Report: NBA players are linked to same Biogenesis steroid scandal that A-Rod is linked to
Unless you've been living under a rock, or just completely hate baseball all together, you must have heard of the Biogenesis scandal currently rocking MLB.
Former NL MVP Ryan Braun has already been suspended 65 games for his use of performance enhancing drugs through Biogenesis (a laboratory in Florida), and now disgraced Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez is about to have the hammer drop on him as well. In all, 20 MLB players are linked to the clinic, all brought to light by whistleblower Porter Fischer, who used to work for Biogenesis.
Now, Fischer is saying that athletes from other sports were clients of Biogenesis as well. From ESPN.com.
The man who turned the Biogenesis clinic from a quiet investigation in Miami into a national scandal says there are at least a dozen more athletes whose names haven't been exposed and that they come from across the sports world.
Porter Fischer, the former Biogenesis of Miami clinic employee who turned boxes of documents over to the Miami New Times last year, declined to name the athletes. But in his first television interview, Fischer told "Outside the Lines" that numerous sports had at least one athlete who received performance-enhancing drugs from clinic founder Tony Bosch.
"This isn't a 2013 thing or a 2012 thing; some of these people have been on the books since 2009," Fischer said.
Fischer said he and associates have identified athletes from the NBA, NCAA, professional boxing, tennis and MMA, in addition to other professional baseball players who have not yet been identified. As far as he knows, Fischer said, Bosch had no clients from the NFL or NHL.
He said the only sports entity he has heard from was Major League Baseball.
The athletes not yet publicly named come from the documents Fischer took from the clinic, documents he said another employee asked him to take for safekeeping. The number of athletes involved with the clinic, based on what he saw and heard during his time with Biogenesis, is far more than people realize, he said.
"In just the four years that I know, it's got to be well over a hundred, easy," he said. "It's almost scary to think about how many people have gone through [Bosch's treatments] and how long he's gotten away with this."
The NBA has a drug policy in place in which users are suspended 20 games for the 1st failed test, 45 for the 2nd, and for life the 3rd time. Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis are among those who have been suspended by the NBA for failed tests in the past.
Of course, now the question becomes, will the NBA talk to Fischer and Biogenesis in an effort to find out which players have visited the Biogenesis clinic? If so we may have the first real PED scandal in basketball. In a league full of genetic freaks (LeBron is 6'9", 270 pounds of solid muscle for example), there have always been whispers that PED use was more widespread than what we've seen, but this could be the first time where several players are busted in a "drug ring". Or it could all blow over without much more being said. Personally I've always felt that there were more athletes in all sports abusing PED's. The science of cheating will always be ahead of the science of testing due to the amount of money being poured in on the cheating side. Thanks to that, and the amount of money on the line for the athletes, cheating is always going to be an option. In baseball for example we've seen the progression from greenies (amphetamines) to steroids and now hGH. It's realistic to imagine that players in the NBA have followed a similar path.
No matter what happens, it should be interesting to see how this all shakes out. If only to see A-Rod squirm like the fraud he is.
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