Briant_Gumble said:Not to mention disregarding the no more than 20 seconds between points rule.
Nadal's not the only one. Djokovic takes even longer
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Briant_Gumble said:Not to mention disregarding the no more than 20 seconds between points rule.
sniper said:true, but he's not very sportsman-like on court.
the high raised fist, the little rituals.
I don't like it, though he's not the first nor the last of course.
right.SundayRider said:Yeah of course they train - but when you get teams where the lightest player is 90Kg at a low level of BF% you have to ask questions.
Ferrer? At 30Don't be late Pedro said:I wager that you could replace Spanish with most, if not all, nationalities and Nadal and Ferrer with their relevant top players.
tells us where the priorities lie.zebedee said:Wimbledon proposes to double its miserly £100,000 annual contribution to the ITF's antidoping budget. Tennis spends about one fifth of what cycling spends and it looks like they want to keep it that way.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/te...-drug-tests-brought-Grand-Slams.html#comments
By comparison, Wimbledon is reckoned to be spending £100 million on improvements to its centre court, including a rumoured £20 million on its retractable roof.
Pathetic really.
Ronaldo Was Doped
Bernando Santi says that the reason why Ronaldo has suffered so many injuries is because when he signed for PSV Eindhoven in 1994 as a 17-year-old, he was regularly pumped full of anabolic steroids in order to build up the player physically and help him grow.
As a result Ronaldo then developed muscles that were unable to co-exist with his knee’s bone structure, leading to devastating problems in later years.
"I spoke to colleagues in Holland who know people at PSV,” Santi told the daily Folha de Sao Paulo. “I did not get to talk to PSV doctors. They gave supplements to Ronaldo, who was very thin, and among those supplements they included some anabolic substances which could make him grow a bit more.”
Santi is in no doubt that it was these drugs that have caused the injuries. "It is a consequence of having grown beyond what his muscles were prepared to grow," he insisted.
"He gained muscle mass very fast, when he still had not reached maturity. The bill for the use of steroids shows up long term, 10, 15 or 20 years later."
iejeecee said:There have been speculations in the past that (Brazilian) Ronaldo's knee injuries are a result of early steroid use
(e.g. http://grg51.typepad.com/steroid_nation/2008/02/reports-of-socc.html)
I wonder if Nadal is a similar case....
Did uncle Toni take the IQ tests for him.zebedee said:Nadal has been tested a number of times over the months since Wimbledon. Why would the ITF continue to test a player who cannot compete? That's a daft notion.
Nadal has been tested o-o-c several times because it is now recognised that the probability and risk of doping in tennis players is occurring precisely during those periods when a player is off the tour either training, as Agassi used to do or dealing with an injury, as clearly is the case with Nadal. The talk of Nadal serving a silent ban is a complete nonsense, now of urban myth proportions, sadly, as it tends to distract from the real issues around doping in tennis.
It is far more likely a proposition, as you say, that abuse of anabolics early in his career has led to the knee tendon problems Nadal has today. If it does emerge that Nadal was one of Fuentes clients too, then it more or less indicates the case that Nadal was comprehensively doping from a very young age comparatively speaking.
Briant_Gumble said:Personally I'm more inclined to believe this explanation than the covered up six month ban.
zebedee said:Clearly nothing will happen to turn the tide of sport doping until governments really start twisting arms. Without back-up from the panoply of state agencies who could make life difficult for the dopers and their doctors, as the Italian Carabinieri and their investigating magistrates have occasionally shown, antidoping is going nowhere whatever your sport.
iejeecee said:There have been speculations in the past that (Brazilian) Ronaldo's knee injuries are a result of early steroid use
(e.g. http://grg51.typepad.com/steroid_nation/2008/02/reports-of-socc.html)
I wonder if Nadal is a similar case....
zebedee said:Tank the odd match every so often for a good payout from an illegal betting syndicate and you might make some half-decent money along the way too.
iejeecee said:Hahaha, hell yeah why not go the whole 9 yards while your at it
Maybe the real cause of Nadals knee problems are some mafioso types with a baseball bat.... ok, that was lame, anyway.
To me clay court matches seem the most grueling of any surface. Maybe they are softer on the joints, but they require a lot more stamina. Or at-least they used to in the past. Is it a coincidence that nearly all of the top "doped" Spaniards of the last 2 decades were/are clay court specialists. I guess the added conditional benefits of doping are most beneficial on slower surfaces.
del1962 said:Or perhaps that Spaniards grow up on clay courts, while others on hardcourts or grass courts.
Yeah, very sorry, iejee. Tennis players neither dope nor throw matches. That was just me trying to drag a clean sport down and tar it with cycling's brush.iejeecee said:Hahaha, hell yeah why not go the whole 9 yards while your at it
Maybe the real cause of Nadals knee problems are some mafioso types with a baseball bat.... ok, that was lame, anyway.
To me clay court matches seem the most grueling of any surface. Maybe they are softer on the joints, but they require a lot more stamina. Or at-least they used to in the past. Is it a coincidence that nearly all of the top "doped" Spaniards of the last 2 decades were/are clay court specialists. I guess the added conditional benefits of doping are most beneficial on slower surfaces.
zebedee said:Yeah, very sorry, iejee. Tennis players neither dope nor throw matches. That was just me trying to drag a clean sport down and tar it with cycling's brush.
I admit it. Doping is basically unknown in our noble game. There's no point either in the ITF wasting money unnecessarily on an antidoping programme that's not required. Better the old farts who run the ITF and the grand slams spend it on improving those flower displays which make their grounds look so pretty.
Spaniards tend to be particularly proficient on clay, epo or no epo, because there's little else in their country to play on.
zebedee said:As I can vouch personally, you can numb knee pain with strong painkiller which allows you to continue playing. However, any underlying condition will remain and worsen as the effect of impact injury (microtrauma) grows. Nadal may have got away with it in 2009/2010, perhaps using cortisone injections to ease any inflammation too, which itself can aggravate anything underlying. So the problem slowly worsens and you end up with the condition so bad that the knee just goes, as both of mine did. The slightest problem with a knee destroys confidence too, which at the level Nadal is playing at, would be catastrophic for him. Tennis at his level is played as much in the mind as on a court.
If it's degenerative tendinosis he has, then autologous blood injections into the tendon are required (or more advanced blood spinning treatments which I think Nadal actually had) and lots and lots of eccentric work. That takes a lot of time and it is perfectly understandable why Nadal was forced off tour and it's got nothing whatsoever to do with silent bans for doping.
One of the worst aspects of pro-tennis is playing constantly on hard courts which are ruinous for players' knees. Nadal has rightly raised this issue and it's one the ATP needs to address. Nothing to do with peds. Players' health and careers are best sustained by playing more tennis on grass and clay courts.