These are testing times for big Pat
The saying goes that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. To that end, Blues and All Blacks lock Patrick Tuipulotu might just emerge from the drug-test shambles he has had to endure as a bigger and better rugby player.
It’s the least he deserves, if everything is as it seems in this unusual case.
It’s hard not to conclude that the same system that has appeared to fail him initially has worked because it has ultimately cleared his name. It’s a bit like being kicked in the teeth, then picked up and dusted off by the same bully.
You have to feel for the young man who had to spend nearly three months away from the game wondering whether his rugby career had just been derailed when he was told, while on tour with the All Blacks in November, he had returned a positive from a doping test.
Under sporting regulations that meant an immediate suspension pending the result of a further test on his B sample. Still only 24 and in the early stages of an extremely promising career that has already yielded 12 test caps, he must have been mightily confused.
How on earth had he returned the positive? And what of the shame and dishonour that hovers over anyone shown to have taken prohibited substances during their sporting careers? Would anyone believe his protestations of innocence when it all came out?
For a young man of Pacific Island heritage, where honour and perception are paramount, he must have wondered what was going on, and why it was happening to him.
Then, just days after details of Tuipulotu’s suspension emerged, courtesy of some quality journalism work from a colleague in this very newspaper, comes a further bombshell. In this case it was the right sort of explosion from the young man’s perspective.
Tuipulotu’s B sample had come back clear. He was absolved. Nothing to see here.
Extraordinary. First of all consider that the A and B sample are just two versions of the same doping test. Drug Free Sport New Zealand boss Graeme Steel described it as a ‘‘one in 10,000’’ occurrence’’. Of the thousands and thousands of tests he’s presided over he can recall only one, maybe two, cases of differing results between samples.
How does a Wada-accredited lab, and presumably its highly qualified officials, come up with two contrasting results from the same test?
Where is the explanation? More to the point, where is the apology?
Other questions hover. Why did it take so long between the testing of samples? Why has the whole process been so hush-hush, even when the discrepancy has emerged? Surely transparency now is paramount.
Anyway, now the sad tale at least has a happy ending, let’s hope we see Tuipulotu doing what he does best, and that’s not sitting on a couch biting his fingernails to the quick. That’s playing rugby with all the power and precision that has made him one of New Zealand’s most promising lock forwards.
The guy deserves the right sort of positive in his life right now.
It has certainly been a strange week in rugby, what with Tuipulotu’s rollercoaster ride, and then the strange situation of the All Blacks’ own security consultant being charged over the planting of a bugging device in their team hotel in Sydney.
You know when Steven Hansen calls it ‘‘bizarre’’ that it is indeed something out of the ordinary. The former cop is not one to use such terms when it comes to the judicial system, unless fully justified.
We await enlightenment on this, probably when court appearances take place.
Suggestions the same guy who planted the device found it don’t make a lot of sense.
Other details in this case are highly confusing, such as why it took the All Blacks until the end of the week to report something this suspicious they discovered at the start of it.
Timing is everything in sport. In this instance it might be at the very essence of the whole case.