Has Kenya found a super drug? 2021 Boston champ is one of 10 Kenyans to test positive for triamcinolone acetonide since 2021

rojo wrote:

Jonathan Gault has done some great reporting into the positive test for 2021 Boston champ Diana Kipyokei. He spoke to her agent Gianni Demadonna who has concluded, "Diana is completely guilty. I am sorry. She has done something very bad."

So refreshing to see someone close to an athlete draw the line.

Great stuff Jonathan!!

Link:www.letsrun.com/news/2022/10/2021-bost...

The bigger question to me is what is going on with "triamcinolone acetonide". Lance Armstrong used it, Brad Wiggins, and now it's apparently crossed over to running as 10 Kenyans have tested positive for it since 2021.

I have so many questions about this.

Are they all getting it from the same doctor? Why are they suddenly all using it or why are they all suddenly being caught? What has changed? This drug is easy to get and has been around a long time so why are we suddenly seeing all these positives?

And I also have some contrarian takes as well. The drug is allowed out of competition. So if it's that good, I've got to admit i don't blame them for using it while training.

Are these suspesnions justified? What are the rules about taking it in competition? If I take a drug a month ago but it shows up in my urine a month later is that really considered in competition? Should it be?

I know there was another thread on her suspension yesterday. I started this one to highlight JG's reporting. But in that thread, I liked the following post from ThoughtsLeader

For sure. It seems like more gray area stuff, and I'm not convinced AIU/WADA handle this stuff correctly. Like L-Caritine, or the thyroid meds as another example. It feels like there should be HEAVY scrutiny on these as TUEs, and then instead of having confusing rules about what is the legal amount to take/how it's legally taken/when it's allowed in-competition vs out-of-competition....just ban them unless you have the TUE. And make that TUE hard to get pushing alternative treatments where possible and making sure the application is actually necessary and not just a Dr. Brown type.

Either ban it or not.

Here is the thread from yesterday.

Thread:www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?th...

I have closed that thread to new posts and I may eventually merge that thread with this thread.

von Braun wrote:

Physician here (not in sports medicine, just a lowly pulmonologist). The only performance benefits I could foresee from taking systemic glucocorticoids like triamcinolone would be the anti-inflammatory effects? Medina Spirit, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 2021, was busted for being given a different GC (betamethasone), in all likelihood for similar purpose.

Maybe there are some theoretical metabolic effect like increasing lipolysis (breakdown of stored fat into free fatty acids) and increasing skeletal muscle glycogenolysis (breakdown of stored glycogen into glucose) to keep your plasma glucose levels up, and thus keep you from "bonking". BUT that would all be at the cost of many countervailing side effects after repeated use over even a modest time frame. For example, I don't think of triamcinolone (or any other GC) as helping with weight loss: in fact weight *gain* is a well known side effect of chronic GC use, even at relatively low daily doses for several months at at time. GCs tend to make people retain fluid due to some mineralocorticoid effect, which stimulates the kidneys to hang onto more sodium and water. Same thing with effects on muscle strength: if anything GCs are known to cause muscle *weakness* -- just google "steroid myopathy".

Whole thing seems bizarre. Other than being cheap and easily accessible, GCs are inherently catabolic and inherently have vanishingly low affinity for the androgen/estrogen receptors so there's no little to no anabolic effects. I just don't see how there's much performance upside here.

jk0 wrote:

The truth shall set us free wrote:

I’m just glad to finally see the truth come out that drugs are the reason so many Kenyans do well. Genetic superiority is a racist lie.

I mean, of course genetic superiority is a racist lie. There is no one human group better than another at being human, at living, breathing thinking and being worthy of honor, dignity and concern.
Nonetheless, it is not racist to think that environment and lifestyle over 10’s of thousands of years selection might provide an advantage in one tiny piece of human activity, say, long-distance running.
Life is also a distribution of talents and advantages/disadvantages. A given man or woman from the Rift Valley might be more likely to one day run a world record 10k, but there are also some slow folks there and some fast ones from elsewhere.
I love that our sport brings worldwide cultures and people together, if just a bit. Most readers and posters on these pages are big fans of athletes from many 10’s of countries.
That’s cool.

