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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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2 9 - 0 4 - 2 0 0 5 Injectie Cannavaro schokt Italie
29 april 2005
ROME - Fabio Cannavaro heeft de Italiaanse voetbalwereld in verlegenheid gebracht. De staatszender RAI vertoonde beelden waarop is te zien hoe de Italiaanse international op 11 mei 1999, aan de vooravond van de finale van de UEFA Cup tegen Olympique Marseille, een injectie van de clubarts van Parma krijgt.
Daarin zat het medicijn neoton, een herstelmiddel voor hartpatiënten. Overigens stond het middel, dat tegenwoordig niet meer in de handel is, niet op de dopinglijst. Cannavaro nam de beelden zelf op. Toen hij deze week lucht van de uitzending kreeg, probeerde hij die te verhinderen met de dreiging van gerechtelijke stappen.
De tegenwoordige speler van Juventus liet zich in het programma Punto a capo uiteindelijk verdedigen door zijn advocaat. Volgens de speler is de bewuste tape bij hem weggenomen. Of de beelden gevolgen hebben voor Cannavaro, is onduidelijk. Juventus, zijn huidige club, heeft nog niet gereageerd.
3 0 - 0 4 - 2 0 0 5 Veron in Cannavaro video
Reuters
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."
3 0 - 0 4 - 2 0 0 5 Uefa Cup: Questions plague troubled Parma
Peter Berlin
PARMA, Italy On Thursday night, as Parma continued its unlikely march in the competition that has brought the club its greatest glory, nasty and familiar questions were being raised over the team that won the second of Parma's two UEFA Cups.
Parma, a previously undistinguished club, rose to join the cream of European soccer in the 1990s. From 1992 to 1999, it won the UEFA Cup twice, the Cup Winners Cup, now folded into the UEFA Cup, once and the Italian Cup twice.
On Thursday night, immediately after Parma limped to a dreary 0-0 draw with visiting CSKA Moscow in the first leg of a UEFA Cup semifinal, RAI, the state broadcaster, showed a program that suggested that those years of milk and honey contained a nasty artificial additive.
The seven fat years might have been artificially beefed as more than just billions of Parmalat lire were being pumped into the team.
The program showed a home video, reportedly made by one of the players. It was shot on the eve of the 1999 UEFA Cup final against Marseille in a suite at the Marriott Hotel in Moscow that had been turned into a treatment room. The faces of the players were obscured, as in a police reality show, but not for the critical sequence, involving a syringe and a well-muscled arm. After reports about the program in Thursday morning's Italian newspapers, Fabio Cannavaro, the captain of the Italian national team, had outed himself as the man receiving the needle. In the show his face was shown as he made two ecstatic, but almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, groans, like a junkie welcoming a hit.
"Look what we're reduced to before the UEFA Cup final," Cannavaro is heard saying. "I'm 25 years old and they're killing me." It might reasonably be asked why any team doctor or professional athlete in their right mind would allow themselves to be filmed injecting drugs.
"It was a mockery and Cannavaro was even joking," Paolo Trofino, Cannavaro's lawyer, said in the studio debate after the video was shown.
The question still applies: Why would any sane team doctor or professional athlete make a spoof video in which they pretend to inject drugs? But the midnight motorbike adventures of two Greek sprinters, and the bizarre attempts by Hungarian throwers and weightlifters to beat doping tests with urine-filled rubber balls in the Athens Olympics last year, show one thing. Whatever it is that drugs enhance, it isn't intelligence.
The video showed one of the Parma staff opening a package of Neoton, a creatine phosphate used as a heart drug. This is where the problems really begin, as those participating in the studio debate were quick to point out.
Trofeo, covering his bets, said Cannavaro had been receiving a "muscle reconstituent, a regenerator." He also pointed out that Neoton is not banned.
Creatine is not a banned substance. The World Anti-Doping Agency says there is no evidence that it enhances athletic performance.
However, just because it isn't on the WADA list does not mean that it is not harmful to athletes and thus illegal in Italy. That argument is still running.
Others argued that there was no evidence that Neoton was in the syringe. So was this a case of "Drugs, lies and videotape?"
The timing of the broadcast was doubly appropriate. First, and obviously, it was immediately after Parma played and therefore at a time when most of those people who still care about the fallen giant would most likely be in front of their televisions. Second, it came the day after the latest development in the investigation of Juventus, the perennial Italian power, for administering a pharmacopoeia of substances to its players in the 1990s.
