top Canadian coach calls out drug cheats beating his athletes

Thanks for pointing out that running the provincial and national championships is not a requirement to apply for provincial carding. Feel free to continue that train of thought and indicate where Ross Proudfoot demolished the 5,000m World record. Twice.

I've got a pretty good guess why Aaron was initially carded as a 5000 athlete. My guess is that it is because he applied to be carded as a 5000 athlete. When you next post, could you let us know what Aaron Hendrikx said to you when you asked him if he applied to be carded as a 5000 athlete? My guess is, and I'm only guessing, but my guess is that he said 'yes'.

In case you don't post on this thread ever again, make sure you talk to Chuck PT and look into moving to Vancouver. You seem like a good guy and should probably leave Guelph as soon as humanly possible.

Looking forward to you answering as best you can.

making a ham sandwich wrote:

Obviously, give the guy carding, don't make him run 5000m at petty provincial meets.

Assuming you genuinely don't understand and aren't just playing a repetitive fool, are you aware that there is a set number of cards available and that if you arbitrarily give one to Proudfoot you'll have to take one away from someone who actually met the published criteria? Is that fair in your books?

Can you also point out where in the published criteria there is the option to award cards not on the factors listed but on whether random message board posters feel someone should get carding?

Seems like you have a problem with many of the athletes who received funding. A 3:39, 13:29 guy gets funding. The world is coming to an end. I suppose you also have a problem with the 1500m runner who isn't in the top 10 on the 2015 rankings list, and didn't finish in the medals at AO Champs.

All carded athletes are deserving, and the committee did a good job.

No doubt these are excellent times, but if carding were only based on fastest times there wouldn't be published criteria giving points for provincial and national championships. Some time ago a committee decided that personal and season's best times should only be one of several factors in determining carding. It's not up to the current selection committee to change that criteria for the benefit of their own athletes.

Agree with you wrote:

Seems like you have a problem with many of the athletes who received funding. A 3:39, 13:29 guy gets funding. The world is coming to an end. I suppose you also have a problem with the 1500m runner who isn't in the top 10 on the 2015 rankings list, and didn't finish in the medals at AO Champs.

All carded athletes are deserving, and the committee did a good job.

Agree with you wrote:

Seems like you have a problem with many of the athletes who received funding. A 3:39, 13:29 guy gets funding. The world is coming to an end. I suppose you also have a problem with the 1500m runner who isn't in the top 10 on the 2015 rankings list, and didn't finish in the medals at AO Champs.

All carded athletes are deserving, and the committee did a good job.

Judging by the Trackie thread, the committee changed their minds and did not nominate Proudfoot, Allison, or Hendrikx.

Why would Proudfoot go to the AO Champs and chose not to run the 5000m, if that's what he's going to apply for carding in? What does he know that we don't? Perhaps nothing, and he was simply negligent.

People are using the word 'deserving' rather loosely, failing to realize that there may be more 'deserving' athletes than there are cards available.

Agree with you wrote:

All carded athletes are deserving, and the committee did a good job.

As already mentioned in the above posts, 'deserving' is a subjective call.

If you are handing out your own money, you are free to determine what makes an athlete 'deserving' of getting it. If that just means the fastest people get your money, that's your choice.

The provincial ministry, through AO, wanted to give money to the fastest people who ALSO competed at their own championships. This shouldn't be that hard to understand since those championships are one of the primary aspects of the provincial program and so it makes sense to encourage fast athletes to attend.

So in this case 'deserving' athletes are those who ran fast and competed at the championships.

Oh shut up.

800m 1:48.19 London (CAN) 28.06.2015

1500m 3:39.16 Victoria (CAN) 10.06.2015

Mile 3:59.62 Cork (IRL) 08.07.2014

3000m 7:49.64 Dublin (IRL) 24.07.2015

5000m 13:29.32 Heusden-Zolder (BEL) 18.07.2015

Proudfoot gets the money for 13:29.

Are you the 16:40 guy? Can you even break 5 for a mile? Loser, shut up with the Vancouver crap.

