eagleeye wrote:
I've never really understood the details of the whereabouts system, but the more I'm learning the more archaic it feels. Hearing Aisha and Eric talk about it on their recent podcast was informative too. Apparently, the app for reporting your location is terribly slow to the point where a lot of athletes just email their contact instead. Imagine having to update the details every single time you went out for a coffee or to the gas station or walked to the library or anything at all that wasn't that exact prescribed location.
Aisha and Eric were also in favor of something that shares live location permanently with the testers. Committing to an exact location where you will stay for 60 minutes of every single day at the same time sounds very constraining. Aisha said she would always choose the earliest time in the morning because it's the only way she knew for sure she'd be there (sleeping). I still don't understand how the "calling during the hour" works, but the tester should be required to document proof of their presence at that location for the entire hour too in order to demonstrate that the athlete was not there.
All that said, if you're competing at the top level, it's a privilege, and you need to adapt to whatever system exists if you want to partake in it, even if it's not perfect. However, as a fan of the sport, the more I am learning about whereabouts failures, the more I'm losing trust that the current design of this system actually catches dopers vs. simply naive people who aren't taking it seriously enough. Maybe those people also shouldn't have the privilege of competing - I'm not sure. A live location that is constantly shared with the tester seems like it would modernize this system in a way that makes me trust more that three failures is more likely to be evasion than naivety. An hour is also a very large window - give 30 minute time slots instead.
This is a good point. It's important that we have doping testing without giving advance notice, and to do that you need athletes' locations. But we have technology that can *easily* do that - literally just add your DCO on FindMyFriends or Google Maps or whatever and they have your location at all times. Maybe it wouldn't work as well for distance runners running without their phone, but surely there's a solution in there somewhere. It's insane that we will ban athletes for leaving home to walk the dog or grab coffee during an hour a day and DCOs aren't required to make their best effort to make the test happen. The point of the drug testing should be to make the athlete take the test! Not just check if they're in the location they say they are.