Will we see the athletes in the Beijing Games tested with the same aggressiveness as the Tour de France riders?
Will we see the athletes in the Beijing Games tested with the same aggressiveness as the Tour de France riders?
Nearly all the dopers have long ago stopped doping and let their bodies clear out the drugs they were using. As a reslt of better testing, most athletes who are dopers do their doping only during the pre-season when they are undergoing very hard training. The doping allows them to do two or three times the number of hard workouts per week as they would be able to do if not doping. By stopping the doping after the hard pre-season training, they have zero risk of testing positive and still largely benefit from their extra harding training made possible thru doping.
Even with unlimited testing, I'd be surprised if more than a few athletes test positive at Bejing. And those few who test positive are just as likely to be accidential dopers who took some supplement that was contaminated by the manufacturer.
How much money does Mark and Barry have? Worked out OK for them and they will slink away. Who is responsible for that crap?
If only they WANTED.
Of course they could catch big fish. Look at cycling and what is possible if you are testing even half-seriously!
HA! The running community calling TdF testing "half serious"? If distance running cared any less what its stars were doing it would be called the NFL. Even baseball cares more. Every sport should look at cycling and teams such as Garmin and Columbia as the right way to fight doping... teams and athletes who proactively test (voluntarily) and are transparent about it.
quack wrote:
Every sport should look at cycling and teams such as Garmin and Columbia as the right way to fight doping... teams and athletes who proactively test (voluntarily) and are transparent about it.
I agree. Testing in Beijing isn't going to be productive. The top athletes need to be frequently tested during the portion of the year they are in hard training -- either on a regular once-a-week basis, or randomly on a surprise basis of twice a month. That will make it much more difficult to dope. Because T&F athletes often train individually and don’t belong to teams as cyclists do, a different testing model is needed.
Due to the expense of testing, not every T&F athlete can undergo very frequent testing, but certainly the top athletes should. There are about 25 T&F Olympic events (including marathons). Surprise testing the world’s top-10 male and top-10 female athletes in each event for 20 times/year would require 10,000 annual tests worldwide. WADA, IAAF, plus the anti-doping agencies of several other countries can together afford to do this number of additional tests. Even at $300/test this amounts to just $6,000 for each top-10 athlete. These top athletes and/or their sponsors could easily cover this testing cost themselves. The financial benefits derived would exceed the testing costs for these athletes if the public became convinced these top athletes are finally clean.
The IAAF also needs to insure that top athletes who go to far-away remote locations to train, will still be located and frequently surprise tested. Top-10 ranked athletes should be banned from further competition until they have submitted to at least 15 surprise tests over the past 12 months.
While 90 countries have some sort of anti-doping program, I believe that only about 7 countries have full fledged anti-doping agencies as exists in the US & UK. Fans have no idea how often top athletes in small counties like Kenya and Ethiopia get surprise tested, if at all or by whom. Until there are clearly defined, rigorous, out-of-competition testing requirements for all the world’s top-10 ranked T&F athletes, fans will continue to look with suspicion at those who are performing unbelievably well. The IAAF needs to take the lead here, as the ICU did in cycling.
The most interesting fact to come out of the recent Tour EPO busts is that the dopers thought that there was no test for the newest EPO variant, Micera.
What the dopers didn't count on was the the drugmaker, Roche, provided WADA with technical data and chemical marking information months prior to the drug's release to the medical community. Speculation is that Amgen also cooperates with WADA in the same manner thus eliminating the need to build tests from the ground up.
Look for a spate of "injuries" amongst cyclists, distance runners, and triathletes leading up to Beijing based on this news.
quack wrote:
HA! The running community calling TdF testing "half serious"? If distance running cared any less what its stars were doing it would be called the NFL. Even baseball cares more.
No, I write that as a new runner and an old cycling fan.
Cycling is avantgarde in doping prosecution.
It is far from being good enough at doing it, though.
I am not sure team testing does really help. Even the super-doping-suspicious team CSC with the super-critique-team-teaster-doctor produces weird results.
Mz personal stance is team tests give teams are nothing but hedging against the surprising official doping tests: You get a clue which rider to pull out from racing circuit.
I love to be a cycling fan because it educates me better than any other sport about doping.
For me, cycling is the only sport that does it half-serious, all other sports do less. No sport does a three-quarter-effort in anti-doping. (Hello Lydiard!)