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"No we're not, liar! We are funded by the Center for Justice and Equity in Running."
Ok
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uu.uuu wrote:
Gatlin was set up.
The whole Gatlin saga is one of the wildest doping stories in track and field. It's got everything—sabotage claims, backstabbing, shifting blame, violent retaliation, and even a supposed April Fool's joke that turned eerily prophetic.
So shortly after Gatlin tested positive in 2006 the story of 'trainer sabotage' first came to light via Trevor Graham. Gatlin's coach accused masseur, Chris Whetstine, of sabotaging the sprinter's career because he was holding a grudge against the Olympic 100m champion. According to Graham, Whetstine came running over all nervous after a race, grabs Gatlin, rubs something on him, and pops a 'little bottle with a crooked S' (LMAO) written on it into his pocket before skedaddling away. Now Whetstine wasn't some unknown- he'd spent ten years supporting Team USA and supporting stars like Diddy (pause) during the good 'ol LiveStrong days when the who's who of Hollywood was obsessed with jogging 3:45 marathons.
Nike team member and coach Salazar heard his fellow coach Graham say that and was like, 'Umm definitely not- that's crazy for Gatlin and team to try to pass the blame onto Chris'.
Still didn't stop Llewellyn Starks, another Nike employee, from tracking down and beating Whetstine senseless later that year following USAs. (Whetstine and Nike settled out of court). The former LJer turned agent Starks, by the way, is -or was- most known for the leg snap heard round the world. Definitely not linking it here.
Fast forward 13 years and to a whole new Nike doping scandal involving the aforementioned Salazar front and center and guess what Salazar said? He blamed the whole 'tested steroids on my son' situation on.....CHRIS WHETSTINE. Yup, the former trainer who Salazar previously said could have never done such a thing.
Salazar said the following, in reference to using the nike lab to test steroid half-life:
'On May 9, 2009, Galen Rupp’s University of Oregon 4×1 mile relay team set a new NCAA record. Shortly after the race while talking to the press, Galen felt someone rubbing his shoulders. He turned around and it was Chris Whetstine. Galen had heard the stories. He was extremely concerned and called me. I called the USADA hotline to report it. USADA may still have the tapes or notes of my call. Nothing came of it but it caused us grave concern.’
There's far more craziness to the story, such as Gatlin's father grabbing his gun and stating he was going to go k*ll Trevor Graham after a story emerged of a Gatlin positive drug test (it was an April Fool's joke printed on a website). Two years later the joke became reality.We know how this ends, of course. Graham was implicated by many, including Victor Conte. He was handed a lifetime ban. 8 of his athletes tested positive. Some ended up in prison. In a stunning turn of events, Graham was also revealed to be the insider who sent a sample of the clear to USADA in 2003, jump-starting one of the biggest sport's scandals ever. But today Graham claims his innocence and often tweets about the 'big conspiracy' he will reveal about Gatlin's forged test, and how another top American coach abuses prescription use (any guesses who that might be?).
BTW, while Graham is dirty as heck, Gatlin legit might be innocent (or ignorant). Many, including investigator Jeff Novitsky have echoed as much. Then there is Randall Evans, an assistant coach who, according to Whetstine, reportedly purchased Testosterone in Mexico and then transported it back to the States (his wife was in the FBI, thus it was entirely legal for him to do so, he reportedly told Whetstine). Sometime later, Evans gave Gatlin what he told him were B12 vitamin shots for his injured hamstrings.
Takeways?
The Whetstine Scapegoating is Ridiculous
It’s crazy that Whetstine was initially dismissed as an innocent trainer, only to later be blamed for Salazar’s own doping experiments. The fact that he ended up getting physically assaulted and then quietly settling out of court with Nike only adds to the shadiness. Given how many different scandals Nike has been involved in over the years, it’s fair to ask whether Whetstine was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—or if he was being used as a fall guy to cover for much bigger figures.Trevor Graham’s Role is Wildly Contradictory
The guy was both the architect of a massive doping program and the whistleblower who brought down BALCO. He was clearly deep in the game, but it’s still wild that he’s maintained his innocence all these years and claims to have proof of a bigger conspiracy. Given his history, it’s hard to take him at face value—but at the same time, he’s been right before. If he’s telling the truth about Gatlin’s test being forged, that would be one of the biggest bombshells in track history.Gatlin Might Have Been Clueless
His first ban was from prescribed ADD medication. The second, if Whetstine’s account is true, came from injections that he might not have realized were testosterone. If you assume Evans really was bringing testosterone from Mexico under FBI cover and injecting Gatlin under the pretense of "B12," then Gatlin would have had no reason to question it. That doesn’t make him completely innocent, but it does open the door for plausible deniability.Nike’s Role is Incredibly Suspect
Starks assaulting Whetstine and Nike quietly settling makes it seem like they wanted to make the whole thing disappear. Then there’s Salazar, who publicly dismissed Gatlin’s "sabotage" claims, only to later accuse Whetstine of tampering with his own athletes. That kind of hypocrisy makes you wonder how much of the doping operation was actively covered up by Nike and its affiliates.Salazar’s Fall is Well-Deserved
The fact that he was testing steroids in the Nike lab (and allegedly on his own son) tells you everything you need to know. He spent years cultivating an image as a clean coach while running a shady operation behind the scenes. His involvement in the Oregon Project and the doping allegations surrounding it show that this was a long-term, systematic approach rather than a few isolated incidents.Who’s the "Top American Coach" Graham Keeps Hinting At?
