Doping in Soccer/Football

[nevada]

They might root out a guy playing for a Bayern Mönchengladbach or a Fulham or something once every decade or so, but Barcelona? No way.

Even on this forum, Amsterhammer threw a hissy fit when I commented on the dream team not being so squeaky clean perfect.

I hope it blows up and they all get thrown under the bus. Guardiola is a career cheat and a stain. But if they whack him, they should whack the lot of them, and that's even less likely to happen than it is in cycling.

Guardiola is on his way to the premiership.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Guardiola is on his way to the premiership.

And? It just means he gets to lead a different bunch of cheats in worse weather conditions.

 

[Benotti69]

And? It just means he gets to lead a different bunch of cheats in worse weather conditions.

For more money than Barcelona are paying him

 

[Parrulo]

I'd say this applies to almost all top clubs in Europe to be honest....I usually shy away from casting aspersions about people's physical transformations...but just take a quick google for Cristiano Ronaldo shirtless to see the wonderful benefits that HGH could bring you....

so natural....just protein shakes and banana smoothies

well at least he doesn't say he became like that without going to gym lol

 

[centri]

Barca is using HGH

http://www.irishpeloton.com/2012/02/drugs-in-football-pull-the-other-one/

Perhaps the most interesting part is how they appear to not think the rules apply to them

Word from a trainer I know out here, who attends seminars and the like with folks from Barca, is that they use Growth Factor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_factor

Not uncommon, and perhaps a slip-up by the journo... given the ease at which he states it. That said, I'm of the "they dope" persuasion.

 

[sniper]

Barca is using HGH

http://www.irishpeloton.com/2012/02/drugs-in-football-pull-the-other-one/

Perhaps the most interesting part is how they appear to not think the rules apply to them

This is getting ridiculous.
Graham Hunter, the big Barca fan, forced to withdraw his slip of the tongue and apoligize:
http://www.netjoven.pe/deportes/84790/Barcelona-Periodista-que-los-acuso-de-doping-se-retracta.html

Damn, he seems to be down on his knees begging for forgiveness, as if somebody's been keeping a gun to his head.

'Es imperdonable. Voy a hacerlo mejor en el futuro', declaró Hunter tras acusar a los 'azulgranas' en especial al mediocampista Xavi.

The guy hadn't even accused anybody. It was a classical slip of the tongue.

Man, would it be great to hear Fuentes come clean.

 

[Ney the Viking]

Danish newspaper reports that Cadena Cope has offered FC Barcelona 200.000€ for their doping alledgations against the club (FC B has sued the radio station).

Guess thats Thruth 0 - 1 Omerta

source: http://ekstrabladet.dk/sport/fodbold/udenlandsk_fodbold/spanskfodbold/article1716786.ece

 

[coinneach]

greek european champioship winners

The football team that I was and am most suspicious about was the Greek European Championship side....their players were average, but their fitness and stamina was unbelievable. Then, a couple of years later, the 2 best Greek sprinters get done just before the olympics.

I have never seen any journalist or blogger explore whether there is a possible connection, or not. The deafening silence shows how football can keep itself above suspicion.

Its so easy to pick on some minority sport that most car drivers don't like anyway.

Can anyone enlighten me?

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Maybe you're onto something, maybe not, I don't know. I figured Greece won that tournament thanks to playing in a style that was very out-of-vogue at the time, to the point that many of the teams they played against simply didn't know how to face a team playing like that because they'd not done it before. They were compact, well-organised and able to nick that one goal that would win it. As to the phenomenal fitness, Stelios Giannakopoulos was fined by his club team for going down with cramp inside 90 minutes in one of the games, on the basis that if he was looking after his fitness he'd be able to go 90 minutes without cramping up.

I cheered them all the way to it as underdogs, but at the same time it put the cause of the sport back a long way from an entertainment point of view, as now you have lots of identikit national teams who have organised and structured defence and no playmakers or born goalscorers, whose style of play is all about getting the 0-0 or 1-0. This leads to very frustrating games because if they're level, they just stifle the opposition and prevent exciting football being played, and if they fall behind then more often than not they roll over and play dead because they simply don't have any weapons for getting themselves back into a match.

And as soon as teams cottoned on to what the Greeks were doing and worked out ways around it, they were swiftly returned to their usual spot in the European football pile.

