We can’t say we didn’t expect it …
However, we even hoped it would terrible sword of Damocles was removed from the head of Andrea Iannone. A rider who may have been questionable for some of his attitudes – which only concern him anyway – but he doesn’t deserve that sentence.
We have known Andrea practically since the beginning of his career and trust our impression and our experience: he is a good boy. Sometimes he may have made decisions that everyone didn’t like, including his opinion, but we are always interested in the driver.
And we liked Iannone. For his speed, of course, but also for his disrespect, which goes to the limit. How Carlos Reutemann used to say: “I don’t drive racing cars, I’m a racing driver”. With everything that this sentence contains.
Even if the chances of seeing him back on track are very slim without going into the case Alex Schwazerwho has admitted his guilt, we don’t like this story.
And we think that the driver Andrea Iannone was left alone to dry. Worse, they shot him in the back to make an example.
As men of sport, we are of course fully aware of this what a scourge doping is. And not just on a professional level. There are probably a lot more amateur dopers out there. It doesn’t matter what discipline. You are known. Lots of athletes, really a hell of a lot of athletes, do it out of ego to beat their own personal record or eternal friend-rival. It’s not as rare as you think.
In the past, state-sponsored doping took place in the GDR. and it makes us sick to know how many athletes sacrificed their lives to beat teammates who used illegal drugs. But to associate the Andrea Iannone case with it is blasphemy, absolute madness. Whatever Iannone was doing, he wasn’t aware of it: No driver uses these substances for doping.
We come from an era in which many drivers took a shot before the start. We have seen several champions do it. And we’ve heard of cocaine use too. Both at the leisure level and move his courage a meter further down.
Andrea Iannone did not use drostanolone to build his courage. Trust me, he always had more than enough of them.
WADA wanted to make an example of him in order not to have to deal with a precedent which could have been used to defend other sports. We can understand the severity. Not this heaviness. Not that way. You don’t kill a rider like that.