It’s hard to say definitively, but given Graham’s history of throwing names out there, the most likely suspect is probably someone tied to Nike or the Oregon Project. That narrows the list down quite a bit, and Salazar is the obvious candidate. But if Graham is hinting at an active coach, it could be someone from the next generation of Oregon Project-affiliated coaches. There aren’t many high-profile American coaches with enough influence to be worth targeting, so it’ll be interesting to see if Graham ever actually reveals what he claims to know. Then again, Graham isn't necessarily a truthful human, so this is likely all nonsense.The coach Graham mentions is almost certainly Dennis Mitchell. Or Duane Ross.
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Here is another classic I don't think I've seen mentioned yet.
Dieter Baumann and his toothpaste...
Baumann was obviously really good - he won that awesome Barcelona 5000m in one of the OG "parting of the Red Sea" finishes, where he ran 25.2 for the final 200m and gave one of the most epic celebrations even witnessed on a track including a forward somersault into some sort of "electric shock bug" move.
But he'd always wanted to break 13 but for a long period of time seemed destined to be a low 13 guy capable of not necessarily having a gangbusters PR but one capable of outkicking anyone on his day. That was of course until 1997 (the EPO era radar detector is spiking) when he came out and tore 7 seconds off his 5000m PR and became the second white dude under 13 after Kennedy, but his 12.54.70 (run in the legendary 12.41 Geb WR race) was well under BK's 12.58.21
It wasn't until 1999 that he found himself in trouble, testing positive for nandrolone after eating an incorrectly made carne asada burrito that turned out to be made from the stomach of an uncastrated boar.... Well not exactly but it was traces of nandrolone he tested positive for and it was a lot of it (he was 20x the legal limit putting SH to shame), and he was banned 2 years by the German federation (DLV) and the IAAF.
Then it gets juicy. He fought the ban, taking lie detector tests and it was eventually lifted by the DLV but not by the IAAF - the explanation, his toothpaste was spiked. Now a lot of people know this but I told a long time ago by a very solid source (a German woman who was working for one of the worlds largest track and field athlete management groups) that this really could be legit and that it involved a prominent German steeplechaser at the time, Damian Kallabis who was close friends at the time with a rival of Baumann, Stephane Franke, and this all went down at a training camp in St Moritz. The story was that Kallabis had used a syringe to directly inject pure nandrolone (so no 19-NA precursors this time) into the top of his toothpaste and had gained access to Baumanns room when it was being used by hotel cleaners, basically pretending to be Baumann (because incredibly all three of these guys looked very similar and obviously spoke German).
The motive was quite simple, the Kallabis/Franke camp believed that Baumann was getting away with EPO use (highly possible given the era and that there was no test at the time or even RBC limit in place) and were pissed he wasn't being caught and costing them national federation funds etc etc - and just wasn't fair. Hence dumping a concentrated amount of an anabolic agent he could get busted for into his toothpaste. I remember laughing, but she was convinced this could really have happened (though she was also from Stuttgart and the Baumanns were living and training in Tübingen so maybe there was some Schwabisch bias at play).
Either way this is the most James Bond espionage'esque story I've come across in track and it's a pretty classic one from that era too that almost seems so crazy that it could be true.
This post was edited 3 minutes after it was posted.1310 -
DMKowns20 wrote:
Ben Johnson testing positive (had undifferentiated winstrol in urine). Unless he took it that morning (not very likely) it's seems probable he was sabotaged.
A scapegoat was needed. His coach Charlie Francis admitted he was doping (like most of the final), but the numbers in his test didn't add up with where he was in his cycle hence the sabotage claims.