Um, yeah wrote:

Agree with you wrote:

All carded athletes are deserving, and the committee did a good job.

As already mentioned in the above posts, 'deserving' is a subjective call.

If you are handing out your own money, you are free to determine what makes an athlete 'deserving' of getting it. If that just means the fastest people get your money, that's your choice.

The provincial ministry, through AO, wanted to give money to the fastest people who ALSO competed at their own championships. This shouldn't be that hard to understand since those championships are one of the primary aspects of the provincial program and so it makes sense to encourage fast athletes to attend.

So in this case 'deserving' athletes are those who ran fast and competed at the championships.

Actually, in the case of Quest for Gold carding for the past several years, 'deserving' athletes are those that score the most total points based on a combination of top-2 performances and 2 Championships. It's not necessarily enough just to attend the Championships, you must race well in your chosen event, as points are assigned based on placing.

Yeah, the last card can go to a 'slower' athlete who places higher at Championships, leaving a 'faster' athlete who places worse at Championships as an alternate.

I haven't seen anyone take issue with how the Championship points are assigned, other than suggesting our 'best' athletes shouldn't have to follow the general criteria, which obviously is self-entitled whining.

Ross actually DID eventually get government money for his performances last year-- he was awarded a National card on appeal. He was subsequently removed from the provincial list for this reason-- a list he should not have been on in the first place, if the rules had been followed.

And here's the key thing about the rules: Athletes who followed them had to make some sacrifices in how they planned there competitive seasons. These sacrifices were greater for people competing in longer events, who don't get to race as often; but, everyone who wanted to be considered for carding had to make sure they ran their event at AOs and Nats in order to give themselves a realistic shot. That some SR athletes seem to have deliberately chosen NOT to run their key events at AOs and/or Nats should give pause. Did they not care about getting Q for G? Were they simply negligent? Or, did they have a plan to get it regardless-- a plan made possible by the fact that they had a senior club person on the selection committee?

That SR had a representative on the committee would seem to eliminate the second possibility, and that they have had many athletes in the past apply for and receive Q for G funding would seem to suggest that they care about getting this funding, thus eliminating the first possibility. By process of elimination, and as evidenced by the extreme reluctance of the committee (including SR member Moulton himself) and Athletics Ontario to explain how these athletes came to be nominated for funding (then secretly un-nominated and RE-nominated after a highly irregular and secretive appeal process), a reasonable observer would have to go with option 3.

Posts like those by Jeremy Rae indicate "they do not care about getting Q for G," indicating their MO is to run fast and hope it's enough to get carding. However, the strong indications that speed river athletes lied in their applications and perhaps their appeals indicates they're willing to do much more than just hope running fast is enough to get carded.

I was wondering why Ross Proudfoot didn't have a special ministry card; getting AC card on appeal explains that one.

How difficult would it be to satisfy all the requirements for both AO and AC carding, along with National teams? Can anyone explain what a 5000m runner like Proudfoot would have to have done in 2015 to tick all the boxes for

-AO carding

-AC carding

-FISU qualification

-Pan Ams qualification

fred wrote:

Are you the 16:40 guy? Can you even break 5 for a mile? Loser, shut up with the Vancouver crap.

What's your beef with Vancouver, guy? It's the best place in Canada for a distance runner to train. Awesome trails, awesome coaching, awesome support!

I have no doubt SR athletes, like everyone else, plans their season with an eye to running as fast as possible. But I also think that they, like everyone else, plan to apply for government funding at the end of the season. Their history of doing just that would seem to bear me out on this. The only question is why, unlike others, they don't always appear concerned about putting themselves in the best position to get said funding. And, as was pointed out above, you really can't expect to get AO funding based simply on performance.

To nail down AO funding, Ross would only have to have run the AO 5,000m (which he could have basically jogged and still got sufficient points). And he was at the meet anyway.

He got AC carding, so his season was clearly sufficient for that.

