Oh! Well that makes sense.

So what she was taking was not considered prohibited before. Would that mean they can only punish her for this years violation?

Considering it was only banned recently, I hardly see the issue here.

Yes that's correct the bottom line is as a athlete you are responsible for what goes in your body ,  the reason is it stops people making excuses about how they tested positive , but in this case she was notified and didn't bother reading it.

who's making an issue of it it's no different than anyone else failing a test ,the only reason it made these headlines is her profile , and why would it make a difference if something is on the banned list 3 months or 30 years the list is updated every year and all athletes get one sent to them along with a 24 hr information line .she admited she got hers last year and didn't bother reading it.

According to the rules if you intentionally take a banned substance it's a 4 year suspension.

Just let her play. A 4 year ban doesn't do anyone any good and effectively ends her career.

If the substance was so terrible and performance enhancing why was it legal for like 10 years? And yes meds can have like 3 or 4 different names so I can understand how a mistake could have been made here.

Didn't know that, sorry

I thought it was a discretionary thing

The only reason that it being only just banned as of 1 January is if the last time she took the drug was in December. Technically, in that case she would not have violated the rules. But her confession pretty much sounds like she did take the drug in January, so she violated the rules and that's all there is to it.

There's really no excuse for her and her management team and her medical team to all plead ignorance of the change to the banned list. I bet her doctor and coach knew very well that a lot of athletes were using it as a performance enhancer, and that it would probably one day appear on the banned list. I would have expected they would scrutinise the banned list every year to see if it finally made it on the list and in each previous year they would have said "all right, one more year!"

As I said, I think he doctor or coach or manager knew this was now banned, but they decided to let her take it for the Aussie open in the hopes that she wouldn't be pinged for it, and after the Aussie open they would stop her from using it. If she can prove ignorance and also show that someone in her team knew about it and let her keep taking it I reckon she could sue her management team.

It is NOT prescribed for a max of 4-6 weeks at all. In its most commonly used form for boosting stamina it is prescribed for 4-6 weeks in "apparently" much higher doses than she was taking. Many medicenes are prescribed for different lengths of time depending on what they are treating and according to her and her team it wasn't to boost stamina.

Personally it sounds like their is enough mitigating evidence to suggest her intention wasn't to cheat so she should probably get a reasonably lenient suspension/fine.

well at least by then serena may be gone :p