Catchfence

Jeremy Mayfield got his comeuppance. He tried to escalate his woebegone lawsuit against NASCAR for failing multiple drug tests. Now the lawsuit has been thrown out of court on six grounds, including lack of evidence.

That he had no credible case should have been obvious to everyone from the start – what gave it all away was that Mayfield never had any witnesses, just his own word – yet in varied fan forums there was a lot of nonsense about false positives and so forth, things that simply don’t exist in the real world. It remains amazing that people take seriously the “deny deny deny” actions of athletes caught ingesting illicit substances, especially as not one case has ever happened where an athlete was accused of taking a substance and it came out by objective truth that he did not. Not once has this happened – those accused of taking illicit substances have consistently been proven to have taken them.

So what happens with Mayfield now remains to be seen, but given his serial foolishness I suspect he’ll stay in denial and keep fighting. Certainly there’s been nothing particularly rational about his handling of the suspension; he could have done the right thing by telling the truth and doing something to kick the habit; instead he chose to fight. Why he has insisted on fighting instead of cleaning up his life is a mystery – he could never win because he had no case, and all he’s done now is ruin everything in his life.

It’s a sordid tale and a career that once showed genuine accomplishment has become an insult to racing. Mayfield needs to grow up and stop fighting; clean up your life before you go too far, Jeremy.