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juho wrote:
DMKowns20 wrote:
Ben Johnson testing positive (had undifferentiated winstrol in urine). Unless he took it that morning (not very likely) it's seems probable he was sabotaged.
A scapegoat was needed. His coach Charlie Francis admitted he was doping (like most of the final), but the numbers in his test didn't add up with where he was in his cycle hence the sabotage claims.
There's a Canadian Ben Johnson documentary that, in my opinion, has the best info on the Seoul doping scandal.
I forget what the documentary is called. It's good though. Might be "Ben Johnson: Drugs and the Quest for Gold," if that's the right one.
It also has some of the guys from AW spilling some of the beans.
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How about Marie-José Pérec at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. She went into those Games as the two-time defending Olympic women's 400m champion (plus had won gold in the 200m in Atlanta 1996). She was set to do battle with Australia's favorite, Cathy Freeman, who had finished second in the 400m behind MJP in Atlanta but then went on to win gold in that event at the 1997 and 1999 world championships (MJP didn't run the 400m at all from 1997-1999). But before the clash could take place, MJP fled Australia and returned home to France, claiming she had been threatened in Australia as part of a conspiracy to sabotage her attempt to defeat Freeman and win a third consecutive Olympic 400m gold medal.
Just check out this excerpt from this NYT article. It sounds like a movie:
Under the gaze of 110,000 fans in the goldfish bowl of Olympic Stadium and a worldwide television audience of millions, Marie-Jose Perec, the French runner, was to begin her quest for a third consecutive gold medal in the 400 meters on Friday.
Instead, Perec ran on Thursday.
She fled Sydney after being reportedly threatened in her hotel room by an unidentified man. She was later held for several hours by police officials at the Singapore airport after her companion, the U.S. sprinter Anthuan Maybank, allegedly attacked a television cameraman.
The couple left Singapore late Thursday night, bound for Paris aboard an Air France flight.
Perec, 32, who is a native of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, won the women's 400 in Barcelona in 1992 and in Atlanta in 1996, when she also won the 200 meters. Since then, she has struggled with injury and illness — she suffers from Epstein-Barr Syndrome, which causes chronic fatigue.
She has not won a 400-meter race since the Atlanta Games and her form was poor in the few races she ran early this summer. Her relations with the French press, always marked by extreme sensitivity on her part, have deteriorated. At the same time, her desire for privacy has increased.
Perec's only public comment since she sprinted from the airport on her arrival in Sydney was a distressing note posted Tuesday on her Web site. She criticized the Australian media, saying, "I have the impression that everything has been made up in order to destabilize me."
"The games have hardly begun and already I wish they would end because I'm so scared," she added. "I simply have to make sure my training place stays secret. That's the main thing."
She refused to stay or train with the French team in Sydney and instead had been staying in a luxury hotel downtown. There, on Wednesday night, she was threatened, according to her agent, Annick Avierinos.
Avierinos said a man had knocked on the door of Perec's room and then threatened her.
"He told her he would find her wherever she went and there was no point calling the police because there was little they could do to protect her," Avierinos said.
She said Perec also had been insulted and threatened several times since her arrival in Australia. "She just can't take any more of it," Avierinos said.
Hotel officials and the police said they had no records of an assault.
"We are very much looking forward to hearing whatever explanation Marie-Jose Perec can give us," said Peter Holt, a spokesman for the hotel.
French Olympic officials said they were sure Perec's departure had nothing to do with drugs. But they remained skeptical about her motivation.
"I am very unconvinced as far as the verbal aggression is concerned," said Henri Serandour, president of the French Olympic committee.
The president of the French athletic federation, Philippe Lamblin, was equally unsympathetic.
"The whole of France is penalized by this decision," he said. "She left like a thief. She had the chance to finish in style but instead she's gone off the rails."
While Perec's career has declined and her isolation increased in recent years, the woman who won the silver in Atlanta, Cathy Freeman of Australia, has gone in the other direction. Freeman, who often waves an aboriginal as well as an Australian flag after victories, has won a place in her country's heart in a way that Perec, despite all her golds, never did in France. Perec had beaten Freeman seven of the nine times they had raced. Freeman would have begun her quest for revenge under the flame she herself had lit at the opening ceremony.
