Doping in Sport

fez

fez

fez

Caporegime
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Since the Russian olympics team was gently slapped for basically running a state sponsored doping program a russian hacking group have been releasing information about various athletes who "failed" drugs tests. I assume this is an attempt to show that the world hates Russia and that there are double standards being applied. Personally I think Russia got away horrendously lightly as most of their athletes were at Rio.

Now my understanding of the idea of exemptions is to allow athletes to take medication which they need to perform at a usual level. That is to say they can treat things like hayfever, illness and injury. The list of banned substances is ridiculous and without a serious dedication to it I think most of us who are not athletes would fail their tests and we are not taking them for performance reasons.

No one has ever said "do you know what will help you in the gym? get these hayfever tablets down you".

You don't fail a test and then explain it away, you tell them what you wish to take before you take it and they log this and then when you are tested they take this into account.

From reading peoples responses to this revelation that Froome, Wiggin, Biles etc have all taken banned substances it seems the general view is that they are doping and should be banned from the sport. I would like to put this down to them being thick and ignorant of the issue but I reckon 90% of the posters thought that taking any banned substance for whatever reason shouldn't be allowed.

What are your thoughts on this?
 
Think about it this way; if someone is confirmed as doping and wins, yet second place was only marginally behind him, would you think he was natural? Typically if you're doping, it gives you a large advantage, not a minuscule one. If the difference between Olympic atheletes is tiny, including ones confirmed to be doping and those unconfirmed, makes it sound like a lot are on the scene.
 
I'd be willing to bet most of the athletes that make it to the olympics are doing something that would be considered doping by the wider world. The really good ones just have better regimes around not getting caught out.
 
You highlight the Russian Olympians and I agree as a nation they got off rather (too) lightly. Yet, as a nation they are banned from the Paralympics.... Ridiculous.

Anyway, TUE's is what you are getting at. And the grey line between legitimate use of them and the over-use/unfair use.
It is without doubt a massive problem. The Nike Oregon Project (Salazar's group, coach of Mo Farah/Galen Rupp) is the prime example of exploiting TUE abuse and hanging around with athletes like a bad smell in that "grey area".

The list of banned substances is ridiculous in some cases, however, it is not as bad as you make out and the basic punter who isn't an athlete is not hammering down things that would result in a fail. You mention hayfever, good example, plenty of us suffer it but look at what us lot are taking (legit, not on the list e.g cetirizine) versus what athletes may be prescribed. There has to be something to it when millions use one OK drug yet they choose to administer something that's raising a flag? TUE it regardless, you're cool!

Froome/Wiggins leaked data I don't see as big news/revelation at all. Done under legit TUE, a process easily accessible to their competition. It's paperwork at the end of the day... Not me saying it is right, but if that is cheating, then everyone is cheating. Under current rules/legislation/access etc etc it is not cheating.

Policing it is the difficult part. Testing in/out of competition is the part they are really enforcing, especially for UK based athletes, but the next step really needs to be clamp down on the abuse/overuse/ease of gaining TUE's.

A separate but comparable and relevant comparison is you going to your local GP and seeing how bloody easy it is to gain a prescription for some form of drug whatever it may be. Here in Scotland it's free prescriptions, you literally walk in the surgery and they are chucking antibiotics and such at you to get you out the door. So apply this ease of access to a sportsperson/team with a specific private/team doctor and access to anything on paper as "legit" becomes stupidly easy and how to WADA/UKADA police that? It's an insanely difficult, near on impossible task.... Then you factor in limitations of WADA in separate nations and the massive differences between individual nations anti doping agencies both from willingness/capability point of view and the problem grows another 10 arms and legs.

Minefield doesn't come close with this subject. It's massive.
 
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ThestigGT999 said:
lol maybe part timers

but you get penalised for taking adderall
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lol if you think that most of the guys in things like WWE(I'm guessing this is the sort of wrestling that was being referred to rather than Oly style) aren't doped you're dreaming.

