Excellent news. But what a cheat, adding the dope to his "gummies" trying to fool AIU/DT.
Also nice statement from the AIU Chair: "All explanations based on contamination must be thoroughly scrutinised and not just blindly accepted." Too bad for the dopers and their apologists here, rekrunner.
Oh look, another anonymous poster trolling me.
This looks like another win for "strict liability" -- yay!
I think no one is calling for "blind acceptance" of "contamination" without "scrutiny", but it is unsurprising for the Chair of one of the parties in the dispute to state they are doing the right thing, and the former Director-General of WADA supporting an aggressive policy he helped create. Is he being objective, or using this occasion for PR?
Contrary to your "blind acceptance" of "adulteration", the DT wasn't convinced with the "adding the dope to his "gummies"" scenario either, noting "significant caveats", and that "contamination" and "adulteration" were "similarly feasible". There is an inherent advantage when the AIU bears no burden for its own speculation.
It is well known that taking supplements carries an inherent risk of contamination from an unlabelled substances, due to the lack of regulations in the supplement industry, or lack of consistent compliance to regulations, despite all the certifications. As such, WADA recommends "extreme caution", and warns that "QA schemes ... do not eliminate, the risk of an inadvertent doping infringement." Recall this is a 19-year old boy who did not buy the gummies, but won the gummies as a prize for being Gatorade Player of the Year. They were stamped with an NSF label. What is the expected due diligence here for this 19-year old rising star?
It is unsurprising to me to find yet another case where an athlete was banned for 4 years, for not being able to meet the legal burden imposed on athletes from a policy of "strict liability", or "guilty until proven innocent", despite testing his gummies and finding GW1516. This is particularly concerning when saving samples of your supplements from the same batch, which then test positive, and succeeding to identify the source, is still not enough to exonerate the athlete, but rather results in the full 4-year ban.
Instead, a 19-year old Surinamese boy living in the USA was forced to engage lawyers and scientists to explore the inner guts of Gatorade gummy production some 9 months earlier.
What I see in the DT report is a lot of open questions for all speculative scenarios, resulting in a decision with all of the uncertainties intact, due to a failure of the athlete to overcome the standard of "guilty until proven innocent". The consequence for this 19-year old, who was already required to fund his defense, is a full 4-year ban, return of any and all prize money, and 1,000 GBP payment to WA.
But posters aren't here to engage with logic; they're here to find a villain to project everything they won't admit they dislike about themselves onto someone else. That kind of defensive posturing worries me far more than a teenager who may have taken a readily available, crappy supplement that is mediocre at best.
It just goes to show how ugly doping can get. First he was caught using GW1516, which is not approved for human use and is a carcinogen. Then Asinga tampered with two unsealed bottles of the same gummy bear product to try to fake his contamination argument. Hence the 4 year ban.
The 4 year ban isn't due to tampering, it's because he wasn't able to prove that he didn't intentionally take the substances he tested positive for. They merely said they were unable to rule out tampering and that's why they couldn't accept his defence for exoneration/reduced ban.
If they charged him for tampering as well, the ban would be 6-8 years.
Doping is out of control right now in all events and it’s right in front of our eyes. Distance runners have a great smoke screen of “we had a great training block during covid” and “these new shoes really work” or “I just do more threshold than everyone else” to explain how they’re smashing times we thought were humanly impossible only 10 years ago. Neither of those things apply to sprinters and yet suddenly we have an entire generation of sprinters breaking times all set by known dopers. What revolution in sprint training or equipment happened since Rio that we’re supposed to pretend caused this? I know there are a lot of young fans but the lull in historic performances from 100-10000 between 2008 and 2016 was not a coincidence and most of the outliers (Asbel Kiprop, Genzebe Dibaba, Rashid Ramzi, every 100-200 runner not named Bolt, Nijel Amos, Rupp/Farah, Makhloufi) are either banned dopers or closely associated with doping. And now we’re shocked that world beating 19 year old sprinters with major leaps in performance might be doping?
Doping is out of control right now in all events and it’s right in front of our eyes. Distance runners have a great smoke screen of “we had a great training block during covid” and “these new shoes really work” or “I just do more threshold than everyone else” to explain how they’re smashing times we thought were humanly impossible only 10 years ago. Neither of those things apply to sprinters and yet suddenly we have an entire generation of sprinters breaking times all set by known dopers. What revolution in sprint training or equipment happened since Rio that we’re supposed to pretend caused this? I know there are a lot of young fans but the lull in historic performances from 100-10000 between 2008 and 2016 was not a coincidence and most of the outliers (Asbel Kiprop, Genzebe Dibaba, Rashid Ramzi, every 100-200 runner not named Bolt, Nijel Amos, Rupp/Farah, Makhloufi) are either banned dopers or closely associated with doping. And now we’re shocked that world beating 19 year old sprinters with major leaps in performance might be doping?
