Richard Gasquet's Life-Changing Kiss and the Lessons That Can Be Learned

Richard Gasquet kissed a girl, and the International Tennis Federation didn't like it.

The kiss, according to Gasquet, caused him to inadvertently consume cocaine which led to a positive test and a two-year ITF ban in March at the Sony Ericsson Open.

Almost five months later, a three-lawyer tribunal with the ITF concluded that Gasquet did in fact consume the cocaine from the kiss, ending his ban.

Now, the sports world has heard some classic excuses for failing a drug test. Manny Ramirez has his fertility drugs; Floyd Landis's elevated testosterone levels were "normal;" and the list goes on.

But who would have thought one of these excuses could be true?

Gasquet's case is unique, very unique. The tribunal said the amount of cocaine in his system was no more than a grain of salt.

Was this very potent cocaine, or are the drug tests that good?

Hard to judge, but it makes me wonder, are some of these athletes' excuses plausible?

Certainly Ramirez wouldn't mind an investigation into his excuse, and can an inquiry determine whether Landis is a doper or just imbalanced?

I don't have the answer. I'm not a scientist, only a journalist.

What concerns me is the lack of research and insight into some of these other positive tests. I'm not trying to say everybody who fails a test with an excuse is in the right, but anything can happen.

Drug testing in sports has come a long way and have produced, in my mind, great results thus far. I'm not naive enough to think all athletes are cleaning up and not finding other roads to PEDs and recreational drugs, but I believe more are clean today than 10 years ago.

The system will always need refinement. Maybe, just maybe, there's some validity to these excuses, and it might be time for these sport industries to look into these complaints.

As Gasquet has proved, tests are not 100-percent accurate.

Sometimes, human research and asking questions prevail over a computer. So, if we can prove the technology right or wrong, what's a little more work?

I mean, sometimes people are wrong, and sometimes technology fails or works too well. There needs to be a fine line between human error, computer error, and an error in assumptions.