Lionel Messi

[Jordinho]

I think being catholics is part of it. Just say you're sorry and everything's okay. For them the real shame is getting caught.

 

[metalgear]

HGh sounds interesting as a health supplement ... Where can I get some

 

[Craig_J]

HGh sounds interesting as a health supplement ... Where can I get some

Think it's a bit to late for you to win this years Ballon d'Or.

 

[jts1882]

lack of doping questions, it came out with the Operation puerto revelations that fuentes had also been working with tennis players and football clubs in spain, then it all went quiet

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/29/operation-puerto-doctor-footballers-fuentes

I'm not saying Messi is one player in question here, but in Spain obvious questions around doping don't seem to be asked by the press for any sport, even Contador got off light

I think the judge ordered destruction of the evidence on non-cyclists after the trial.

Edit: See below, although its worth noting Nadal criticised the decision.

Madrid judge Julia Santamaria earlier this week ordered the destruction of 211 bags of blood and other evidence seized in police raids on Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes in 2006, citing privacy laws. Fuentes has been given a suspended one-year jail sentence.

Fuentes confirmed in court he had clients from other sports, including tennis, football and athletics, but not that they had been involved in doping.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/...that-allows-cheats-to-go-unnamed-8603773.html

 

[Bullet]

There is no doubt Messi's technical skills are sensational. He's had a flare for football from a very young age. But to be the best of the best, the greatest player who ever lived to some, then you have to have more than technical ability.

There are plenty of players with vision and deft skills. But they don't make your jaw drop with superman like performances. I love watching Messi. He can be on another level and of course it is not all down to drugs. Yet his development - as a player and as a specimen - are entwined with growth hormones. The combination of his amazing technical ability - to control and move a football with both feet - with power, speed and the confidence he must have had when he started to be able to be on another level, are an awesome combination.

So no its not all down to drugs, he's a brilliant technical player, but would he be as good without the hormones, in my view, no. And what amazes me is it is never talked about, almost swept under the carpet.

This would make more sense if Messi was built like Drogba or even Jake Livermore. Of course the drugs helped him develop, but only up to the level of a sturdy lady, not a beastly male.

 

[Neymar]

This would make more sense if Messi was built like Drogba or even Jake Livermore. Of course the drugs helped him develop, but only up to the level of a sturdy lady, not a beastly male.

yh, but if he had explosive ability of someone like xavi or fabregas, he would not be anywhere near as good as he is now. and whos to say that without the drugs he would even be at xavi's level in terms of phhysical attributes.

 

[Baleforce]

This would make more sense if Messi was built like Drogba or even Jake Livermore. Of course the drugs helped him develop, but only up to the level of a sturdy lady, not a beastly male.

I think it's all relative, without knowing how small he'd be without the treatment it's hard to say

you can have all the skill in the world but if you are 4ft 6 and weigh 6 stone you ain't playing professional football

 

[metalgear]

This would make more sense if Messi was built like Drogba or even Jake Livermore. Of course the drugs helped him develop, but only up to the level of a sturdy lady, not a beastly male.

Sturdy lady ?

 

[Modric THFC]

Use of HGH is widespread at Barcelona.

Here's Graham Hunter you know this Graham Hunter http://www.amazon.co.uk/Barca-Making-Greatest-Team-World/dp/0956497152 who has an inside line of whats happening in the dressing room talking about HGH at Barcelona on Irish Radio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-CW4UeOdDc

The player he's talking about here is Xavi

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

 

[Neymar]

fascinating! especially when combined with the destroying of samples of spanish athletes

im a bit of a conspiracy theorist regarding this topic. i think way more high profile footballers and other athletes are taking drugs than we think. in athletics for example, i think basically everyone in the 100m finals are on drugs. and im including the worldclass 100m runner, that is the elephant in the room. i mean all the guys with the fastest times just beneath him have been caught at one stage or another. whats the chance that he is really totally clean?

also i remember listening to a bbc radio show on the cycling scandal a year and a half ago. and they mentioned how atheltes would base their training sites in obscure locations where the drugs testers couldnt get to them. and i dont want to make accusations at all, but when a certain world-class english distance runner trains in the kenyan mountains for most of the season, it does make me wonder...

