The only reason the ATP believed Andre Agassi's farcical excuse for snorting gack - "I say that recently I drank accidentally from one of Slim’s spiked sodas, unwittingly ingesting his drugs" - is because they wanted to believe it. Better to let him off than have tennis soiled by having their top player disgraced by a drug scandal:
Andre Agassi: I lied to escape a ban for taking hard drugs
Andre Agassi makes the sensational confession today that he lied to the tennis authorities to escape a ban for taking hard drugs.
Agassi recounts sitting at home with his assistant, referred to only as Slim, and being introduced to the drug. “Slim is stressed too ... He says, You want to get high with me? On what? Gack. What the hell’s gack? Crystal meth. Why do they call it gack? Because that’s the sound you make when you’re high ... Make you feel like Superman, dude.
“As if they’re coming out of someone else’s mouth, I hear these words: You know what? F*** it. Yeah. Let’s get high.
Is there another decade to rival the Nineties for gutless administrators?
Not sure crystal meth would be performance enhancing. Certainly agree that many sports administrators have a lot to answer for when balancing commercial considerations.
Posted by: twitter.com/clutterbells | 29 October 2009 at 04:32
I do not, and cannot understand why recreational drugs are even tested for in sport. Neither that anyone should be shocked when it turns out that athletes, like most of the rest of us, have smoked the odd spliff or done the occasional line on a Saturday night. The furore that surrounded Andrew Johns' confession of taking ecstasy was case in point. The hypocrisy, and futility, in the thinking that because someone plays sport for a living that they should "set an example for the kiddies back home" is just plain stupid. Tell me when they're on 'roids - anything else, I'm not interested.
Not that that's addressing Tony's point of course - there are rules, but obviously different rules for different people. Mind you, if he had a clean sheet before, maybe they just believed him?
Posted by: Carrot | 29 October 2009 at 05:32
CM is an amphetamine and as such is performance enhancing. In the AFL if you test positive on game-day you cop the same punishment as you do for steroids, epo, etc.
I would go further than the AFL. Take Ben Cousins on nhis end of season holidays. By hoovering up great mounds of amphetamines in his time off he could do way more exercise than he could if he was getting a guts full of piss, and then come back with miles in his legs at the start of pre-season. Everyone says he is a running machine, maybe that was down to his off-season diet of drugs.
The ATP are dicks. Not that long ago Richard Gasquet tested positive for cocaine and then beat the wrap by saying he got it off the lips of a girl he kissed at a nightclub, and the ATP believed him.
Posted by: Tony | 29 October 2009 at 08:44
What works best for blogging in the off season?
Lapsang Souchong?
Posted by: fxh | 29 October 2009 at 20:33
I’ve never felt so alive, so hopeful — and I've never felt such energy.
"I'm seized by a desperate desire to clean. I go tearing around my house, cleaning it from top to bottom. I dust the furniture. I scour the tub. I make the beds."
I found that hilarious on a number of levels.
A mate of mine once asked "could there be anything funnier than seeing Keith Richards fall out of a coconut tree and land on his head?"
Probably not. But seeing Euphoric Andre clean his house would be right up there.
ps: Drugs are bad, mmmkay?
Posted by: Big Ramifcations | 30 October 2009 at 12:54
And to all you opinionated yobs who don't know your drugs... Yes, meth is a recreational drug. But you can bet your life it's a performance enhancer. Hell yeah.
Both as a training aid [as Tony mentioned above] but also on game day. Meth's little brother, speed, was one of the first performance enhancing drugs used in sport.
IIRC correctly, speed and arsenic was the drug cocktail of choice for Tour de France riders way back when Adam was a boy.
[waiting for some smartass to tell what drugs they used in the ancient Greek Games and trump me by a few thousand years]
Posted by: Big Ramifcations | 30 October 2009 at 13:02
"IIRC correctly"?
Ha ha!
Posted by: Big Rammer's Mum | 30 October 2009 at 13:03
The meth certainly improved Andre's cleaning performance.
Posted by: Tony | 30 October 2009 at 19:06
You know how Andre used to do that cutesie, double-handed, blowing-of-the-kiss gesture after a big win?
I have no doubts "Slim" was on the receiving end of one of them after Euphoric Andre's cleaning performance.
Posted by: Big Ramifications | 30 October 2009 at 19:18