Dizzying fee for Ana Bărbosu's lawyer in the doping investigation! + Who pays the money and what chances does the Romanian gymnast have to escape the case

Named European gymnast of the year by the continental forum and caught in the whirlwind of a doping case, Ana Maria Bărbosu is at the beginning of complicated operations, through which she will try to get rid of the suspicions raised around her. The gymnast, who is studying at Stanford University (California) on a scholarship, has missed three tests in the space of 12 months, which exposes her to a potential suspension of at least a year.

This is a violation of the so-called “whereabouts” rule, whereby athletes are required to announce their location on a special platform so that they can be found by anti-doping officers for possible testing.

However, Bărbosu was not detected once in Romania and on two other occasions in the USA, so the procedures against her were automatically triggered. And the details surrounding the case gather spectacularly, beyond the extremely discreet character in which the wheels of the official investigation turn!

Ana Maria Bărbosu's file is on the agenda of the International Testing Agency

While competing on the Stanford University team in the American university championship, Ana Bărbosu faces an investigation for violating the World Anti-Doping Code

The file is currently controlled by the International Testing Agency (ITA), the entity that has largely taken over the issue of doping on a global scale in recent years.

The agency was established in 2018 at the initiative of the IOC with the idea of ​​creating an independent body in the field. It is an attempt to cancel the conflicts of interest in the big federations, which managed their own cases, but at the risk of covering their top names. And the big boom was the institutionalized doping discovered in Russia, confirmed in 2016 by a special report of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

The lawyer Howard Jacobs took over Ana Bărbosu's doping file for about a month // photo source: athleteslawyer.com

Therefore, ITA is the management body of the “Barbosu case”, in which the athlete from Focșani is defended by Howard Jacobs, the former lawyer of Simona Halep, who obtained a reduction of her sentence from 4 years to 9 months.

Breaking news, GSP sources say Jacobs' advance fee alone is in the neighborhood of $300,000! The payments will be fully borne by Stanford, which launched the initiative to call on the services of the famous American lawyer. Apart from Simona Halep, he also had among his clients Maria Sharapova (2016), initially suspended for two years as a result of meldonium consumption, but the sanction was reduced to 15 months.

The first big stake: canceling the charge of absenteeism on one of the locations

This is the paragraph from the World Anti-Doping Code violated by Ana Bărbosu: three missed tracking episodes in a 12-month period

From the information obtained by GSP, the case is at the point where the three absences of Bărbosu were found, already notified in connection with the suspicion of violation of anti-doping regulations by deviation in the matter of location.

Now, the athlete, through her lawyers, has the right to come up with written arguments for each individual absence from the test to dismantle at least one of the cases. If his strategy succeeds in this phase, the doping case disappears from the first procedures, because there would only be two “red flags” in 12 months against Bărbosu, that is, nothing illegal.

Otherwise, the ITA moves to the next level: notice of indictment, with two options for the athlete – to be heard or the ITA to give the decision directly. And the expectations are that, if the file reaches that point, Bărbosu will obviously ask for a hearing, which would take place through an ad hoc division from TAS, in collaboration with ITA.

The headquarters of the International Testing Agency in Lausanne (Switzerland): Ana Bărbosu's doping file is managed from here

One of the lines of defense is fragile: the lack of anti-doping education

Ana Bărbosu's defense plan would also include the idea that she had no anti-doping education, so that she could properly master the details related to “whereabouts”.

It would be a very fragile card from the start, because simply participating in the Olympic Games or World Championships requires passing through such a filter at the national level. It is even mandatory to take a dedicated course, supported by an educational platform, ADEL (Antidoping Education and Learning), because the certificate obtained at the end is a condition of eligibility for participation in the major planetary competitions.

Quicksand at ITA: escape the provisional suspension?

The fate of Ana Bărbosu in the doping file depends on the fruition of some fine details from both sides, prosecution and defense Photo: GSP archive

According to the mechanisms of the ITA, Bărbosu is currently exposed to an optional provisional suspension procedure. Usually, the ITA or an international federation through the ITA calls for such a measure if a major competition is approaching and it would be unethical to the other competitors for an athlete under investigation to participate.

However, this is not the case of Ana Bărbosu on this side, only that, lately, the ITA has been calling for similar decisions in cases of missed localization, that is, exactly the case of the Romanian woman.

At the moment, however, until the first aspects of the investigation are clarified, Bărbosu is free to continue participating in the University Championships in the USA, in Team Stanford. And everything takes place behind closed doors, between emails, telephones and crossed documents.

If the lawyers will know how to cancel out of hand a single episode of missed location, Bărbosu would basically be acquitted, without public uproar.