Italian prosecutors, struck by the large number of early deaths among Italian athletes, have been investigating drugs in Italian sport. Unsurprisingly, the high-profile Giro d'Italia bicycle race and high-profile Juventus became the focus of investigations. Last November, after a six-year investigation, Raffaele Guariniello, a Turin prosecutor, nailed Dr. Riccardo Agricola, who was found guilty of "sporting fraud." An expert witness in the trial described finding 281 different drugs at the team's training headquarters.
The Italian Olympic Committee asked the Court of Arbitration in Sport if it could strip Juve of trophies it won between 1994 and 1998 for administering drugs that were not banned. On Wednesday, the court ruled in Juve's favor. But because the list of substances in the case includes banned substances, the club is not in the clear yet.
One of those lobbying for Juve to be stripped of its titles is Gianfranco Zola. The tiny genius stands to benefit. The club he played for finished second to Juve in Serie A in 1995. The club? Parma, of course.
Two years later, Parma finished second to Juve again, this time by one point. Late that season, Parma dropped two points against Torino in the Stadio Delle Alpi in Turin in a match that still fills Parma fans with a sense of injustice.
Pierluigi Collina, the best-known Italian referee, disallowed what would have been the only goal of the game. The would-be scorer was Cannavaro. He has since won his Serie A title - as a Juventus player.
The debate in the RAI studio, involving lawyers, professors of pharmacology and distinguished journalists, developed into a rowdy shouting match and offered far more passion and entertainment than the game that had preceded it.
If there is a drug that has the opposite effect of steroids, it has been administered to the UEFA Cup and to Parma. Both are only emaciated shadows of what they were in 1999.
Parma lies 19th in the 20-team Serie A. With five matches to go, it is in severe danger of finishing in the last three places and slipping down to Serie B for the first time since 1990.
Even though it is only three games from winning the UEFA Cup, Parma on Thursday fielded only two regular starters, one of whom, Giuseppe Cardone, was replaced early in the second half.
"Serie A comes first for us," said Pietro Carmignani, the Parma coach, adding that his few stars would also miss the trip to Moscow.
CSKA Moscow, which is in position to become the first Russian club to win a European trophy, left its star striker, the Brazilian Vagner Love, on the bench until the second half.
The game drew less than 8,000. The tiny CSKA contingent, huddled together on the vast sweep of the southern "curve," could, as the soccer song goes, have come in a taxi.
The fans who stayed away knew what they were doing. Two of Parma's three previous home games in the competition this year have ended 0-0. The third was a 1-0 Parma victory.
"I think it is the first time I have seen a game with so few chances," said Valery Gazzayev, the CSKA coach.
When Igor Akinfeyev of CSKA leapt to his left to parry a shot by Fabio Vignaroli in the 83rd minute, it was the first, and last, difficult save either goalie had to make all night.
Thursday's other semifinal game produced a relative feast of goals. Sporting, which has the incentive of knowing that the final will be in its Alvalade Stadium, beat visiting AZ Alkmaar, 2-1, in Lisbon.
Sporting dominated the game but fell behind in the 36th minute, when Denny Landzaat gave the Dutch team the lead. Rodolph Douala scored the leveling goal in the 37th minute and Mauricio Pinilla blasted the winner 11 minutes from the end. The game drew 34,776 in a stadium that holds 52,000.
0 1 - 0 5 - 2 0 0 5 Cannavaro will keep Italy captaincy
tribalfootball.com
Juventus defender Fabio Cannavaro will keep the Italy captaincy despite being embroiled in a drugs storm. "It certainly wasn't nice to see a player attached to a drip, but Cannavaro has always given his heart and soul for the Nazionale and will remain as captain," explained Federation President Franco Carraro. The Juventus defender was seen being injected with legal substance Neoton the night before Parma's 1999 UEFA Cup Final against Olympique Marseille, as a video made by the player was anonymously handed over to State television RAI. "I can say that international sport needs clear rules on substances and what kind of behaviour is considered acceptable," continued Carraro. "The fact that perfectly healthy athletes are taking medicine does make you think. We need new legislation to stop this from carrying on and a debate that will ensure there are not so many loopholes. The rules are one thing and an ethical stance is another." |
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