Shelby Quote " it could've been someone around me " .... Who is the saboteur 🧐?

join in its fun wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

I appreciate your posts -- I hope you are having fun, because they are truly amusing.

I think I said earlier my goal was to evaluate the evidence. If the evidence is inconclusive, we should not arrive at a conclusion. I don't think that is just necessarily my point.

"Squabble over semantics" always seems like a cop-out. If we can redefine words to mean whatever we want, virtually any argument can be made. Every argument can be redefined as 1+1=2. When WADA explicitly redefines both "doping" and "intention", I think it's fair to ask what does "intentional doping" mean to WADA, and what does it mean to fans everywhere else, and what is the difference in meanings? Is sending an email doping? Is failing to update a website doping? Is taking a legally prescribed, WADA-legal painkiller doping? Is kissing your girlfried doping? Is eating a teriyaki bowl doping? In all cases, WADA has answered yes at one time or another. But this isn't like US Postal or BALCO.

I agree we can unambiguously conclude she was found guilty of committing an ADRV with the length of sanction deemed as intentional, as she could not establish "not intentional", on the balance of probability.

But subsequently, many fans want to extrapolate from that and draw more conclusions that the CAS did not draw, conclusions not supported by the CAS report and not supported by any evidence to date.

My initial conclusion is that, for practical reasons, the WADA Code itself allows anti-doping bodies and adjudicating panels to draw limited conclusions based on broader definitions, or more restricted definitions, depending, and based on incomplete evidence supplemented with presumptions, sometimes at the expense of innocent athletes. And because of these allowances, there is no way to tell for certain how fair a ruling is to the athlete, and how accurately it reflects the reality.

In addition, I have raised some questions about the completeness of testimony from the AIU experts, if not the accuracy. Although I do not expect the AIU to select experts based on neutrality, it is in the interest of fairness, that the expertise is both neutral and complete, not to mention the neutrality of the arbitraters.

Just because Houlihan was caught in the net, that doesn't tell us if they caught a tuna or a dolphin.

the evidence was conclusive in the context of the WADA code which is what all athletes sign up for and need to abide by.
the people who matter (not you, sorry) found it to be so.

I’m not sure if Shelby is the dolphin or tuna in your analogy but if the system is truly broken then why aren’t more dolphin/tuna? getting caught in the net?

rekrunner wrote:

join in its fun wrote:

the evidence was conclusive in the context of the WADA code which is what all athletes sign up for and need to abide by.
the people who matter (not you, sorry) found it to be so.

I’m not sure if Shelby is the dolphin or tuna in your analogy but if the system is truly broken then why aren’t more dolphin/tuna? getting caught in the net?

That's really the whole point. No one can be sure if Shelby is the dolphin or the tuna. Not the AIU, not the CAS, not Tucker, not Armstronglivs, and not rekrunner.

Sure the athlete signed up to the WADA code and must abide by the ban, so not much can be said about that without retroactive WADA Code reform. I can't argue that the AIU and the CAS did anything that the WADA Code didn't permit them to do.

But the athlete didn't sign up for public baseless accusations of intentional cheating and lying, something not found in the WADA Code or CAS report.

Who's to say more dolphins aren't being caught in the WADA net? Look at the 50 Kenyan positives for nandrolone between 2004-2018, where the AIU "near-zero" argument completely collapses, as there are no USDA inspectors, and farmers do not routinely castrate their pork. This was 40% of all Kenyan positive results. Which Kenyan has 5-figures to fight it?

Look at cases like Simon Getzmann, and imagine that some athletes may actually use all of their prescribed painkiller, leaving nothing to test.

Or imagine that the AIU prosecuted the 27 USADA no-fault cases with the same aggressiveness as for Houlihan?

I'm also imagining the increased pressure on WADA to justify countries worldwide investing in it, if it decides to relax nandrolone positives, say by recommending that less than 10 ng/ml be considered ATFs, on a case by case basis, and their already low success rate of 1-2% drops by another 40%.

Here WADA has two conflicting incentives: it wants to increase detection rates and conviction rates, in order to bring returns on investments, so it relaxes its standards of convinctions, while its ultimate goal is that the doping rate, and therefore test and conviction rates, drop to 0%.