The Issam Asinga Case: Did The Fastest High Schooler Ever Test Positive After Eating Gatorade Gummies Or Is It An Evil Coverup?

Doesn't have to be the coaches doping the whole team. Asinga's parents are both former Olympians on the track during the EPO era 1990s. I think it's far more likely Asinga's parents have been supplying him the GW1516 and messed up the micro dosing since this PED didn't exist back during their heydays. And I'll bet Asinga's parents were both involved with "sprinkling the pixie dust" on the gummy bears given to the lab.

From Gault's article:

"He said his fast times are the product of hard work and genetic gifts. His mother, Ngozi, competed in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics for Zambia in the 400 meters, while his father, Tommy, ran in the 800 meters at three Olympics for Suriname."

Those 5K jumps are not outrageous. The 32:09 to 30:35 is eyebrow-raising.

That "tribunal" is denser than a cinder block. You just put the gummies in a ziplock bag and sprinkle a small amount of GW1516 powder in and shake to coat them. Some will get coated more, some will get coated less, exactly what the lab saw. Total cost is $0.05 for the ziplock bag to carry out the tampering.

Still not very plausible.

Why would gatorade have cardarine/gw1516 in their products? A failed medical drug from the 90s that wasnt approved in a single country? It is not like it is used in any other product that is being sold by gatorade/pepsico. It is, however, widely available in the black market because it is so effective in improving physical performance.

Gault downplayed Ngozi's exploits in Barcelona. She ran the 100, 200 AND 400!

Thanks for being the first to post the obvious but ignored.

The interesting bit is the purity of the contamination. As stated, 'pure' dodgy supplements are rare, so the contamination must have known this and sourced a supply. Pointing to the fact that he is an expert.

But all he has to do, for the dodgy Greene, is sow doubt. They knew the contamination would have problems but that didn't matter, just doubt.

The court (wotevs) knew and kicked it out. The doping apologists JC and roji continue to be too thick to recognise obvious bs.

When USADA fails to do its job in protecting dopers, LetsRun have to step forward.

That stuff is super nasty. If an adult put that in a kid, he/she should be locked up for a long time.

Yep, this is it. For the other option to be true would mean a massive Gatorade conspiracy (spiking their product with PED) + incredible ingredient anomaly. They cook tens of thousands of gummies in a single lot in a 19-hour process, yet the ones that end up in his particular package have a massive variation of the contaminant, including variation even within the same gummies (more GW on the outside of the gummy).

GET. THE. FK. OUT. OF. HERE.

It doesn't matter, just wait for Canova to claim these things don't work on highly trained athletes like him anyway.

To The Gills!🍸

It would be impossible (and inappropriate) for the AIU to try to rule on his innocence based on testing and investigation of an opened package. I think they actually went too far by uncessessarily speculating there might have been likely tampering, as this opened the doors for Asinga's team to poke holes wherever possible. It's like starting to argue with a conspiracy theorist at that point.

The labeling issue is not so surprising when you consider the multi-layered process of manufacturing and the supply chain involving various players. It happens a lot more often than we could imagine. Gatorade seems to have been exposed here as not running a well controlled process (assuming the mislabelling is true). However, no way this can be used to explain the doping, as GW is not an ingredient and again, when you cook tens of thousands of gummies there is no plausible way you get the testing variation they found across gummies.

This is just Asinga's lawyer jumping on a $ opportunity against Gatorade, which may well prevail... but they'd likely have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Gatorade used GW at the factory. Dead on arrival IMO.

I bet there was no sophistication in any of it... dude simply got busted quickly after entering the testing pool. Their process was blatant and careless from the start.

Rojo - you should read what the tribunal wrote, not Jon's disgusting doper defense piece. He writes it in exactly the same style like his ill-advised Shelburrito "editorial": pretending there are two equally possible options against all the evidence, and then arguing in favor of the doper despite the unanimous tribunal decision who had actually seen the evidence.