It's a very big money business that is seriously hard on the body even if it is mostly set up, they need to know they can get beaten to bits and recover quickly best way to do that is doping. Except in the US it'll be "legally prescribed" for "anti aging".
 
Is doping still as common in WWE? back in the '80s and '90s they were all up to it, but they pretty much all died young as a result, and the current crop don't appear to be such physical monsters (I don't watch, but from what I've seen).
 
From what I've seen they've outwardly tried to clean it up but like I said the recovery boost alone from doping rather than the mass monsters is going to be enough for there to be at least "mild" doping still going on behind the scenes.
 
=XDC=FluphyBunny said:
I watch sports now and sadly just assume everyone is or was doping :)
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I assume anyone getting in top 10 in a majority of sports are doping to a degree. Likely things like micro-dosing etc.


But it is also hard to draw a line. EPO and related drugs that are common for endurance athletes in doping cases works by increased red blood cell count, which allows increased O2 in the blood. You can get the same effect by training and sleeping at altitude, which is why high-altitude training camps are common for pro runners and cyclists etc. You can even buy special low pressure sleeping chambers that you can go to bed in, raising red blood cell counts. that is [perfectly legal and not counted as doping.
 
tom_e said:
lol if you think that most of the guys in things like WWE(I'm guessing this is the sort of wrestling that was being referred to rather than Oly style) aren't doped you're dreaming.

It's a very big money business that is seriously hard on the body even if it is mostly set up, they need to know they can get beaten to bits and recover quickly best way to do that is doping. Except in the US it'll be "legally prescribed" for "anti aging".
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WWE News: Update On The Drug Roman Reigns Took That Forced Him To Violate The WWE Wellness Policy
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3259768/ww...-the-wwe-wellness-policy/#uG5tY5zm4SAaouy2.99
 
xdcx said:
You highlight the Russian Olympians and I agree as a nation they got off rather (too) lightly. Yet, as a nation they are banned from the Paralympics.... Ridiculous.
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I think that the International Paralympic Committee did what the International Olympic Committee should have done but it is ridiculous that they're completely excluded by one committee and the other gave a hospital pass to the individual federations and washed their hands of the issue. Obviously it's unfair on those athletes who were competing cleanly (and there must be some Russian athletes to whom that applied but where there is, what appears to be, a state sponsored doping programme then it needs more serious action.

xdcx said:
Anyway, TUE's is what you are getting at. And the grey line between legitimate use of them and the over-use/unfair use.
It is without doubt a massive problem. The Nike Oregon Project (Salazar's group, coach of Mo Farah/Galen Rupp) is the prime example of exploiting TUE abuse and hanging around with athletes like a bad smell in that "grey area".

Snipped for space.
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You're right, this subject is huge and extremely complex. It also appears that what was legitimate at certain points may be retrospectively judged not to be ok and then athletes sanctioned for it. Athletes will always be looking for something that gives them an advantage so the line between legitimate and illegitimate training/supplement will be very slim at times and the distinctions drawn can look a bit artificial.
 
It sort of belongs in here but Maria Sharapova has had her doping ban reduced to 15 months from the original two years. The arguments that seem to have led to the reduction are that it was fine to delegate her responsibility for compliance to her agent and that the change in meldonium's status wasn't specifically noted.

Surely if it's fine to delegate the responsibility there is still an issue of vicarious liability and/or principle agent at play here otherwise it makes a mockery of the system when a player can blame their agent/trainer/flunky for their consumption of any banned substances and receive reduced sanctions while the person taking the blame receives little to no sanction at all. This strikes me as being a long way from what was intended and sends out the wrong message to athletes. The original ban didn't seem particularly harsh so reducing it yet further appears daft.

Sharapova's lawyer's description of this decision as a "stunning repudiation of the ITF" rather made me smile - it's almost as if his client wasn't found to be at fault or indeed still remained banned. Maybe the ITF do need to be clearer about communicating the substances on their banned list but a) professional athletes should be checking what they consume and b) most of the other tennis players somehow managed to abide by the rules.
 