 

[Modric THFC]

fascinating! especially when combined with the destroying of samples of spanish athletes

im a bit of a conspiracy theorist regarding this topic. i think way more high profile footballers and other athletes are taking drugs than we think. in athletics for example, i think basically everyone in the 100m finals are on drugs. and im including the worldclass 100m runner, that is the elephant in the room. i mean all the guys with the fastest times just beneath him have been caught at one stage or another. whats the chance that he is really totally clean?

also i remember listening to a bbc radio show on the cycling scandal a year and a half ago. and they mentioned how atheltes would base their training sites in obscure locations where the drugs testers couldnt get to them. and i dont want to make accusations at all, but when a certain world-class english distance runner trains in the kenyan mountains for most of the season, it does make me wonder...

I've no doubt anyone in a Kenyan training camp is doped. You go out there because that's where the expertise is for doping in middle distance. Also you keep an eye on your rivals and made sure they're nothing getting an advantage.
WADA has huge issues with Kenya and the Kenyan Government released a report this week on Doping in Kenyan sport.
This is from a german reporter who went undercover to investigate athletics doping in kenya http://athleticsillustrated.com/interviews/hajo-seppelt-kenyan-doping-exposed/

Also his coach is long rumoured to be dodgy and he comes out with carbon copys of Armstrong claims
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/olympic-legend-mo-farah-stunned-2275353
"I’m probably the most tested athlete in the world."

As someone obsessed with cycling for 20 years I know how easy it is to get round doping tests. Only an idiot would fail an EPO test. There is no bio passport in athletics. Not that that very accurate either.

 

[jts1882]

Jamaica only had a handful of tests in the run up to the 2012 Olympics and since then have had many positives.

Following some of the links above, there is the Juventus scandal and a comment by Wenger:

How does this effect football? Well, in the wake of the 1998 cycling scandal Roma manager Zdenek Zemen cast doubt in Italian magazine L’Espresso about the physique of certain Juventus players. Zemen believed that the increase in muscle bulk in players including Gianluca Vialli and Alessandro del Piero was likely achieved through doping, a problem he claimed was rampant in Italian football. The allegations were dismissed by everyone from Marcello Lippi to Vialli himself, who called Zemen a “terrorist”, but the claims were significant enough to be investigated by a Turin magistrate named Raffaele Guariniello.

Guariniello went through medical records, interviewed persons allegedly involved and, after two years, had enough evidence to make a case against Juventus. At the centre of the subsequent trial was the accusation of ‘sporting fraud’ levelled at Juve, the evidence seen in court included pages of stimulants given by the club’s medical staff to players and the revelation that the Turin club had not informed football authorities what exactly the medication was that they had been dishing out, as was the rule in Italy. After two years a sensational verdict was delivered – Juve’s doctor was found guilty of administering a series of illegal substances to footballers at the club, including EPO. In somewhat of a whitewash the court found that Juventus themselves were not guilty of anything as it could not be proved that Juve had ordered the doctor to carry out this doping programme. There then followed a lot of legal wrangling and visits to appeal courts and a new verdict was reached in 2005 – everyone at Juventus was absolved of ‘sporting fraud’ and there was no proof of EPO usage. More trips to appeal courts were made until the whole thing became a mass of confusing verdicts, retractions and reinstatements. David Foot in his superb book Calcio summarises the final verdict on the Juve doping case thusly:

“The Cassation court – the highest in the land – came to a final decision in March 2007. It was a classic Italian judicial compromise, satisfying nobody. In the first place the sentences absolving both [Juve president] Giraudo and [club doctor] Agricola were quashed. But the statute of limitations meant that nobody could any longer be convicted for the crimes of ‘sporting fraud’ and doping. So, in short, the judges had upheld the original sentence (guilty) but, in practice, everybody walked free without a mark on their criminal record.​

An incredible turn of events, when you think about it. Essentially, an Italian football team was found guilty of what amounts to running a systematic doping programme and not a thing was done about it. Compare this to the reaction caused by the Festina scandal in cycling in 1998 where several riders, team managers and doctors were given lengthy bans and there was talk of abandoning the entire Tour de France and whether the sport itself could carry on. Even today the effects of Festina are still felt in professional cycling. In the Juventus case Agricola was, amazingly, even allowed to stay on as team doctor.

Outside of Italian football, murmurings about doping have not gone away. In 2004, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger made the claim that “We have had some players come to us at Arsenal from other clubs abroad and their red blood cell count has been abnormally high. That kind of thing makes you wonder”. To go back to cycling again, if any rider is caught with a high level of red blood cells there is no ‘wondering’ involved, it means only one thing – that rider is using EPO and is immediately suspended, pending further investigation. Wenger went on to allege “there are clubs who dope their players without the players knowing”, painting a rather murky picture of an underworld that seems to have gone almost wholly unreported in the world of football.

