Ben True throwing down the clean sport gauntlet - Shares personal USADA info and volunteers sample for doping research

lol are you kidding?? this tell us nothing

How is this transparency? Let's see the entire document.

What was that "clean athlete" program that supposedly had athletes freezing blood samples for future testing? I remember it included Tyson Gay....OOOPS!

He's soooooooooooo blue-collar. Must be the all-time clean world record holder (well, except for the white Goddess Paula and Mr Congeniality #1 and #1a, Haile and Bernie). Ben and Bernard's B-Sample are just so real and anti-NOPe. Gosh I hope it snows in Rio because snow is True-approved. Snow is pure and clean like Ben.

#ijizzforben

#untilmyjealousyconsumesmeandihatehimlikeeveryotherrunnerfasterthanme

It's always best not to come out as a moral compass; it'll always end up biting you in the ass in some way or another.

Molly sharing the disclosure information seemed hollow to me. How does one know if someone is disclosing everything?

ive always assumed these two were going about things the right way, but like tran, sorta wonder how useful this latest practice is.

huddles pic raises another (cascading) question ive had in the past:

is there a real philosophical/moral/other distinction to be made between allegra and prednisone?

how about allegra v. cytomel for somebody with tsh above 5? above 2?

what about vitamin d/iron v. allegra?

not sure i have a take on it, but seems like the argument could be made that anything youre putting in the body to remediate its natural deficiencies might be problematic...

Swoony B wrote:

He's soooooooooooo blue-collar. Must be the all-time clean world record holder (well, except for the white Goddess Paula and Mr Congeniality #1 and #1a, Haile and Bernie). Ben and Bernard's B-Sample are just so real and anti-NOPe. Gosh I hope it snows in Rio because snow is True-approved. Snow is pure and clean like Ben.

#ijizzforben

#untilmyjealousyconsumesmeandihatehimlikeeveryotherrunnerfasterthanme

get help

Some of the cyclists have shared selective

Information in the past

Also the British lady widely suspected to be the female equivalent of Lance Armstrong has made a lot of these type of noises in the past

juan_t_reyna wrote:

is there a real philosophical/moral/other distinction to be made between allegra and prednisone?

how about allegra v. cytomel for somebody with tsh above 5? above 2?

what about vitamin d/iron v. allegra?

not sure i have a take on it, but seems like the argument could be made that anything youre putting in the body to remediate its natural deficiencies might be problematic...

Allegra -

Prednisone -

Please be aware that they both have substantially different active ingredients.

On another note, was it a push by Saucony for two of their athletes to post this? Nothing from Duane Solomon.

John Clendon wrote:

On another note, was it a push by Saucony for two of their athletes to post this? Nothing from Duane Solomon.

It was actually Amy Cragg and Molly who did it first. Ben even noted in his tweet he liked that Molly did it. So I think it was a Providence training partner push, not a Saucony push.

Also, I think this thread is missing the boat. It's not about "this tells us nothing"... It is increased transparency, undeniably. Whether or not it's transparent enough for your liking is another thing. As you can see on Ben's there it can show the TUEs, which is what the letsrun police are all about nowadays anyway. I think it's silly to say "this shows nothing." Good on Amy, Molly, and Ben, I think it is a great step.

juan_t_reyna wrote:

ive always assumed these two were going about things the right way, but like tran, sorta wonder how useful this latest practice is.

huddles pic raises another (cascading) question ive had in the past:

is there a real philosophical/moral/other distinction to be made between allegra and prednisone?

how about allegra v. cytomel for somebody with tsh above 5? above 2?

what about vitamin d/iron v. allegra?

not sure i have a take on it, but seems like the argument could be made that anything youre putting in the body to remediate its natural deficiencies might be problematic...

I don't think Prednisone compares much to Allegra, but I believe you're on the right track with questioning that Allegra. I mean, is Allegra really all that different from the so-portrayed *evil* Advair of Laura Fleshman's confession? For that matter, does Molly even have allergies?

