The LaTasha Jenkins case has reached its end. WADA dropped its appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, after Jenkins was cleared of doping charges late last year by an arbitration panel. According to various news articles, including this one by The Canadian Press, WADA wrote the CAS saying:
“Having carefully reviewed the scientific data of this case, which includes material not available to use from the initial hearing, WADA has reached the conclusion that the adverse analytical findings cannot lead to a sanction (against Jenkins),” the agency wrote in a letter to CAS released by her lawyers.
Interesting tidbit, there. “Material not available to use from the initial hearing”? Exactly what, pray tell, would that have been? Documentation related to the lab results that had been held back from the defense? Perhaps containing data or information that showed the Jenkins case was fatally flawed in exactly the way the initial arbitration panel determined? (For the record, the initial panel found that Jenkins’ two samples were handled by the same technician, in violation of WADA’s own standards. This, in turn, invalidated the test results.)
Shouldn’t such scrutiny take place before any charges are filed against an athlete? That is the idea of the anti-doping review panels that USADA and other agencies use prior to prosecuting a case. Check to see if there really is a case to pursue before pursuing it. After all, the athlete’s reputation will immediately tank once an adverse finding is announced to the whole world.
Too many cases like this one (and the Landaluze case a year earlier), and the whole credibility of the anti-doping system will be right down the toilet. Assuming it hasn’t already been flushed. Good that WADA dropped the case. Too bad the folks at USADA didn’t do a more thorough review to begin with. An athlete had to sit out two years while waiting for her case to be resolved. How many others have simply accepted sanctions based on flawed lab work, not knowing that the lab work was flawed, or knowing, but not having the resources or desire to fight? One hopes it’s very few. But at the same time, it’s hard not to wonder.
Will any other athletes wind up sitting out for two years before finally a ruling comes down that says, “Hey, wait a minute here, rules are rules. Athletes have to follow them, and so do labs. And in this instance, the lab violated enough of the rules that this case has to be tossed.” Who knows? One thing the Jenkins case points out is that a good, thorough review of all the evidence should be conducted even before declaring an adverse finding. We hold the athletes to high standards, and rightly so. We have to hold the labs to equally high standards, too.
Rant,
Or it could be that the “bottomless coffers – actually had a bottom? It would seem to me that just maybe – a “few of the BIG NAMES” decided that they were just not going to lie down and get walked on – and as you know – walking on people has a lot of “hidden costs”…
You know – one of the “tidbits” that the ASO liked to mention was “how outrageous” the earnings” of the athletes were… there was actual gripping about the size of the Tour purse. I do believe they have stopped doing that…but it still tickles me pink that some of those “earnings” have come back to bite them all in the end…
Now – if we could only organize the cigarette smokers – I bet there would be some respect for their rights too from the “righteous non smokers”…or at least – they may not be getting taxed unreasonably…
Could it possible be that CAS has started to see the light in regards to the sometimes over-zealous prosecution by WADA and affliates, and hence that WADA now knows that it won’t get a pass? I have the feeling that in the past, because of the perception (which may or may not reflect the actual ground truth) that the whole peleton is doping, that any suspicion of doping, no matter how tenuous or flawed the evidence, would result in a sanction because people figured that the accused was probably guilty anyway, even if the evidence is suspect. Perhaps now there will be closer looks at the evidence and perhaps some cases will be dropped. One can only hope.