Haven't all of these been banned at one time or another or was associated with an agent or coach who was banned/arrested and whose performance suddenly fell off and returned to what it would have been without PEDs?
This looks like another win for "strict liability" -- yay!
I think no one is calling for "blind acceptance" of "contamination" without "scrutiny", but it is unsurprising for the Chair of one of the parties in the dispute to state they are doing the right thing, and the former Director-General of WADA supporting an aggressive policy he helped create. Is he being objective, or using this occasion for PR?
Contrary to your "blind acceptance" of "adulteration", the DT wasn't convinced with the "adding the dope to his "gummies"" scenario either, noting "significant caveats", and that "contamination" and "adulteration" were "similarly feasible". There is an inherent advantage when the AIU bears no burden for its own speculation.
It is well known that taking supplements carries an inherent risk of contamination from an unlabelled substances, due to the lack of regulations in the supplement industry, or lack of consistent compliance to regulations, despite all the certifications. As such, WADA recommends "extreme caution", and warns that "QA schemes ... do not eliminate, the risk of an inadvertent doping infringement." Recall this is a 19-year old boy who did not buy the gummies, but won the gummies as a prize for being Gatorade Player of the Year. They were stamped with an NSF label. What is the expected due diligence here for this 19-year old rising star?
It is unsurprising to me to find yet another case where an athlete was banned for 4 years, for not being able to meet the legal burden imposed on athletes from a policy of "strict liability", or "guilty until proven innocent", despite testing his gummies and finding GW1516. This is particularly concerning when saving samples of your supplements from the same batch, which then test positive, and succeeding to identify the source, is still not enough to exonerate the athlete, but rather results in the full 4-year ban.
Instead, a 19-year old Surinamese boy living in the USA was forced to engage lawyers and scientists to explore the inner guts of Gatorade gummy production some 9 months earlier.
What I see in the DT report is a lot of open questions for all speculative scenarios, resulting in a decision with all of the uncertainties intact, due to a failure of the athlete to overcome the standard of "guilty until proven innocent". The consequence for this 19-year old, who was already required to fund his defense, is a full 4-year ban, return of any and all prize money, and 1,000 GBP payment to WA.
But posters aren't here to engage with logic; they're here to find a villain to project everything they won't admit they dislike about themselves onto someone else. That kind of defensive posturing worries me far more than a teenager who may have taken a readily available, crappy supplement that is mediocre at best.
You call it a supplement, medical science calls it a carcinogen that has not been approved for human use.
Maybe. But the decision's emphasis that the two samples the Asinga camp provided were unsealed bottles and that the substance was found in greater quantities on the outside of the contents clearly suggested tampering. If he had come clean it might have been a 2 year ban, but the hit to his marketability would have been too much I guess.
The times from the 90s and early 2000s are the ones that were untouchable, even for the dopers I listed. Now those who were suspicious or outright banned 10-15 years ago are being left in the dust by a generation of “clean” athletes and somehow people are convinced it’s the anti-doping agencies that are unfair. I will say, I think the 800 is a weird test case where men are slower, women are much faster and nothing really makes sense as to what is happening there.
Doping is out of control right now in all events and it’s right in front of our eyes. Distance runners have a great smoke screen of “we had a great training block during covid” and “these new shoes really work” or “I just do more threshold than everyone else” to explain how they’re smashing times we thought were humanly impossible only 10 years ago. Neither of those things apply to sprinters and yet suddenly we have an entire generation of sprinters breaking times all set by known dopers. What revolution in sprint training or equipment happened since Rio that we’re supposed to pretend caused this? I know there are a lot of young fans but the lull in historic performances from 100-10000 between 2008 and 2016 was not a coincidence and most of the outliers (Asbel Kiprop, Genzebe Dibaba, Rashid Ramzi, every 100-200 runner not named Bolt, Nijel Amos, Rupp/Farah, Makhloufi) are either banned dopers or closely associated with doping. And now we’re shocked that world beating 19 year old sprinters with major leaps in performance might be doping?
