Ryan Braun fails PED test. Faces 50-game suspension.

She failed a drug test when she was playing in Turkey. The lab, as it turned out, was not anywhere close to specifications on how they administered the tests.

It was the SI story about her a few months ago in, obviously, better detail than I'm conveying here.

 

Or he knew exactly what he took, when he took it and how long it would stay in his system.

 

Gary Sheffield always said he just rubbed on some painkilling cream that Bonds' trainers told him to rub. Given the time frame and how little we knew about it then, I could see something like that being true.

Also I think there's a big war going on about truth-in-labeling, and how the FDA won't regulate even the off-the-shelf stuff from GNC. It doesn't sound like a likely explanation here, but it's enough to provide the athlete with some sort of excuse that gets people thinking he did it accidentally, a la Shawne Merriman.

 

SOP. Deny like crazy and try to win public opinion. Maybe fans will be impressed that you wanted to retest and won't think about how you had a month to cycle down before the second test.

Everybody is innocent in Shawshank.

 

You have taken millions of bong hits.

 

Anyone who depends on their body for their livelihood, like a pro athlete, who doesn't find out what is in any and everything they put in their body is insane.

 

No, not really, but I've done lots of runs, some with 10,000 runners, and if you spend your life doing that, you will see a few hundred people that looks just like that at every single event you do. Not everyone is a fat writer on a couch.

 

Having a six pack doesn't mean you're on steroids. I'm sure Braun is on something because he failed a test. But I know lots of people who look just like him who aren't taking steroids.

 

I'm willing to believe it's possible he didn't know what he was taking. However, that's not enough to overturn the suspension.

That said, if they did fuck up the test he needs to sue the shit out of the lab and MLB.

 

Which speaks very badly of you, Rick. Classless response.

Shit like this is bad for baseball. I don't see how anybody can call themselves a fan of the game and actually be happy to find out about something like this.

 

From "The Trials of Diana Taurasi," by Kelli Anderson, Sports Illustrated, September 12, 2011 (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1190262/index.htm):

A few weeks after Phoenix lost to Seattle in the 2010 Western Conference finals, Taurasi joined Taylor on a new club, Fenerbahce, in Istanbul. All was going well—the team won its first nine Euroleague games—until Taurasi was called to a meeting with the team president in early December. She was handed a sheet of paper with the results of a drug test from Nov. 13. Most of the writing was in Turkish. "All I see is Positive, Modafinil," says Taurasi. "Which at the time I didn't even know how to pronounce. I was like, This isn't right."

Taurasi went back to her apartment, Googled modafinil and learned it was a psychostimulant used to treat excessive sleepiness. "Pilots use it for jet lag," she says. "I was in shock." She was suspended from the team. When her B sample came up positive, too, Fenerbahce terminated her contract and Taurasi returned to the States, facing the possibility of a two-year ban that would keep her out of the 2012 London Olympics. "She wouldn't get out of bed for two weeks," says Taylor, who also left Fenerbahce, in a show of solidarity. "She couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't function."

Taurasi shuttled between her home in Phoenix and the Chino homes of her parents and sister, keeping a low profile in both cities. "I was down, I was depressed, I was angry," she says. She kept quiet but didn't stay idle. She and her lawyer, Howard Jacobs, who has represented athletes in scores of doping cases, started building a defense. The Ankara lab, which was associated with Hacettepe University, had had its accreditation suspended for three months by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2009. And modafinil had popped up several times in the BALCO scandal but had since become such an uncommon positive result that, according to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency website, only one American athlete had been sanctioned for its use since '04. Yet Jacobs discovered that three other athletes besides Taurasi had tested positive for modafinil at the same lab within a month.

Once Jacobs was able to examine the lab documents, he was fairly certain he was looking at a case of a false positive. "There have to be certain criteria that are met to say that you have actually identified modafinil," says Jacobs, "and it looked to me that they did not meet those criteria." Two independent experts he consulted agreed. Furthermore, the chain of custody inside the lab was "virtually nonexistent," says Jacobs. "And it took a week for the sample to get from one part of Turkey to another, with no explanation."

Presented with Jacobs's defense, the lab retracted Taurasi's report, as well as the reports of the other three athletes who had tested positive for modafinil.

On Feb. 16, Taurasi got a call from the Turkish Federation with news of her exoneration. "As much as I was in shock that [I tested positive], I was probably more in shock [when I got that call]," she says. "Drug testing is one of the most unfair processes you can be put through. You give your urine, and you just have to trust in whatever goes on."

Taurasi, who says her legal fees ran to six figures, knows she is fortunate she had the resources to put up a proper fight. "Most people who are in that position, where it's a false positive or there is some mistake, they don't have the money to fight it, so they just take the two years and their career is pretty much over."

 

ESPN is reporting that Braun was notified he tested positive before the MVP award was announced.