 

[sniper]

The football team that I was and am most suspicious about was the Greek European Championship side....their players were average, but their fitness and stamina was unbelievable. Then, a couple of years later, the 2 best Greek sprinters get done just before the olympics.

I have never seen any journalist or blogger explore whether there is a possible connection, or not. The deafening silence shows how football can keep itself above suspicion.

Its so easy to pick on some minority sport that most car drivers don't like anyway.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Good point about the Greek. Note that they were trained by a German coach, Rehagel I believe.
The Germans have always been reputed for their incredible stamina, and consequently for their capacity to decide matches in the dying minutes of important games.
It has only rarely been questioned whether that stamina was natural or not. Mostly, it is/was assumed to be a matter of 'mentality'.

One related question is whether in professional football, say at Champions League level, we have a level playing field, or whether Barca and Madrid are really ahead in terms of juicing. Physically they do appear to be a few steps ahead of the rest. But I'm inclined to assume that clubs like Bayern Munich and of course the English and Italian clubs have access to the same quality of PEDs and medical 'care' as Barca and Madrid.

On the other hand, HGH seems to be widespread in Barca and Madrid (see previous posts in this thread), and perhaps this particular drug is not yet as widespread in other parts of Europe?

 

[The Hitch]

. Then, a couple of years later, the 2 best Greek sprinters get done just before the olympics.

Try a couple of weeks.

 

[Andynonomous]

Old news, but I don't know if it has been covered here.

http://thelongballtactic.wordpress.com/tag/epo/

 

[sniper]

Old news, but I don't know if it has been covered here.

http://thelongballtactic.wordpress.com/tag/epo/

Old news indeed, but still a good read.

It's just massively irritating to see how Barca kills freedom of speech by opening legal suits against any journo or news outlet who dares to cast suspicion on their performances.
Even the German press remains silent, perhaps because they know that Bayern Munich and the German nationals probably dope as hard as Barca and Madrid.

I guess all we can do is to hope for some bomb (e.g. Fuentes) to explode at some stage, but then again, the Juve-affair was a small bomb already, and nothing has changed since. There is too much money at stake. That is also the tenor of this nice short article in the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung (on why the German anti-doping corporation NADA is currently lacking funding):
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/j5b38B/492200/Der-Missbrauch-des-Sports.html

 

[Andynonomous]

Platini says that Spain doing a good job in the fight against doping.


Ok then, since we know that soccer is soooo clean, then he must be right about Spain.

 

[Caruut]

Old news indeed, but still a good read.

It's just massively irritating to see how Barca kills freedom of speech by opening legal suits against any journo or news outlet who dares to cast suspicion on their performances.
Even the German press remains silent, perhaps because they know that Bayern Munich and the German nationals probably dope as hard as Barca and Madrid.

I guess all we can do is to hope for some bomb (e.g. Fuentes) to explode at some stage, but then again, the Juve-affair was a small bomb already, and nothing has changed since. There is too much money at stake. That is also the tenor of this nice short article in the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung (on why the German anti-doping corporation NADA is currently lacking funding):
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/j5b38B/492200/Der-Missbrauch-des-Sports.html

The Fuentes bomb should have hit football when it exploded, but it didn't. Only half the names from Puerto were ever released, and to think that football wasn't tarred is naive, in my opinion.

You only have to look at the relations between Barca/Madrid and the Spanish establishment to work out why nothing hit them. Both clubs are run on debt. Debt that will never be called in because Spanish banks are too scared of the fallout on their brand if they were ever to take down one of those two.

British newspaper The Guardian have a column written by an anonymous footballer (or as it was popularly believed, a group of footballers all contributing to one persona to provide more stories and more anonymity). The Secret Footballer said that in a career spanning over a decade at clubs spanning from strong top-half Premierleague sides to top-level Championship sides, he was tested 3 times. Each time he had a urine test, and was made to do it in front of the testers.

He claimed never to have done drugs, but possibly this was a lie. Most of the columns were related to training, relationships between team-mates, relationships with the media, relationships with fans and personal lives of players. Given that he was still active, perhaps he felt that he'd be pushing the footballing establishment too far with his anonymity if he started discussing more than what was essentially just gossip.

3 times in a long career suggests that you'd give it a go, don't you think?