Other little tricks: always go with the doper's (long dismissed!) version first, then some time later reveal the actual story but very briefly while pretending that that is just the (corrupt/evil/overeager) opinion of the AIU or the tribunal. Then put the opinion of anonymous letsrun armchair "experts" like twoggle and other trolls above the expert expertise of Prof. McClone or Prof. Saugy etc. And keep writing 5x what the doper and their slimy lawyer said, and how hard it is on the poor drug cheat, and so on and so on, and only 1x what the tribunal or the experts said.

Not true? "Evil Coverup" is the very first thing the title says, and the first quote - a 7 line paragraph - is from the doper's lawyer. Only then comes a much shorter statement (2 lines) about what the AIU said, without a quote. With that said, then Jon goes on and on how great the doper was, to then finally mention some facts about the case.

Then comes one paragraph about what the doper said.

Then come two paragraph about what the doper's lawyer said.

Then again what the doper said. Keeping track, rojo? We are now at 2 lines from the AIU, and 20ish lines from the doper's side. At this point, many readers will be on the side of the doper. Well played, Jon.

Oh look, now finally an expert got a say, though that looks terrible for the doper.

Then long details about the case, followed by - you guessed it - what the slimy lawyer thinks about it.

And so on and on Jon goes. With some judgments about the AIU "That’s convenient for the AIU", and - of course - more statements and quotes from the lawyer, and none from the AIU's side. Then how hard it is for the drug cheat to be banned for 4 years... hard to imagine a more biased report.

Has anyone paid attention to the numbers in the contamination? We're talking not even 1ng (nanogram). There are 1,000,000ng in 1mg. An person would have to take 10-20mg (10,000,000 to 20,000,000ng) taken over 12 to 14 weeks to have effect on muscle recovery, fat loss, and increased endurance. Taking the effective dose for an effective time would result in many milligrams(mg) not less than 1 nanogram. It doesn't add up. This young man was set up. Was it because he was running for team Surinam not team USA? If he was doping, he wasn't good at it.

There's a HUGE difference between this case and the Houlihan case. Do I think both are dirty? Yes, when it comes down to it.

But Houlihan blamed her positive test on a small burrito stand that, as far as we know, did absolutely nothing wrong. Houlihan claimed she was given the wrong order and that it was contaminated; likely, neither of these was true--not to mention that burroti stands don't typically have a mission to protect professional athletes from doping positives.

Meanwhile, in this case Gatorade:

• Labelled a batch of supplements as NSF certified when they weren't
• Refused (or more likely, were unable) to provide a sealed jar of that batch

Gatorade is a multibillion dollar company that specializes in sport nutrition. For them to screw up this much should be a huge scandal, completely independent of whether Asinga is dirty and tried to cover it up (which, again, if I had to choose I would say he did). There are two stories here, one about possible doping and the other about corporate malfeasance.

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Let's go just a bit farther for a moment. One of the following two things is nearly certain to have happened:

1) Asinga contaminated his own supplements to try to cover up his doping. Why these particular supplements? He either somehow knew that they were falsely labelled or just happened to choose them as the ones to contaminate. Gatorade could have easily proved him wrong by providing a sealed jar of the same lot, but again it just happened that they didn't have such a jar, even though they were required to and had jars of the other lot from the same batch.

2) Gatorade and Better Nutritionals are lying, and the two lots are NOT essentially identical. This explains why they are unable to come up with a sealed jar of the same lot--they are intentionally withholding it.

If Option 2) were correct, it could be related to Asinga's alleged contamination or there could be some unrelated reason. But I will say that the only way to get past the improbabilities from Option 1) is if Asinga is telling the truth.

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To return to the original question, yes, Asinga is more likely dirty than not. And it makes sense that the AIU needs more than manufacturing irregularities before it is willing to throw out a positive test. So AIU's resolution was probably the correct one, given the circumstances. But Gatorade has gone really wrong here, to the extent that a deeper coverup is not impossible. We shouldn't let them off the hook just because the most likely possibility is that Asinga doped.

He didn't necessarily crank up the night before the test.( Moran)

I agree.

It's 98% that he cheated and tampered evidence after the fact -- which IMO should warrant a lifetime ban -- and maybe 1.5% that someone handed him a tampered set of gummies for Tonya Harding-ish competitive reasons and 0.5% that the actual gummies were tainted and he didn't know.