Manchester City’s Kolo Toure’ could miss as much as two years of professional soccer after flunking a drug test over what his former manager Arsene Wenger (above) insists were the diet pills belonging to the defender’s wife. Offering a defense (sort of) that Toure’, “did not reach for his wife Avo’s pills out of vanity” (“it was not because he had bought a new pair of jeans and was not happy with how they looked”), the Guardian’s Daniel Taylor argues “the pressures that accompany these BMI (body-mass index) checks are considerable.”
Touré has been guilty of gross naivety, at the very least – so hung up about his weight he decided to experiment from a box of multicoloured capsules that, taking a leap of logic, we can only presume he did not know enough about.
His lawyers intend to argue it was an innocent mistake, that Touré had no idea he was digesting a banned substance that has not yet been named officially but was detected in a test he took after the 2-1 defeat at Manchester United on 12 February. Whether that line of defence will have any impact on his punishment is difficult to know but what can be said with certainty is that he will not go short when it comes to character witnesses.
There have been no paparazzi sightings of him stumbling out of the bars favoured by Manchester’s glitterati. He does not drive the fastest car at City’s training ground. The windows are not blacked out and he is happy to park in the space that is allotted to him as opposed to, say, Mario Balotelli, who routinely puts his Lamborghini on the kerb straight outside the double doors.