Here Is The Full Documentary That Accuses Peyton Manning And Others Of Doping

Here Is The Full Documentary That Accuses Peyton Manning And Others Of Doping

Turns out it's total bullshit, at least in the parts that refer to Manning.

The doctor in question and Peyton deny everything and, unlike most of these "he said, she said" counter-claims, one thing is testable. The documentary says Charles Sly, the accuser, was working in the doctor's office in 2011, and - this is a key fact - the documentarians claim to have verified that. The doctor claims that the guy was only an unpaid intern in 2013. One or the other must be lying. If the doctor is not lying, then the documentary maker must have lied about having verified Sly's 2011 employment.

Well, the documentary maker lied. They could not have verified that Sly worked there in 2011 because he simply did not. ESPN did the leg work: "Sly told ESPN's Chris Mortensen that he isn't a pharmacist and wasn't at the Guyer Institute in 2011." There's no way this can be spun as an oversight or error. It can only be an outright lie.

The documentary also claimed that Sly was a pharmacist. Unlike the other claim, this one may not have been an outright lie, but if not, it was still sloppy and libelous reporting which, when you get right down to it, isn't any better than lying. So I think you can probably discount anything else claimed in that documentary. If they got anything right, it was purely by accident.

Sly himself told ESPN that "he recanted his story to Al Jazeera when he realized that it had used information he had made up to British hurdler Liam Collins, the undercover reporter."

So Al Jazeera used the documentary knowing that the main "accuser" had admitted he was just shooting the breeze. (The camera was hidden.)

Peyton Manning raises an excellent point in the ESPN article: "I'd love to understand why this guy's saying this, why he made it up, that he admits he makes it up and yet it still becomes a story. I'd like to be told and explained that."

Fair question.