The sad but true reality is that races are won by the faster runner who never fails a test (while skipping two of them per year for all of his career), wheter we like it or not.
And mind you, I mean exactly what I said (not failing a test is not the same of not being juiced).
Hahaha rekrunner with his trademark off-topic wall of texts, trying to blame the AIU to engage in propaganda to create doubt of this guilty verdict. Saw it coming!
And likewise, I saw this coming.
Contrary to "off-topic", my "wall of text" post was a direct on-topic response to your post, pointing out some factual errors and wrong assumptions, and/or directly responsive to this thread.
Contrary to blaming the AIU, I blamed WADA, and their recent policy shift that reverses the burden towards the charged athletes to prove themselves innocent. WADA ties the hands of panels like the DT, and enables the AIU to speculate alternative hypotheses without any burden of proof.
Regarding "guilty verdict", the DT points out that the "guilty verdict" was not contested (see 56) and admitted (see 58), and this case was rather about degree of fault, and length of sanction. The DT said that no scenario can be ruled out (except for GW1516 as a raw ingredient), and that "contamination" and "adulteration" were both "similarly feasible".
Regarding "propaganda", all of my relevant points come from the DT decision, or are supported by WADA.
The Lizzy Banks article above shows just how damaging it can be for athletes to have to prove their innocence under WADA's recent burden shift, costing her £40,000, her mental and emotional health, and effectively putting an end to her career.
Hahaha rekrunner with his trademark off-topic wall of texts, trying to blame the AIU to engage in propaganda to create doubt of this guilty verdict. Saw it coming!
And likewise, I saw this coming.
Contrary to "off-topic", my "wall of text" post was a direct on-topic response to your post, pointing out some factual errors and wrong assumptions, and/or directly responsive to this thread.
Contrary to blaming the AIU, I blamed WADA, and their recent policy shift that reverses the burden towards the charged athletes to prove themselves innocent. WADA ties the hands of panels like the DT, and enables the AIU to speculate alternative hypotheses without any burden of proof.
Regarding "guilty verdict", the DT points out that the "guilty verdict" was not contested (see 56) and admitted (see 58), and this case was rather about degree of fault, and length of sanction. The DT said that no scenario can be ruled out (except for GW1516 as a raw ingredient), and that "contamination" and "adulteration" were both "similarly feasible".
The AIU informs you of the prohibited drug and the quantities in your body. You then have to explain how such got in your system. How is this not a fair process? What it sounds like to me is that you want the AIU to accept any ridiculous explanation from athletes who know full well they took the prohibited substance.
Contrary to "off-topic", my "wall of text" post was a direct on-topic response to your post, pointing out some factual errors and wrong assumptions, and/or directly responsive to this thread.
Contrary to blaming the AIU, I blamed WADA, and their recent policy shift that reverses the burden towards the charged athletes to prove themselves innocent. WADA ties the hands of panels like the DT, and enables the AIU to speculate alternative hypotheses without any burden of proof.
Regarding "guilty verdict", the DT points out that the "guilty verdict" was not contested (see 56) and admitted (see 58), and this case was rather about degree of fault, and length of sanction. The DT said that no scenario can be ruled out (except for GW1516 as a raw ingredient), and that "contamination" and "adulteration" were both "similarly feasible".
The AIU informs you of the prohibited drug and the quantities in your body. You then have to explain how such got in your system. How is this not a fair process? What it sounds like to me is that you want the AIU to accept any ridiculous explanation from athletes who know full well they took the prohibited substance.
you may have seen recently that 100% of men tested had microplastics in their testicles.
how many of those men can tell you exactly how they got in there?
does that mean i think Asinga is innocent? i wouldn't bet on it, though taking gw1516 for a sprinter seems rather misguided as a prescription of adderall will be more effective and easy enough to come by.
i understand WADA has to put full responsibility on the athlete for what's in their body, otherwise everyone doping could claim it was unintentional/tampered/etc., but the fact of the matter is not a single one of us truly knows with certainty every molecule that enters our body. it's simply not feasible.
The AIU informs you of the prohibited drug and the quantities in your body. You then have to explain how such got in your system. How is this not a fair process? What it sounds like to me is that you want the AIU to accept any ridiculous explanation from athletes who know full well they took the prohibited substance.
