of effort to catch anyone in Spain, more than in England or France, for example. In La Liga, two matches are selected for post-match testing every Saturday, and from those team, just two players are picked. NO testing is done on Sunday matches. You do the maths on how likely a Messi or Ronaldo is to get tested on any given week. I make it about a 1 in 50 chance each week.

No one is pretending athletics or cycling is any cleaner than soccer. It isn't. What pisses people off is the double standards applied. For example, you have an <Snip> Irish Times writer Brian O'Connor writing about Barca during the week, asslicking of the highest order, while in the same article writing off athletics as not even worthy of mention due to how dirty it is. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2012/0423/1224315049414.html
People as painfully ignorant as him perpetuate the idea among the public that athletics is rotten to the core... that the olympics aren't worthing watching because, as joe schmoe thinks...'they're all at it'. All the while never wondering if maybe, just maybe, there are some immoral people in their beloved sport, who, ya know, might just stumble on the idea to juice up if it means being able to run the legs off a team in their own league one Sunday, do it again Wednesday night in Europe, then do it again three days later in El Classico. Nah, sure drugs don't help soccer players.

Ask yourself this, if an athlete or a cyclist dropped dead in the middle of a competition, how would the reaction have differed from the way fans and media reacted to Muamba and Morosini's over the last few weeks?