If you’re an NBA fan worried about injury management and recovery times for your favorite team’s player, what Rudy Gobert tweeted late last night might be giving you heart palpitations. The French Team and Utah Jazz star tweeted out last night, “Got woke up this morning for a doping control( BLOOD and urine), the morning after a late game when i could sleep more. No respect for the player’s recovery time. Terrible way of doing things @FIBA .”
Got woke up this morning for a doping control( BLOOD and urine), the morning after a late game when i could sleep more. No respect for the player’s recovery time. Terrible way of doing things @FIBA .
— Rudy Gobert (@rudygobert27) September 2, 2019
Hours after France’s hard fought win against the German National Team, Gobert was being woken up in the early hours in the morning to be submitted for a doping test. Recovery is vitally important in the hours after a game. Research into sleep after intense activity show that activities requiring quick reactions—like shot blocking or defending elite athletes, for example—take a dive. From The Atlantic:
It seems like certain kinds of athletic tasks are more affected by sleep deprivation. Although one-off efforts and high-intensity exercise see an impact, sustained efforts and aerobic work seem to suffer an even larger setback. Gross motor skills are relatively unaffected, while athletes in events requiring fast reaction times have a particularly hard time when they get less sleep.
According to FIBA’s guidelines, they can alert that they will be drug testing “12 hours prior to and including 4 hours after the game.”
For doping controls FIBA makes the common distinction between In-Competition testing and Out-of-Competition testing.
In-Competition testing is currently defined as follows:
It will be interesting to see when Rudy was notified and then required to be present for the test. He most likely had to get up, go off-site from his hotel, and disrupt his day of recovery for this test. Not the greatest way to get rested up in a new country, time zone, and after a tough fought game against Germany. That doesn’t mean drug testing is not a good thing, but the process of disrupting elite athletes during recovery during an international event is sure to ruffle up feathers of a lot of these athletes clubs back home.