Swoony B wrote:

He's soooooooooooo blue-collar. Must be the all-time clean world record holder (well, except for the white Goddess Paula and Mr Congeniality #1 and #1a, Haile and Bernie). Ben and Bernard's B-Sample are just so real and anti-NOPe. Gosh I hope it snows in Rio because snow is True-approved. Snow is pure and clean like Ben.

#ijizzforben

#untilmyjealousyconsumesmeandihatehimlikeeveryotherrunnerfasterthanme

This post really spoke to me. I feel the same way about Molly, except for the jealous hate stuff. Way to go Molly! Showing 'em you're the boss AND clean!

John Clendon wrote:

Please be aware that they both have substantially different active ingredients.

Sorry John, maybe I should state the question more precisely, because your post is pretty non responsive. If we took the universe of substances you might put in your body, some of them troubling, many of them not, we could probably all agree that they represent a universe of "substantially different active ingredients."

The last line in my previous post was more the point of what I was getting at--when is remediation problematic, and when is it not? Allegra is very clearly "performance-enhancing," though not often considered morally problematic as far as I can tell, for an allergy-sufferer. Prednisone is often a next line of defense for extreme allergies, but I assume we'd all make the argument that it might have other benefits/act on other pathways as well, and that makes it problematic. What if allegra (and all analogues) didn't exist? Prednisone okay then? Probably not. Is that because we just want you to be able to fix the very specific issue you have, but not gain "other" benefits? How would you go about making those classifications?

Which is why I asked about the guy who's "actually" hypothyroid. Give him the drug, but not the guy with a tsh of 2.1? I guess I assume that's how most folks would work through this line of questions. And they'd get to something like "we rely on 'generally accepted' medical definitions for most of our line-drawing." That, I assume, would satisfy most folks, and most athletes. But who decides what's generally accepted? It's pretty clear there's an awful lot of disagreement about an awful lot of things when it comes to "medicine"--you look at generally accepted standards of care in the law, and theyre not easily definable. You get regional variations, specialty and subspecialty variations, etc. Thyroids probably a pretty good illustration. Survey different types of docs, and in different regions of the country, and I don't know that you'd get a consensus of +5, or +4, +2. Do you just take the median? And thats just a very, very specific question. What's the end result? WADA draws up a complete sketch of the canonical man and canonical woman, defining every attribute and maximum allowable deviation, and also draws up a list every allowable remediation and its permissible mechanism? Sounds awfully Gattaca and awfully hard to administer.

Refreshing!

Next up, Galen.

I commend Ben True for standing up for our drug effectiveness, and am sure this will result in greater sales for our many corporations and companies. If more runners were like True, then our profits would be even greater than they are. I hope this information is published throughout all athletic journals so we can keep taking more control of the sport of athletics.

It's half true that this tells us nothing. It's better, but the gold standard is the athlete publishing their test results.

What the athletes are agreeing to is being included in a pool of data available for "research." I do not know the details of what "research" means. There are many details.

Before the NOP doping trolls make all kinds of false claims, the athletes do have all of their test results available and can easily publish them.

Particular to track and field there is not much testing going on, but publishing what test data an athlete generates would be a very meaningful improvement in transparency and integrity.

Badder Than Ghengis wrote:

What was that "clean athlete" program that supposedly had athletes freezing blood samples for future testing? I remember it included Tyson Gay....OOOPS!

The program was called Test Me, I'm Clean and Tyson was a part of that program until it folded in 2009. Members of the program received additional OOC testing and their frozen blood samples were sent to WADA to keep on file for future testing; this is sort of like the BP program before it actually existed. This is one of ways Tyson was able to prove that his window of doping began when he started working with Jon Drummond on a regular basis. What is interesting is that several prominent Americans were part of that program and when they tried to make it international by soliciting some Caribbean athletes, but they wanted no part of it.

Galen could provide same thing (he's never failed a drug test) and a "sample" for research and it would be decried as a PR/coverup event.