International Career
Taurasi was recruited to play for the European team Spartak Moscow. The team had finished in eleventh place in the Russian league when Shabtai von Kalmanovich decided to buy the team. Kalmanovich was a successful business man with various interests, including women's basketball. He had stopped in to see a local women's basketball team in Yekaterinburg, and "literally fell in love with the point guard, Anna Arkhipova". He ended up buying that team, but later decided to buy the Spartak Moscow Region team, and turn it into a top team. He arranged to add a number of top-notch players, who had earned seven Olympic medals between them. Many of the players were European, but the team also included Australian born Lauren Jackson and USA born Sue Bird and Taurasi.
The team would go on to win four consecutive Euroleague championships.
On December 24, 2010, Taurasi's lawyers revealed that Taurasi had tested positive for a mild stimulant while playing in Turkish Champion Fenerbahçe professional basketball team. According to her lawyer, Howard Jacobs, the positive test came from an "A" sample, and that testing had been requested on a second "B" sample. Jacobs also was quick to point out that the substance Taurasi tested positive for "was not a steroid or recreational drug." Until the "B" sample can be tested, Taurasi has been provisionally suspended from the Turkish league. In its own statement, the Turkish basketball association revealed that the WADA-list banned substance was modafinil.
On February 16, 2011, Diana Taurasi was cleared of doping allegations. ABC News indicated Taurasi was absolved from all doping allegations and can rejoin her Istanbul team following the retraction of the Turkish laboratory on its earlier finding on the former UConn star’s urine samples.
On May 16, 2012 Taurasi signed a contract with UMMC.
Read more about this topic: Diana Taurasi
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)