Why do we not have lifetime bans?

Would you like to get a lifetime ban for every thing you ever cheated at?

You can't treat all cheating violations as if they are of the same magnitude. There is a difference in cheating in a game of flag football in elementary school and cheating in a competitive profession where if you cheat you get paid more while other people who did not cheat make less money or don't get a job.

And yes, if i ever cheated on my wife, I would deserve a lifetime ban from marriage. If I was involved in insider trading I would deserve a ban from the stock market.

If i cheated in a game of go fish (where there was nothing significant at stake) i would not expect to be banned from that.

Being a professional athlete is a livelihood for some people and if i were to cheat to make money and take it away from other people I would deserve to be banned from doing that again.

Does that adequately answer your condescending question?

I think what it comes down to is that we may not be better off if we find a way to effectively test athletes with supreme accuracy and give them lifetime bans.

Our sport is a very, very fringe sport, even though tons of people participate in high school and even the d3/d2 level there are very large teams.

However, so many people on both my highschool and d3 college team barely knew anything about pro runners. They laugh at the idea of pro running. Granted, there was a good core who were all fairly avid fans of the sport. However, most people only recognize Usain Bolt's name. Alan Webb is hit or miss, and forget about any pro throwers.

At this point, we will only ever find out what the human body is capable of without PEDs if we could magically root out all dopers. What if the 100 is never run faster than 9.9, the mile never faster than 3:51, the 5k never goes sub 13 again?

For many of us, this wouldn't damage our love of the sport, or our desire to watch it. However, there are a lot of people who only watch for the 9.6 races, the all out 3:4x races, and guys going way under 13 in a way us mortals can barely imagine. If you remove all those performances, we lose a lot of viewers for a sport that has less draw than the newest adam sandler movie.

Maybe we can change things similar to how Symmonds and Lanana want to change things... Track leagues, city teams, booze an gambling. For now though, we are extremely fringe.

I'm not pro doping, I don't like doping, but there is a reality we must face. I think we might be better off not knowing that the top performers are doping in some way.

But hey, that's just my perception, maybe I'm totally wrong and a cleaner sport would draw more people in. I just think the drug testing ways of the MLB, NBA, and other leagues is very telling.

I agree with you that this would not make track more popular ( I was a little unclear about that in my first post). I propose it more as a way of making it fair for the athletes who compete and to make it so track fans can be more confident that performances are clean. I don't think it would have a positive or negative effect on the amount of people watching races but I do think that those who do watch (which are mainly people who are very involved in the sport, who don't need WR performances to make it enoyable) could enjoy it more by knowing everyone is clean.

Lifetime bans are possible as we saw with cycling. Not sure how USADA arrives at suspension length behind the scenes, but it seems rarely do they have someone dead to rights guilty and they have no prosecutorial authority to tap phones and email, raid offices, compel witnesses to testify under oath, or any of the other standard tools to gather evidence. So they are probably happy to in effect settle a case based on only a blood or urine test failure in exchange for cooperation, possibly naming their source or other potential dopers.

Seems to me like they go too light on them, but on the other hand if everything was a lifetime ban you wonder if anyone would ever speak up given the stakes. Drug testing is super soft in the pro sports leagues mainly due to the agreements struck with the player unions, and because these athletes are not covered by the WADA code governing things like pro track, cycling, and the Olympics.

Because professioal dopers and ex professional dopers run the sport.

Same reason we shouldn't have the death pentalty because history has shown us that people and science are historicity wrong!

I think a big reason is that the burden of proof would need to be overwhelming.

Oh, there are lifetime bans; see Lance Armstrong.

Because the history of doping busts shows that 99% of all cases are accidents. Athletes who can't be expected to know any better eat ephedra cold medicine, supplements with DHEA or stimulants in them, or drink beer spiked with stanozolol by an enemy sprinter. Sometimes they have too much sex for their wife's birthday, and sometimes their dad puts steroids in their toothpaste. And there's no telling how many have been brought down by sneaky massage therapists wielding testosterone gel. Next time you're at the track, and see someone hanging out with a tote bag but not running, watch out. Might be the old "4 to 1 handshake."

It's a jungle out there. Track athletes try real hard to stay clean so you should cut them some slack.

I think the reality is because some really are Probably sabotaged. Not all, but some. The attempt is being made to strike a balance. I do think it should be 4 years again though, not 2.

Also there are about 10 lifetime bans listed on the usatf website... of course, some of them are coaches and agents and their bans aren't being enforced (examples: mark block, Remy korchemny).

BigDaddyWooWooo wrote:

Same reason we shouldn't have the death pentalty because history has shown us that people and science are historicity wrong!

Lifetime bans can be un-done; the death penalty cannot

Agree 100%, or 10 years plus So career would end. I have a friend was WR not too long ago, told me he hates Track and Field, and he doesnt watch....because too many cheaters. So sad. Life banned will be great. I thought about that before. Would make the CHEATER think twice before doing.

There isn't much crime in, say, Singapore due to stiff penalties. I don't like lifetime bans though. So for serious doping let's instead chop off a toe on runners, a finger on throwers, and so on.

Maybe you need to rephrase the question.

There IS a system of lifetime bans. Lance is currently serving one, as is Michele Ferrari.

They just bumped up the "default" 2 year ban to 4 year bans, which makes a step in this direction.

Immediate first time offense lifetime bans would be unfair to the athletes, and should not be instituted with the current reliability and fallibility of testing, with respect to "false positives". The risk and incidence of "false positives" must be zero.

clean sport wrote:

Does that adequately answer your condescending question?

No, it doesn't. So you only want to ban those who make money off cheating? People like you cheat on their taxes, on their jobs, on their purchases, etc. do they deserve lifetime bans?

Whole Foods just admitted to cheating customers via over pricing. Based on the OP's criteria, they should be put out of business.

OP,

Please explain how the severity of the penalty changes ANYTHING.

The problem is how to KNOW if someone is cheating.

For a while, the dopers used drugs that weren't technically on the list and so they were not measured by the tests. Now they use only drugs on the list with specific concentrations allowed but dose very often so they never go over the limit. In both cases, they argue that they aren't technically cheating.

I think we all agree they are but what testing protocol will prove it? I guess in many countries it is illegal to even own the drugs but that isn't really what the anti-doping agencies are set up to govern and in the grand scheme of things most police forces have MUCH bigger problems to worry about.

oijdf3975 wrote:

The problem is how to KNOW if someone is cheating.

This appears to be on of the huge issues... And yet there was a researcher some 17 years ago, Murray, hot on the trail of detecting synthetic EPO in urine. But according to a WSJ article, he evidently became disillusioned with

"drug-testing politics,"