paris2024hawk wrote:
If the athletes are resorting to micro dosing to avoid getting caught doesn't that mean antidoping is having an effect, in the 70s and 80s you could dope up until your competition as out of competition testing wasnt established. Also if higher but still small number of athletes are getting caught today isn't antidoping having a positive effect. Of course what they are able to do is not much but antidoping has made the sport a tiny bit cleaner. Anti doping can't stop doping but they can manage it.
If you disagree do you think antidoping is completely futile and has no affect In the sport whatsoever.
I would say it's both a "yes" and a "no" answer to your point that antidoping is probably having an effect. What it has done, such as through the biopassport and increased testing (in those countries where this is consistently exercised), is reduce the "industrial level" of doping that occurred in the 70's, 80's and 90's, that was typical of the former E Bloc, for example. We see the effect of that kind of doping in the enduring nature of some of the women's world records from that era.
But in the decades since doping has become more sophisticated. From the early 2000's we saw that athletes could dope without detection because the drugs included masking agents. Athletes have also moved to microdosing so as to escape testing and detection through the passport. They may use a cocktail of virtually undetectable drugs that will still have a powerful effect in stimulating performance. Hence, we continue to see improvements from performance levels in the "Wild West" of the 70's, 80's, and 90's. The most commonly used drug in microdosing is still testosterone. An athlete can microdose before an event and it will be out of their system by its conclusion.
In answer to your last question, antidoping isn't completely futile; it has likely reduced the possible incidence of doping from 90-100% of top athletes if there were no doping controls to at least half that and maybe more. But 1 in 3 elites and even 1 in 10 is still a lot. It is also the dopers who are more likely to end up on the podium.