Martin Samuel(Mail)
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In sport, every failed drugs test has its official apologist, whether it is the Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Zapatero, for the cyclist Alberto Contador, or the equally august Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, jumping to the defence of his former player Kolo Toure.
Wenger explained Toure's A sample by claiming the defender had merely taken slimming pills belonging to his wife, while Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini went so far as to dedicate Saturday's win over Wigan Athletic to the former club captain, describing him as a fantastic man and a serious professional.
He may be both. Equally, he may be a rotten drug cheat. We just don't know. And we'll never know. Men like the sprinter Dwain Chambers, who confessed to systematic cheating, are rare. Most positive tests are followed by a litany of excuses based on protestations of ignorance (I took a cold cure, I didn't know there was anything in it), wide-eyed innocence (it must have got contaminated at the lab, I've never take a drug in my life) or the bizarre (the steak did it, which was Contador's excuse).
In football, beyond failures for recreational use, the thought that a player might take stimulants to enhance performance is dismissed in an instant. Yet think about it. This is a sport in which cheating is endemic. Players dive to gain an advantage, or to get an opponent in trouble.
They even appeal falsely for something as insignificant as a halfway line throw-in. A penalty given against Blackburn Rovers at Fulham is disputed, not because there was no offence but because if that type of foul is penalised there would be 10 penalties per game.
So why does it then follow that the moment they leave the field the same players adhere to a rigid code that is not present in athletics, cycling or American team sports.
Baseball had a huge drugs problem driven by the financial rewards for being a big-hitting star player. So why should football be any different? Why would a player not cheat in an attempt to preserve his performance level and lucrative rewards? Why would a club not be tempted that way, too?
One thinks of Juventus and its training-ground pharmacy described in evidence to an official investigation as being comparable to the facility at a small to medium-sized hospital.
A hearing in October 2002 heard that Juventus had 281 medicines on site, three-quarters of which were prescription only. At least five of the anti-inflammatory drugs held contained banned substances.
'Either the players were always sick or they took drugs without justification and going beyond the therapeutic field to improve performances,' said Professor Gianmartino Benzi, a pharmacological expert from the University of Pavia. 'To discover such a quantity was strange and amazing to us.'
Juventus's club doctor Riccardo Agricola was found guilty of sporting fraud and was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison, although he did not serve this as a Turin appeals court found it could not apply the sporting fraud law in the instance of drug use at a club. Still, it shows what can happen.
Toure's mistaken use of a diet pill sounds innocent enough, except that the reason some diet pills are banned is because they contain energy-producing chemicals - which is why they were popular with recreational users as a form of speed, known as black bombers or purple hearts - and can also be a diuretic. Anything that flushes fluids from the body can be used as a masking agent to dispose of traces of other drugs. For a sportsman, the motive for taking a simple diet pill may not be as wholly blameless as it sounds.
Either way, any footballer will have listened to enough lectures and warnings on carelessly ingested supplements to know that pills should not be used without first taking advice from a club medic.
Even if Toure acted unwittingly, to accept his explanation opens the door for other, nefarious, users who will cite his precedent. That is why the World Anti-Doping Agency insists athletes have strict liability for the findings of a positive test. Foolishness is an explanation; it is not mitigation.
What is remarkable is that it is so immediately advanced by those within the game as the only possible reason for wrong-doing. Toure, we are told, may have been worried about meeting Manchester City's strict fitness regime and, struggling with his weight, took one of his wife's diet pills without considering the consequences.
Yet, how about this alternative scenario? Toure was worried about meeting Manchester City's strict fitness regime and, with a place in the first-team and lucrative contract to protect, chanced taking an illegal substance as a way of keeping weight off or improving performance? Either circumstance is possible. We just don't know and probably never will for certain.
Equally, we cannot say whether Rio Ferdinand left the Manchester United training ground because he was forgetful or had something to hide, or whether Christine Ohuruogu skipped three drugs test because she was a silly old scatterbrain or a dedicated cheat.
All we can say is that to presume innocence, to believe the apologists' insistence that one of the richest sports and some of its richest sportsmen could not possibly be motivated to cheat flies in the face of the evidence at football grounds every week: which is that the end justifies the means.
Always.