It is mostly unfair to athletes who honestly do not know the source, and will be unable to prove it. In this case, Asinga seemed to manage to find the source, but this was still ruled insufficient to prove the source, as there was still the unanswered question of "contamination" versus "adulteration" -- neither of which was proven, and both of which may not be possible to prove by any party.
So, if we go with the spirit of justice that athletes are innocent of intentional doping until proven guilty, the scenario we potentially have, as it hasn't been ruled out, is that Asinga won Gatorade Player of the Year award, which included a prize of a large supply of Gatorade gummies, and despite the NSF stamp, some of the batch may still have been contaminated in a way that can no longer be determined (e.g. dirty mold hypothesis). And the punishment for the innocent but unlucky athlete faced with the impossibility to prove contamination is exactly the same as the athlete who intentionally doped. In fact, the intentional doper might get a 1-year reduction for not contesting it, if he knows he cannot win.
Recall we are talking about a 19-year old boy, competing on scholarship at University, and burdening him with finding out how Gatorade manufactures gummies, and how they clean their equipment. How much spare money did you have as a college student at 19 years old? I was hovering at around $0, going into my second year of university, and accumulating debt.
See Lizzy Banks above, and what proving her innocence cost her "£40,000, her mental and emotional health, and effectively putting an end to her career". Note she still has 4 ADRVs against her, despite the 10-month suspension and eventually winning her case against UKAD by proving her innocence. Then take note that in 2019, potentially as many as 316 athletes were charged with contamination, before WADA reduced the threshold limits on 6 diuretics.
I have previously talked in other threads about the case of Simon Getzmann (who was featured on one of Seppelt's latest documentaries on ARD), where taking WADA-legal medication cost him €10,000 of his father's money, and a 1-year suspension, before he could prove his innocence and resume playing sport.
If we compare the current WADA Code to the WADA Code before 2015, the standard sanction would be 2-years, without requiring the athlete to prove the source, or the "AIU to accept any ridiculous explanation". This is still not ideal for the innocent athletes, but it is better than now, and the 2-year sanction would not formally be characterized as "intentional doping" by a doping tribunal.
It is mostly unfair to athletes who honestly do not know the source, and will be unable to prove it. In this case, Asinga seemed to manage to find the source, but this was still ruled insufficient to prove the source, as there was still the unanswered question of "contamination" versus "adulteration" -- neither of which was proven, and both of which may not be possible to prove by any party.
So, if we go with the spirit of justice that athletes are innocent of intentional doping until proven guilty, the scenario we potentially have, as it hasn't been ruled out, is that Asinga won Gatorade Player of the Year award, which included a prize of a large supply of Gatorade gummies, and despite the NSF stamp, some of the batch may still have been contaminated in a way that can no longer be determined (e.g. dirty mold hypothesis).
The AIU informs you of the prohibited drug and the quantities in your body. You then have to explain how such got in your system. How is this not a fair process? What it sounds like to me is that you want the AIU to accept any ridiculous explanation from athletes who know full well they took the prohibited substance.
Recall we are talking about a 19-year old boy, competing on scholarship at University, and burdening him with finding out how Gatorade manufactures gummies, and how they clean their equipment.
Give me a break. He doesn't have to find out anything. He used a banned substance and he knows it, so there is nothing at the Gatorade manufacturing center for him to look for.
Dirty molds, as in the metal trays that give shape to the gummy slurry.
That specific hypothesis was mentioned in the DT report:
"For instance, hypothetically, dyes of residue containing GW1516 in inadequately cleaned molds could have contaminated the Gatorade Recovery Gummies with the level of contamination declining each time the molds were used throughout the day."
This could not be supported beyond speculation, but was also not excluded.
Recall we are talking about a 19-year old boy, competing on scholarship at University, and burdening him with finding out how Gatorade manufactures gummies, and how they clean their equipment.
Give me a break. He doesn't have to find out anything. He used a banned substance and he knows it, so there is nothing at the Gatorade manufacturing center for him to look for.
Unless he didn't know he "used" it. Unfortunately, the way the WADA Code works, it is not necessary to resolve these questions with any degree of certainty, in order to impose a 4-year ban. And the DT did not resolve the question of whether he knowingly used a banned substance to any degree of certainty.
Sorry, but I am not goin down any rabbit hole with you.
You asked me the question -- don't complain when I try to answer your question with real world examples and details.
Before 2015, athletes were not required to explain, and ADAs/ADOs/IUs were not expected "to accept any ridiculous explanation from athletes". From the point of view of fairness to innocent athletes, the 2015 changes made it much worse.