Kittel: No - FC Barcelona: Yes

Following Monday’s news that the second most winning cyclist in 2011, Marcel Kittel, is being linked to doping abuse, I wanted to bring back a little comic strip the Spanish sports paper, AS, brought last year when there were doubts if some of FC Barcelona’s injured players would be fit for the Champions League match against FC København.

Guardiola: Doctor, do you think that Xavi & Puyol will be ready
to play the match against FC København today?
Doctor: To play against FCK, I don't know, but to do the Tour, of course!

The wrongly called “doping treatment” that Marcel Kittel has been undergoing (4 years ago!!)is a UV treatment. To those of you who is not familiar with this treatment, Marcel Kittel’s Project 1t4i team explains:

"Dr. Franke took a very small amount (a few cc) of blood from the body via a syringe and put this under UV lighting immediately to fight the infection in the blood. This blood was subsequently reinserted into the body. The entire treatment did not take more than a few minutes. It did not involve an infusion or transfusion."

According to WADA this is not legal. “If the treatment involves taking blood from athletes, manipulating it and then re-injecting it, then that process is prohibited under section M2.3”, WADA’s communications director Terence O’Rorke tells VeloNation.

Marcel Kittel used this treatment to get over a flu. It might seem a bit extreme just for a flu but to see it as doping it’s simply too much!

To return to the Spanish comic strip, FC Barcelona is known for using a specific plasma-treatment helping their players get fit a lot faster than normally. The doctors take out a blood sample and centrifuge it. By this they can pick out only the extra plasma-rich parts of the blood, which they inject back in the inflamed area to help the body recovery faster. This is perfectly legal in the football world. Spanish tennis star, Rafael Nadal, uses this treatment as well. Like FC Barcelona without any sanctions.

 Am I the only one finding this extremely pathetic?

Dice the sentence

There is something seriously wrong with the cycling system and I doubt many will argue with that fact. Alexander Kolobnev seems likely to slip through with a small fine, Alex Rasmussen and Jeannie Longo go free despite 3 missed anti-doping tests while the Ezequiel Mosquera and Alberto Contador cases drag out. Everybody knows how long the Contador case has been going for now and apparently the UCI didn’t even send their case against Mosquera to the Spanish federation until the end of April even though his positive test occurred during the Vuelta in September.

How come it has to take this long to determine if a rider is guilty or not and why are the end results so far from each other? Sometimes it really looks like the cycling organs deciding these things just end up throwing dices to decide…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the UCI, WADA and all the national federations have this site on the top of the bookmark list.

The system needs to get fixed - same rules for everybody, ya!