He qualified for and ran FISU, but not after having tried to bend the rules and get himself named ot the Pan Ams team instead (you had to declare for one or the other early in the season). He was actually named to Pan Am team, then quickly removed when people complained. The official explanation for his having been named was that a mistake was made. But, his own coach was on the committee that named him, and would presumably have been aware that he had already declared for FISU. Ross later offered in an interview that he thought the rules preventing him from switching to Pan Ams were "petty", or something to that effect. Once again, the fact that others had had to adhere to them-- and that giving everyone else the same special after-the-fact consideration that he (almost) received would have led to chaos-- seems to have eluded him.

It would be very hard to avoid concluding that SR has a habit of believing that their success sometimes entitles them to exceptions to established rules and procedures, and of regarding complaints about this from others as a kind of "revenge of the losers".

As a long time observer of Canadian athletics, I've seen this attitude in a few places before, most notoriously in the Mazda Optimist (Ben Johnson) group in the 1980s (in which I had a very close friend). Members of this group had been thoroughly inculcated in the belief that they were already better than everyone else in Canada, and that anything they did to achieve the next level in the sport (up to and including systematic doping) was completely justified. And they were openly contemptuous of anyone who called them out on their attitude or behaviour. Their understanding was that the rest of us were just jealous, no-talent chumps not willing to do everything it took to succeed.

In the case of SR, the behaviour is clearly not on the same level, but the attitude bears a striking similarity, when push comes to shove.

much awe wrote:

fred wrote:

Are you the 16:40 guy? Can you even break 5 for a mile? Loser, shut up with the Vancouver crap.

What's your beef with Vancouver, guy? It's the best place in Canada for a distance runner to train. Awesome trails, awesome coaching, awesome support!

How many guys living there ran sub 13:30 last year?

fred wrote:

much awe wrote:

What's your beef with Vancouver, guy? It's the best place in Canada for a distance runner to train. Awesome trails, awesome coaching, awesome support!

How many guys living there ran sub 13:30 last year?

0. The exact same as the number of Speed River coaches that I still trust.

But I think we'll see some sub-13:30s from Vancouver based athletes quite soon, as more people move from Guelph out to Vancouver.

I wasn't in Ontario during the Mazda Optimist era, but the attitude you describe is exactly what I've seen from several Speed River coaches and athletes since I moved here. We've seen examples of this in relation to the Chiba Ekiden scandal, the OUA 3k incident, the Quest for gold carding scandal, the Pan Am games/FISU Proudfoot issue, and so on.

I know no one here has suggested this yet; but, in case anyone is thinking that some of us are overreacting, let me point out that two SR athletes (Milne and Hendrikx) appeared on the 2014 Q for G lists without appearing to have accumulated enough points. It is for precisely this reason that Hugh Cameron of Athletics Toronto volunteered to sit on the 2015 board. He wanted to see up close how it operated, and to make sure everything was kosher in 2015. Long story short, he resigned from the board after having been "out voted" on the SR nominations. He wanted to apply the criteria as written and the rest of the committee did not agree, at least in the case of the SR athletes. They WERE willing to see them applied it pretty strictly in the case of at least one fully qualified candidate-- Alex Ullman of Windsor-- who had his application set aside for being submitted past the due date.

In short, when we saw what was beginning to look like a pattern, we had to say something. It wouldn't have mattered that this pattern seemed also to fit within a still larger pattern of ethically questionable behaviour over the past couple of years; but, this larger pattern does, in fact, seem to exist.

Great comments by Reid Coolsaet in this CBC article on Kenyan cheating

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/summer/trackandfield/kenya-missed-deadline-reid-coolsaet-lanni-marchant-1.3521834

'Coolsaet has trained with with many Kenyan runners, including Joseph Mutinda, who was banned for three years in 2015 after admitting to doping.

"That gets me really angry – especially if it's people that I compete against. My first reaction when I see athletes doping is … why are you even doing this sport? To me, it's stealing. I would be really curious to know the details of what he was taking, who was giving it to him and why," Coolsaet said.'

Like Coolsaet, I am very much against athletes cheating and stealing.