| Dalla decisione ITF:
...
"Thomaz Bellucci is a 29 year-old professional tennis player from Brazil. He turned professional in 2005, at the age of 17, and is currently ranked 113 in singles and 406 in doubles, having reached career-high ATP rankings of 21 in singles in 2010 and 70 in doubles in 2013. He competed in the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil and regularly competes on the ATP World Tour, having won four competitions on that tour from 2009 to 2013."
(io: la biografia di Bellucci serviva per allungare lo scritto? Come quando consegni la tesina per qualche esame e fai un po' di copia ed incolla dal manuale per farla sembrare più lunga?)
...
For a number of years, Mr Bellucci has consulted a biochemist (Dr Alexandre Cosendey) and a medical doctor (Dr Breno Caiafa) to assist with his health and physical training. One issue he consulted them about was his loss of fluids, vitamins and minerals as a result of excessive sweating during training and competition. To help address this issue, the biochemist and the doctor recommended he start taking a number of bespoke vitamin compounds to supplement his normal diet. In 2017, they provided him with three prescriptions for such supplements, which he had filled by two different pharmacies in Brazil. Since these were bespoke compounds, the pharmacies had to collect the different ingredients on-site and mix them together to fill the prescriptions. One of these pharmacies Mr Bellucci used (at the recommendation of his biochemist and his doctor) was Body Lab Farmacia de Manipulacao Ltda in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Body Lab), which produced one of the prescribed supplements in two different batches, the first in June 2017 and the second in August 2017.
Mr Bellucci says that he took the vitamin supplements produced by Body Lab (from the June 2017 batch) during the Event, including several on the day he was required to provide a urine sample (18 July 2017), a few hours before providing that sample.
At the time he received the notice of charge from the ITF on 18 September 2017, the bottle of supplements that Body Lab had produced in June 2017 still had a few capsules left in it, while the bottle that Body Lab had produced in August 2017 was still sealed. Mr Bellucci personally brought those June and August 2017 vitamin supplement capsules and one other supplement that he also took during the Event (Isostar, which he had bought via Amazon) to Korva Labs in Los Angeles for testing. Following analysis, Korva Labs reported that it had found varying levels of HCTZ in a number of vitamin supplement capsules from each of the June and August 2017 bottles.
Mr Bellucci also provided a report from Paul Scott, president of Korva Labs, who was of the view that the amount of HCTZ found in Mr Bellucci's urine sample was consistent with the ingestion of trace amounts of HCTZ (i.e., consistent with what was found in some of the vitamin capsules) within a few hours of sample collection.
Mr Bellucci also submitted samples of his hair to Korva Labs, which tested them and reported them negative for steroids. He did this in an effort to rebut any suggestion that he had been using HCTZ to mask his use of other prohibited substances.
Mr Bellucci produced copies of the prescriptions provided to him by the biochemist and the doctor, and the ITF spoke to the biochemist to verify Mr Bellucci’s account as set out above. The ITF also received a communication from Dr Perini, the pharmacist at Body Lab, who accepted that Body Lab does fill prescriptions for HCTZ, and so does have HCTZ on the premises, but denied that the vitamin preparation that was produced for Mr Bellucci could have been contaminated with HCTZ at Body Lab.
In the circumstances, the ITF requested that the vitamin supplement capsules that had been tested at Korva Labs be sent to the WADA-accredited laboratory in Montreal for further testing. The Montreal laboratory detected varying levels of HCTZ in those capsules, from both the June 2017 batch and the August 2017 batch. According to Prof. Christiane Ayotte, Director of the Montreal laboratory, while contamination of the vitamin capsules after manufacture could not be ruled out (as the bottles had been opened before they reached her laboratory), the variable levels of HCTZ detected by her laboratory in the capsules were consistent with contamination at the manufacturing stage. She also said that if the capsules were ingested on a regular daily basis, the levels of HCTZ detected in the capsules could have caused the AAF in this case.
he ITF notes that when his urine sample was collected on 18 July 2017, Mr Bellucci was asked to list on the Doping Control Form any medicines or supplements that he had taken in the previous seven days, and he did not list anything. Nevertheless, Mr Bellucci has insisted that he did take each day during the Event the vitamin pills produced by Body Lab in June 2017,
including several on the day he provided sample 3089061. That is consistent with the instructions for use on the prescriptions for the vitamin pills, and also on the label of the bottles containing the pills, as well as with the AAF itself. Mr Bellucci has apologised for his failure to declare his use of the pills on the Doping Control Form, and insisted that this non- disclosure was inadvertent and not intentional or in bad faith, but rather was due to his understanding (albeit mistakenly) that his daily consumption of vitamin pills was not something that had to be disclosed on the form. The ITF is very concerned about this omission, but in all of the circumstances of the case has decided to accept Mr Bellucci’s explanation that he was indeed taking the vitamin pills daily during the Event, notwithstanding his failure to declare this on the form.
The ITF also points out that Mr Bellucci should not have had the vitamin capsules tested privately, but instead should have sent the sealed bottle of vitamin capsules to the ITF, or to a laboratory specified by the ITF. By doing so, he could have removed any doubt about when the vitamin pills were contaminated with HCTZ.
Nevertheless, in all of the circumstances of this case, and in particular in light of Prof Ayotte’s opinion that the variable levels of HCTZ detected by her laboratory in the capsules were consistent with contamination at the manufacturing stage, the ITF accepts that Mr Bellucci has established that it is more likely than not that the HCTZ and its metabolite found in his urine sample 3089061 came from his ingestion of contaminated vitamin supplements on the day of the collection of his urine sample (18 July 2017) and in the days leading up to that date.
|
