January/February 2010 Issue

False Positives

The 10 best excuses given by athletes busted for doping.

Photo of Roger Clemens: Wikimedia Commons

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ATHLETE

WHAT HE SAID CAUSED THE POSITIVE RESULT

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis

Too much Jack Daniel’s

Czech tennis player Petr Korda

Veal dinner

Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson

Sarsaparilla-and-ginseng energy drink

American sprinter Dennis Mitchell

5 beers and 4 sex acts the night before the race

SF Giants slugger Barry Bonds

Flaxseed oil

Pitcher Roger Clemens

Lidocaine and vitamin B12

British shot-putter Paul Edwards

Drinking a bottle of shampoo (seriously)

Tennis champ Andre Agassi

Drinking his assistant’s meth-spiked soda

Italian soccer player Marco Borriello

Rubbing STD medicine on himself

Olympic cyclist Tyler Hamilton

A “vanishing twin” absorbed into his mother’s womb. (Don’t ask.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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