Originally Posted by christopher leigh
to be fair i fully agree with you mate and i understand you know what your talking about.
im not an expert on drugs in athletics but take cycling. Ever since bike riders started riding for money they have doped, they are in effect allowed to dope legally now up to a limit that certain bodies think acceptable to race.
its just doping but not as we know it
I still think quarantine before any the 'blue riband' event is the only way forwards. It means you can enhance your performance by cheating during training. But after 3 months in pre-event quarantine, the effects of any ingested, injected or other route of delivery would have been physiologically removed. So you would be competing effectively 'clean' at the time.
There could be an interesting psychological kick-back to this. Take the mind set of the athlete who sets the world record at the clean olympics. It would be embarrassing for them to continually perform better than that at 'dirty' events since this would very clearly signal that they were abusing substances. If the 'public' continue with their opprobium against drug cheats, the media gets onside and sponsors continue to shun dirty athletes, we might just create the situation whereby we can turn the tide.
The message could be rammed home by some hefty jail sentences for coaches and permanent bans from sporting involvement.
If all this sounds a bit drastic, well it is but the problem is, as Daz says, deep rooted and very complex. And thats even before we get into any undetectable genetic manipulation!
If you read some of the cycling forums there seems to be an almost acceptance of drugs as being part of the sport. Some of the comments such as xx is my hero and will be even if he was on drugs are odd comments because had xx not been on drugs would he have been halfway as good? I find it really bizzare.
Have I ever told the story of my one and only brush with the drug testers? 15 minutes after I'd been dragged off by an official to be tested he realised that I wasn't the intended target.
It's such a quagmire and to be honest its only going to get worse with the advent of genetic doping. In the dopers vs testers arms race the dopers, and the labs that support them, will always be ahead. Look how long it took to come up with and implement a direct test for EPO... it was literally years after athletes had started taking it.
In cycling there is a historical heritage of doping. Jacque Acquetil's quote of "we cannot ride the tour on mineral water" and the iconic status of Tommy Simpson pretty much sum it up. Also, if sponsors, organisers and spectators expect riders to average speeds of 40kph plus for three week races such as the Giro and the Tour they'll have to keep on doping. If we see a drop in those avaerage speeds nearer to 35kph then the problem might be getting sorted.
In athletics a study was done a while ago in the states when a group of top end collegiate athletes were asked "if we could give you a substance that would guarantee you a gold medal at the next Olympics but, in ten years time, it'd kill you, would you take it?"...... almost 80% said yes... nuff said.
Quite so Nik. Most athletes are so driven and focussed they would sell their granny for an edge. Thats why draconian measures are needed.
The alternative is just to chuck it all in and let the dopers have a field day. The way things are going with prosthetics, in 10 years sprinters may be having elective amputations so they can fit carbon fibre sprinting blades. These things will give you more speed and you will weigh less to boot.
What we are moving to is the Roman amphitheatre in delayed motion. Death from competition will not occur during the event but is assured sometime after before natural causes.
Would that also include Paula Radcliffe's marathon world record ??
Having said this I must say I agree with sentiments of those wanting to 'reclaim' athletics. Rather than the (great but) impractical idea of a 3 month pre Olympics camp wouldn't life bans plus the repayment of all monies earned from athletics be an easier way forward initially, provided fiscal means to enable all nations to drug test to the same standard can be found. Extending the ban idea, maybe a country who is found to have 10 athletes found guilty of positive tests in a prescribed period could have its athletes banned from Olympics/World Championships, even possibly all athletics events (big city marathons, etc.) for an extended period, collective responsibility might help clean up athletics.
I like the idea of x strikes and your country is out, but I thinnk there's a real opportunity being missed:
If I was running Glaxo or Johnson & Johnson, I'd want the marketing opportunities that would come with being 'leading the way' in the fight against doping.
If WADA went out and scouted for sponsors, and took fees from Olympic participating countries, they could start to introduce standard testing regimes across the world and work towards a level playing field.
I hope I don't sound naive, and this is a genuine question - is it possible for ANY athlete to compete and succeed at the very highest levels of sort without taking drugs, assuming that at least a proportion of their competitors will be doing so?
One of the problems with the more draconian punishments for doping is that they raise the burden of proof to almost unworkable levels.
If you are going to destroy someone’s career and reputation, fine them thousands of pounds or even jail them, then you have to be 110 per cent sure they are guilty.
The current state of testing procedures means that this is often not possible.
And you can guarantee that the dopers we really want to catch – the medal winning, record breaking, money earning ones – will have expensive lawyers ready to jump on the slightest slip in procedure.
A more workable solution might be something that some cycling teams are introducing – the ‘medical withdrawal’. Riders are subject to regular blood monitoring. Any anomalies, such as large rises in haematocrit or reticulocyte levels (indicative of EPO) or total blood volume (indicative of blood doping) leads to the rider being withdrawn from competition for a couple of months while the reasons are investigated. Obviously a rider who is continually being withdrawn is of no value to the team and is quickly offloaded.
Long-term storage of the blood samples would also get around the problem of the testers always being a year or two behind the dopers.
Again referring back to my previous point, surely Paula Radcliffe is doing so. I am sure that someone will correct me but using this as an example I think is a false example as performance enhancing drugs are used mainly in distances far less than what could be classed as endurance events.
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