The link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/16/the-secret-footballer

 

[Caruut]

Maybe you're onto something, maybe not, I don't know. I figured Greece won that tournament thanks to playing in a style that was very out-of-vogue at the time, to the point that many of the teams they played against simply didn't know how to face a team playing like that because they'd not done it before. They were compact, well-organised and able to nick that one goal that would win it. As to the phenomenal fitness, Stelios Giannakopoulos was fined by his club team for going down with cramp inside 90 minutes in one of the games, on the basis that if he was looking after his fitness he'd be able to go 90 minutes without cramping up.

I cheered them all the way to it as underdogs, but at the same time it put the cause of the sport back a long way from an entertainment point of view, as now you have lots of identikit national teams who have organised and structured defence and no playmakers or born goalscorers, whose style of play is all about getting the 0-0 or 1-0. This leads to very frustrating games because if they're level, they just stifle the opposition and prevent exciting football being played, and if they fall behind then more often than not they roll over and play dead because they simply don't have any weapons for getting themselves back into a match.

And as soon as teams cottoned on to what the Greeks were doing and worked out ways around it, they were swiftly returned to their usual spot in the European football pile.

You're missing one key ingredient to the Greek success. Luck. It can be easy to forget that in a sport like football one error can define 90 minutes of football, which in turn, for the European championships, define the next four year. When a slip or momentary distraction can change so much, luck plays a huge part.

In terms of underdogs playing unattractive football, I think that it is the job of the supposed favourite to play well and break them down, not to expect them to come out all guns blazing so that they can be shot down like fish in a barrel.

 

[Caruut]

For more money than Barcelona are paying him

He also said that he finds the Barcelona job too stressful.

 

[Caruut]

Don't even get me started on rugby. They are absolutely HUGE nowadays.

At the pro-level it's terrible, I think. I have two friends on a top UK uni side who said that they're certain no-one on that side is charging, but up the pyramid they were much less certain.

 

[Andynonomous]

Another "jealous" Frenchman pointing a finger at Spain (tennis/soccer/cycling,...).

 

[Libertine Seguros]

In terms of underdogs playing unattractive football, I think that it is the job of the supposed favourite to play well and break them down, not to expect them to come out all guns blazing so that they can be shot down like fish in a barrel.

Of course. And I don't blame teams for playing that way. It's just not very good to watch and does nothing for the game. It's like watching sprint stages in stage races in cycling; these guys aren't pro wrestlers and their job is to win, not to entertain, but the fans watch not out of duty but out of enjoyment, so they are not wrong to voice their displeasure if the spectacle displeases them.

 

[The Hitch]

There was a show today about messi how he became the best.
One of those s**** documentaries where camera shifts between supposed experts who give 2 obvious often cliched sentences each on things the viewer can see for him/her self.

Anyway not a mention of hgh, and that bold head moron who appeared earlier in this thread regarding revelation that hernandez takes hgh, is one of the "experts" interviewed throuhgout the show.

Of course as in any fake documentary they just talk crap while messis amazing goals are shown.

 

[Mambo95]

Anyway not a mention of hgh,

He was a kid of 11 who had a hormone deficiency problem which was diagnosed before he was at Barcelona. He took hgh for the exact reason for which it was designed. It's not as though he's a giant now

Do you think that children should be denied medical treatment in case they become top sportsmen?

Barcelona may well be doping, but there's no drug in the world which makes people play like Messi.

 

[Caruut]

He was a kid of 11 who had a hormone deficiency problem which was diagnosed before he was at Barcelona. He took hgh for the exact reason for which it was designed. It's not as though he's a giant now

Do you think that children should be denied medical treatment in case they become top sportsmen?

Barcelona may well be doping, but there's no drug in the world which makes people play like Messi.

Not unreasonable to suggest that children who have had hormone treatment should not, as adults, be allowed to be professional sportspeople, though.

 

[Mambo95]

Not unreasonable to suggest that children who have had hormone treatment should not, as adults, be allowed to be professional sportspeople, though.

Why? Because it made him bigger? As I mentioned, Messi isn't a giant. The use is legitimate, not for cheating reasons.

Would you stop a child who had taken EPO as six year old to beat leukaemia from playing sport, because without it he might be dead?

 

[The Hitch]

He was a kid of 11 who had a hormone deficiency problem which was diagnosed before he was at Barcelona. He took hgh for the exact reason for which it was designed. It's not as though he's a giant now

Do you think that children should be denied medical treatment in case they become top sportsmen?

Barcelona may well be doping, but there's no drug in the world which makes people play like Messi.

There aren't drugs which help with speed strength and stamina