Football was, again, linked closely to doping in the Operacion Puerto case of 2006. Puerto was the case brought against Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes who, from his Spanish laboratory, administered doping products to 200 professional athletes. Although the Puerto case is most commonly linked to cycling this is solely because cycling’s governing body were the only sporting organisation to reveal the names of the riders involved in the case. Of the 200 athletes who were allegedly seeing Fuentes, only 34 of them are cyclists. Fuentes himself has said that alongside cyclists he also worked with tennis stars and footballers, cyclist Jesus Manzano also claimed that he had seen several well-known La Liga players also visiting Fuentes whilst he was there.

http://thelongballtactic.wordpress.com/tag/epo/ (see blog article for further links)

Also some interesting things in the comments of the IrishPeloton article linked in post #25.

Veron in Cannavaro video
Reuters
April 29, 2005
Argentina and Inter Milan midfielder Juan Sebastian Veron said he appeared in the film in which his former Parma team mate Fabio Cannavaro is seen using a drip on the eve of the 1999 UEFA Cup final.
“You can see me, I was in the room,” Veron told an Argentine radio station. “But you can’t see that I did anything.”
The film, shown on Italian state broadcaster RAI Due’s current affairs programme “Full Stop and From the Top”, shows Cannavaro, then a Parma player, relaxing in his hotel room the evening before the UEFA Cup final against Olympique Marseille in Moscow which the Italian club won 3-0.
The Italian international, who now plays for Juventus, is shown inserting a drip into his arm which his lawyer confirmed contained Neoton, a drug used in cardiac surgery to protect the heart that is not on the World Anti Doping Agency’s list of banned substances.
Veron said Neoton use is common. “It’s used when there are a lot of matches in a short space of time and it helps you recover more quickly,” he said.
“We had just played the final of the Italian Cup, I think it was two or three days earlier, plus there was the journey to Russia. Some players decided to make use of this, which is also something the doctor knows about.”
Veron, who is now on the books of English premier league side Chelsea but has been on loan to Inter Milan all season, added: “All the teams use it. “It is something that is used and has been used and to do so is firstly a decision of the player and then the doctor.”
He said the video did not make pleasant viewing. “It doesn’t look good because you see when the doctor pricks his arm and it’s not something which is nice to see. Also, the television puts on that background music and a whole ambiance which has nothing to do with it.”

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

Random tests on the hair of French professional footballers and top-level rugby players have revealed frequent use of illegal, muscle-building steroids, it was announced yesterday.

One in five footballers tested, and one in six rugby players, showed signs of having used banned steroids – mostly the anti-ageing hormone DHEA. Similar, but less widespread, signs of steroid use were found in hair samples taken from athletes and cyclists. Drug tests on hair samples have no legal basis in French law or in sports rules but the French anti-drugs agency believes that its "hair opinion poll" points to a submerged culture of drug-taking in football and rugby – and possibly not just in France.

"Here is the proof that doping is not just something that happens in cycling," Pierre Bordry, the president of the Agence Française de Lutte contre le Dopage (AFLD) said yesterday.

The agency sought hair samples from 138 sports men and women last year. Traces of hormones such as DHEA, which builds muscle strength, vanish rapidly from urine and the blood but linger in the hair. Of the 32 professional footballers playing in the French First and Second divisions who were tested, seven showed clear signs of having used steroids. The 21.8 per cent "hit" rate was the highest in any sport tested.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/...rench-footballers-tests-positive-1648198.html

 

[Neymar]

thanks for that jts! i've never even heard of those stories before (juventus and cannavaro). from those articles, they seem to be as controversial as calciopoli. how was this scandal kept so well under wraps?

anyways it just reaffirms my belief that drugs cheating is way more prevelant in football and sport than we think.

 

[Bullet]

Presumably there are fifty shades of grey between outright 80's steroid abuse and being completely clean

Every footballer eats well and rehydrates... 99.9% drink the recovery drinks and energy drinks they are given... 99% take the 'special shakes' the doctor gives to everybody in the squad.... 95% use a drip or special recovery injection (you are under pressure to get into the first team, every other player is taking it, of course you would take it too under those pressures, aged 19) and so on and so on.

I bet a lot of the time players just take whatever the doctor gives out on the trip to Latvia, they don't stop and ask if it is Mx2H-Beta Carozene or Gx-Alpha Fitazopan, they just neck it and carry on playing Angry Birds with Waz, Jazz and J-Dog

 

[Neymar]

Bullet, you might be right re the 50 shades of grey. im no expert of the subject, but surely there is a list of banned substances. and it is simply a case of if you take them or not. its not about the quantity of the substance you take. even if you take a drop of a banned substance, surely that falls under substance abuse?