Yea I really feel like it should always 100% of the time be the athletes responsibility to check the list.

It's not hard to check the list :/

Life bans, withdrawal of prize monies, termination of sponsorship agreements.... we need more serious consequences for cheaters because, as it stands right now, it pays to cheat.
 
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/do-drugs-only-help-a-little.html/

...When you’re looking at performance sports you introduce a whole host of other issues. Technique, mechanics, efficiency, etc. And here you don’t see nearly the same benefit of drugs in terms of performance. That is, I won’t in any fashion disagree that drugs may *only* provide a 10% or so difference in performance. What I will disagree with is that 10% represents “only a little help” in the world of modern sport.

Put differently, it’s possible to reach a correct conclusion and still miss the point entirely. And saying that “It’s only a 10%” gain completely missing the point as far as I’m concerned. I say that as, when you consider the differentials in the top competitors in high levels sports, 10% is enormous. The top three are often separated by a few percent and 10% may be the difference between first and last place or first and doesn’t even make it to the competition or finals. To show this, I want to do my own analysis of real-world results in three different sports. I’m too lazy to hack out a table since the WordPress interface sucks and I can’t be asked. All I’ve done is look at results and done some basic division to get the percentage differences. I’m sure I’ve screwed up one or more of the numbers since I don’t recheck my math. Let’s focus on principles.

In 2015 International Weightlifting Championships, I looked at a handful of weight classes, comparing the total results (you see slightly more variability in snatch and clean and jerk since you often have relative specialists). In the 56kg class, for example, only 5% separated first and third place. By the time you take the best finisher and take 10% off of his total, you’re in 5th place. Ok, not bad. Move to the 77kg class and a mere 2.5% separates first and third. By the time you get t0 10% off of first you are in 20th place. In the 105+kg class, 8% separates first and third. At 10% off the top finisher, you don’t crack the top 10. I didn’t look at every class but you wouldn’t expect major differences to occur from class to class (for whatever reasons the lightest and heaviest are different than the middle weight class I picked). The top three guys are within a few percentage points of one another and to give up 10% takes you completely out of the running. It may only be a little but in high level sport, it means EVERYTHING.

Next I looked at the 2012 Men’s 100m Olympic sprint results. I was going to look at the preliminary rounds but realize that sprinters don’t go all out in the early rounds so the comparisons won’t be that accurate. So only the finals are relevant. And in those finals, 1.7% separates first and third place. With the exception of an odd blip with Asafa Powell (who finished in more than 11 seconds and must have pulled something), a mere 3.4% differences separates first and last place. Lose 10% off the fastest time and you don’t make it out of the prelims. Hell, consider that Bolt has run a 9.59, a 10% reduction in performance is a 10.51. You’re in another county at that point and consider that the high-school 100m world record is a 10 flat (the girls run 10.98); so a 10.5 100m is a good men’s high school time or so.

Moving to ice speed skating, at Sochi in the 2014, 0.3% separated first and third in the men’s 500m and outside of two guys who clearly fell (their times were a minute off the best), first and fortieth place were separated by 4.6%. In the 1000m, 0.6% separated first and third and the fourtieth place finisher was 7.4% slower. In the 10,000m, 3% separates first and third and last place was only 7.4% behind that. This is a sport where the top 40 in the world get to compete and being 10% off the best time doesn’t even get you into the B-group (lowest 20) much less the A-group (top 20).

I could continue to look at sport after sport (I wanted to look at track cycling where 10ths of a second often separate first and second but couldn’t find good numbers easily and gave up) but hopefully this makes the point that a 10% difference in performance due to drugs, even if only seems like mathematically a little, is absolutely enormous in the real world of sport. If all athletes are clean and one of the last place competitors get on drugs, he can literally jump over every single athlete, moving from last to first. Of course, the counter argument to this is that if everybody is juicing the placings don’t change but that was never the point of the original analysis I am taking issue with which is that “drugs only help a little”. If 10% boost can take you from way past last place in any meaningful competition to first, that’s more than a “little” help so far as I’m concerned.
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