Provocatively entitled Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It, the book has brought up to date a controversy that, in various guises, has been stirring ever since black sportsmen began regularly beating their white counterparts.
One critic, writing in the New York Times, described the book as 'demagogic quackery' and a 'piece of good-old fashioned American anti-intellectualism', while another drew parallels with Nazi ideology. 'Didn't we hear all this in Germany in 1936?' asked Richard Lapchick, the founder of America's Centre for the Study of Sport in Society. Elsewhere the book has been praised as brave, reasoned and honest.
What is beyond doubt is that, regardless of its strengths or flaws, the book plugs into a belief that is widely shared but seldom stated: that people with black skin are better suited to the athleticism of sport than people with white skin. Which is to say, it provides back-up to an unthinking stereotype, not necessarily an offensive stereotype, but one that could easily be conflated with those that are...
..There are a number of questions that might be asked about this situation but perhaps the first is why there should be any questions? Why look for biological reasons to explain black success? Why not just accept it in the same complacent spirit that we accept the supremacy of whites in just about every other field of human endeavour?
Harry Edwards, the sociology professor who organised the Black Power demonstrations at the 1968 Olympics, believes that there is in fact a consensus of indifference on the matter that amounts to tacit racism. 'Whites,' he says, 'have always been comfortable with blacks working in the fields, whether they're cotton fields or football fields.' He argues that the reasons for black advancement in sport are not to be found in the biological sciences but in the 'social environment and racism' that creates the conditions for that success.
It's certainly true that the history of research inspired by black achievements in sport is not one of which scientists can be proud. All manner of bizarre theories and contrived studies have in the past been presented as established fact, only subsequently to be utterly discredited by experience. In the 19th century the widespread belief that blacks were physically inferior was underpinned by warped interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution. Indeed, the many theorists claimed that sub-Saharan Africans composed a different, less evolved, inferior species.
The concept of a hierarchy of races saw its practical application in an effective separation of blacks from whites. Blacks were seldom allowed to compete against whites in sport and thus the untruth was able to flourish that whites were by nature superior athletes...
...The legacy of such crude racism is the suspicion that any attempt to attribute a physical advantage to an ethnic group also implicitly apportions a mental disadvantage. And the suspicion is not paranoia. In 1994 Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book that examined IQ differences among races and drew heavily on the work of a Canadian psychologist, J Philippe Rushton, a proponent of the inversely proportional relationship between brains and brawn.
Entine is aware of the problem and argues that it's 'time to decouple intelligence and physicality'. All the same, much of the criticism that has been levelled at Taboo in the States stems from a conviction that the ideas explored in the book will have precisely the opposite effect. If the conclusion drawn from black domination of Olympic track medals is that blacks are physically superior, what is to be made of the enormous over-representation of whites on the list of Nobel prize winners?
The science is limited,' concedes Entine. 'It's fascinating, it does point in all kinds of directions, and you can speculate. But the fact is the way we tend to speculate is really the important issue.' In fact, Entine himself inadvertently demonstrates the way in which we allow race to colour our interpretation of events. Partly, I suspect, to make the book fit the title, he plays down the contribution of (non-black) North Africans in middle and long-distance running and concentrates on (black) East Africans. He is also not above bringing in misleading evidence to back up his case...
..his two most vocal antagonists are black Americans, Harry Edwards, and another sociologist, Todd Boyd.
Edwards recently said that the data presented in the book amounted to an 'underhand way' of saying that blacks were 'closer to beast ' than they are to the rest of humanity.' Still, Entine is certain that whites in America are obsessed with race in a way that black Americans are not, and that, furthermore, white liberals feel obliged to see any discussion of race as inherently racist. 'I'll tell you this,' says Entine defiantly.'It's very condescending, especially to sports fans and African-Americans and others who I think are far more interested in understanding the world in ways that they see around them.'
Exactly how Taboo will lessen the American obsession with race is not at present easy to see. For all Entine's talk of respecting the 'biodiversity' of humanity, our attitudes to race are not yet so evolved that we are able to take ethnic difference in our stride. Even in Britain - which, if not as afflicted by racial division as America, is a long way from being colour blind - few have the appetite to confront the notion of racial superiority in any form.
When Sir Roger Bannister , the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes, spoke in 1995 as a neurologist at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting of 'certain natural anatomical advantages' possessed by 'black sprinters and black athletes in general', he provoked a mixture of fear, anxiety and silence. Garth Crooks, the (black) former Spurs striker who is now BBC football reporter, said at the time: 'I don't think it matters what the biological conclusions are. It forges a distinction between black and white athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful, and untrue.' Linford Christie, the only Briton ever to run under 10 seconds, and a man who has been made acutely aware of his skin colour, was less condemnatory.
But he refused to accept Bannister's argument: 'What Sir Roger said is a cop out, in a way. As long as white people believe that black people can run faster, they always will. It makes my job a lot easier. I'll accept that. But Allan Wells was an Olympic champion. Valeri Borzov was an Olympic champion. So it can be done.'