 

[Modric THFC]

Presumably there are fifty shades of grey between outright 80's steroid abuse and being completely clean

Every footballer eats well and rehydrates... 99.9% drink the recovery drinks and energy drinks they are given... 99% take the 'special shakes' the doctor gives to everybody in the squad.... 95% use a drip or special recovery injection (you are under pressure to get into the first team, every other player is taking it, of course you would take it too under those pressures, aged 19) and so on and so on.

I bet a lot of the time players just take whatever the doctor gives out on the trip to Latvia, they don't stop and ask if it is Mx2H-Beta Carozene or Gx-Alpha Fitazopan, they just neck it and carry on playing Angry Birds with Waz, Jazz and J-Dog

Of course they don't.
There's definitely a difference between what happens in team sports (where the athletes probably have little say or awareness) and individual sports (where the doping is down to the athlete and the athlete's selection of coaches).

 

[SpurMeUp]

Use of HGH is widespread at Barcelona.

Here's Graham Hunter you know this Graham Hunter http://www.amazon.co.uk/Barca-Making-Greatest-Team-World/dp/0956497152 who has an inside line of whats happening in the dressing room talking about HGH at Barcelona on Irish Radio

[video=youtube_share;b-CW4UeOdDc]http://youtu.be/b-CW4UeOdDc[/video]

The player he's talking about here is Xavi

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

That's pretty scandalous! Considering the uproar and fascination with Lance Armstrong, why is there not more attention on this seemingly apparent doping?

As with cycling, once it starts it becomes an arms race. You have to be on it to compete. So if indeed Barca were or are dabbling in HGH then would Madrid also cross that line - if you cant even detect it? But more to the point, why has this not been written about, investigated? It may well be untrue, but has anyone even looked or checked thoroughly?

 

[jts1882]

I don't think the accusation is that Xavi was taking HGH. He was getting a blood doping treatment - platelet-rich plasma - that elevated the levels of several growth factors, but HGH wasn't one of them. Same end result, as several of these have similar anabolic effects on muscle mass - but it's important to be accurate in this discussion. The treatment is more akin to blood doping to increase red blood cell count instead of taking EPO.

 

[braineclipse]

So Messi currently stands on 249 top-flight goals in La Liga, just two behind record holder Telmo Zarra who notched his goals between 1957 and 1967...
and he'll likely eclipse that tally tonight.

He's undoubtedly phenomenal, probably the best football player the world has seen. But I'm amazed no one mentions he was pumped full of human growth hormone for years. Yes it was used as a treatment at a younger age, not used as a performance enhancer. But it is a banned performance enhancing substance in most sports.

Source?

"Pumped full of" seems purposefully over dramatic to me.

From what I've read it was a medical treatment for a medical condition. Similar have been administered to a lot of non-athletes. Pretty rough if you think someone shouldn't accept a medical treatment as a young kid because they're also a talented athlete.

Would he be the player he is today without the drugs? No. It promotes general growth (Messi was 4.2" when he started taking the hormones) but it also promotes muscle growth. Which is why its a banned substance. Lance Armstrong loved the stuff. Maradona was small, and they both have that strong low centre of gravity body, that can suit footballers (Lennon if he had more technical skills). Messi is superhuman because he was doped. People don't like to say it. But there it is.

You really cannot make conclusions like that. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if he hadn't been given the treatment. That's perhaps why people don't like to say it, because it's not a supported claim...

 

[braineclipse]

That's pretty scandalous! Considering the uproar and fascination with Lance Armstrong, why is there not more attention on this seemingly apparent doping?

As with cycling, once it starts it becomes an arms race. You have to be on it to compete. So if indeed Barca were or are dabbling in HGH then would Madrid also cross that line - if you cant even detect it? But more to the point, why has this not been written about, investigated? It may well be untrue, but has anyone even looked or checked thoroughly?

How is it scandalous? They're being open about doing this according Graham Hunter in that interview. He's not talking about something going on behind closed doors.

People hear a name of a product and associate it with completely different contexts. Unless you have extensive medical knowledge about how this was done, how do you know it's in any way comparable to what Lance Armstrong did?

I don't know enough about HGH to know for sure, but the fact that Barca are doing this openly seems to indicate that they're not doing anything worth hiding. (That's not to say that nothing sketchy hasn't ever happened, but that kind of speculation is a different question).