Bizarre but not unprecedented

Our visit today to the GUBU blog -- a necessary distraction from thinking about the many different fiascos the US election may present tomorrow evening -- draws our attention to the strange tale of Waterford Crystal (the horse, not the glassware). The horse, ridden by Cian O'Connor, won a gold medal in showjumping for Ireland in the Olympics. But the nags, like their human counterparts, are drug tested, using the same procedure: two samples are taken, and if the A-sample tests positive for banned substances, the B-sample is tested to confirm.

And the cycle of blame and excuses is the same for horses and humans as well -- "I didn't cheat," "it was for medical reasons," -- as was quickly seen when the horse failed the A-sample. The B-sample was on some circuitous route from Paris, to Cambridge, and maybe or maybe not to Hong Kong, because one way or another, it has been stolen. The rule seems to be that if the B-sample is lost, the entire test is voided. So, in the TV crime show terminology, we have Cian on motive, but not yet means and opportunity.

In any event, bringing our New World perspective to this incident, we were reminded of the Albert Belle affair in baseball. Albert was hitting suspiciously well for the Cleveland Indians in 1995, and during a game in Chicago, the White Sox decided that there were enough grounds to ask the umpires to confiscate his bat and test it for "corking" (in which the player has an illegally altered bat with a lighter interior, to get a faster swing). The suspect bat was stored in the umpires' dressing room. And it was stolen. The creative thief crawled from the Indians dressing room through air conditioning shafts, and through the roof panels, to substitute another bat.

It wasn't a very good substitution because the umpires could immediately see that the bat was different, but it did remove the presumably incriminating evidence. Of course, if Cian was involved in the disappearance of the B-sample, the logistics are much more complicated than crawling through some roofing. But there's no Olympic gold for ingenuity.

UPDATE Nov 2: Things get weirder, after the theft, a break-in and missing files.