Therese Johaug went there for doping – and was mocked.
Charlotte Kalla didn’t like that.
“She had already been punished,” the star writes in her new book.
It was in the fall of 2016 that Therese Johaug’s life would change forever, when the news hit like a bomb. Cross-country skiing’s biggest star had tested positive for the banned substance clostebol, and she was banned for 18 months. Johaug missed the Olympics in Pyeongchang, and the skiing world was in complete shock.
Mocked in Finland
On the same day that Johaug broke the news, Finnish cross-country skier Aino-Kaisa Saarinen, with five Olympic and World Cup medals in her career, was in Livigno, the same Italian town where Johaug allegedly applied the lip balm containing clostebol. She went to a pharmacy, bought a pack, and posted a picture of it on social media. The purpose? To show how someone couldn’t possibly have missed that there was a warning text on it.
– They said at the pharmacy that the lip balm contains doping. We just have to laugh at the fact that something like that can be misunderstood. I don’t believe in coincidences and excuses. I am too experienced to believe in excuses from practitioners who tested positive, Saarinen later said.
Therese Johaug has said in retrospect that it was hurtful for her to be questioned, and Saarinen was not alone in questioning and criticizing her. Several skiers from Finland did the same thing, the same with some Polish skiers. And for Charlotte Kalla, it was a difficult time. She has always been close friends with Johaug, and believes that it was difficult to see a person she knew and liked have her world destroyed.
“It was so unnecessary”
In her new autobiography “Shame on those who give”, Kalla talks about the feelings when Johaug tested positive and shut her down – but she also talks about the anger she felt towards those who mocked and questioned her.
“Finland and Poland mocked her in the form of pictures. It was so unnecessary. Why do you have to shove it in her face? She had already been punished,” Kalla writes in her book, according to Iltalehti.
Charlotte Kalla is also disappointed with how Therese Johaug was punished. She believes that there should be a difference in how practitioners ingested the preparations.
“There should be a greater difference in the punishment than there is now, depending on whether the doping is systematic and deliberate, or an accident. I think Therese was guilty of the latter,” she writes.
READ MORE: Charlotte Kalla’s confession after all these years – reveals eerie detail about Johaug’s doping: “Stop now!”
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