To this day, I wonder what would have happened if MJP contested the 400m in Sydney without incident. The general thinking is that Freeman would have trounced her because MJP hadn't been in top form since 1996 while dealing with her illness and injuries. That's probably true, *but* such thinking overlooks the fact that MJP had a pattern of running the 400m significantly faster in global championship finals than the rest of the year. Here are the data:
- 1992: fasted pre-Olympic time was 49.50 on July 15th; won the Olympic final in 48.83 on August 5th
- 1995: fastest pre-championship time was 50.20, only ran 50.88 and finished 6th in Monaco on July 25th; won the world championship final on August 8th in 49.28
- 1996: fastest pre-Olympic time was 49.45 in Lausanne on July 3rd; won the Olympic final in 48.25 on July 29th
- 2000: only ran one 400m race, a 50.32 in early July in Nice. That was her last race before the start of the Olympics in September. Freeman's gold-medal-winning time was 49.11.
It's also interesting that French officials didn't support MJP at the time. Thankfully, the rift has apparently been mended, as MJP joined Teddy Riner to light the cauldron for the Paris Olympics last summer.
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The Chinese caterpillar thing is true and the next great supplement is right in front of us.
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DMKowns20 wrote:
Ben Johnson testing positive (had undifferentiated winstrol in urine). Unless he took it that morning (not very likely) it's seems probable he was sabotaged.
ya, it wasn't the metabolite that tested positive, so it was injested on or about the day of the race. interesting that the boards know this by all upvotes.
my coach spoke with Charlie Francis, reporting that Carl Lewis told Ben after he was beaten, you out doped me!
I have Carl "cleanish" amongst all dopers until he had to go sub 10. when he caved in when Ben started making him look foolish.
the saboteur knew Ben was doping, and maybe thought it is justice to set Ben up.
Once Charlie and Ben came clean, the witch hunt began,. the Canadian team lined up to confess, saw that they were going to be crucified, and headed for the hills, and some came back under a stealth PED protocol and some got on the podium
The authorities and their behavior are the main problem in PEDs.
Like going to the doctor for an injured knee, and he fixes it by hitting you with a hammer.
The quality of the authority makes things go or not.
The bare minimum authority is best, so as to have some rules,. but to get the ref out of the game, out of the way.
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RojoWillBanYou wrote:
Gloryhole Attendant wrote:
Meb winning Boston 2014
Wilson Chebet has won Amsterdam in 205 2x, closing in ~620. He was getting within 50-70m of Meb and then... slowed . The first miles of the race were strange as well. At one point the whole pack sort of stood up and started running 520/mile pace. Someone paid decent $ to make sure Meb won.
ROJO WILL 1000000% DELETE THIS POST. HE HATES WHEN PEOPLE BRING THIS UP.
That being said this is the #1 conspiracy I believe in. An American wins the year after the bombing when Chebet was in some of the best form of his life. Ryan Hall has a hand in this too. He led the pack and made sure they were slowing when needed.
Ryan’s part in this is actually confirmed and not conspiracy. He said in interviews afterwards that he went to the lead of the chase pack and slowed it down in hopes of helping Meb win - so this part is definitely true
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there was the Aouita Australia case.
with the best of intents, Aouita assumed that everybody knew that PEDs were state of the art, and a given in track and field, where Australia was in the dark ages.
the Atlas Mountain protocol and Iberia, was highly influences on the British evolution and methods of Peter Coe specifically.
Aoutia was hit between the eyes with "reality" where masses of the public were completely naive about PEDS, or better said, not in touch with ultimate reality.
This protocol is assumed in those that followed Aouita, to "advance" the sport,.
where there have been massive busts with the latest being Katir, after El G there was Ramzi,
without EPO and PEDs there is a good chance that there would be no world beaters from either Spain nor Morocco at all.
that said, the anomalies of the British in Coe's era is suspicious, but I have been unable over the years of inspection to find any smoke for a fire, though everyone in Europe seems to dabble in blood doping of some sort, real medical need or excuse.
so the brits did not have the blatant evidence that comes with rampant doping such as the Finns, Viren, who had transfusions prior to and DURING the games, and the wave of copy cats.
today the entire 3rd world is on the PED bandwagon,
in the past everyone took their turn being the worst offenders, with the usa and russia leading the way in their "cold war"
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Yuriy Borzakovskiy is Steve Ovett's son.
The Russian gold medalist at 800m in 2004 sure looks like Ovett. And Yuriy was born nine months after Steve won his 800 gold in Moscow in 1980.
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Harambe wrote:
The Chinese caterpillar thing is true and the next great supplement is right in front of us.
its only partially true
add in turtle blood soup
add in strict discipline, with a cane
and an East Germain coach
Chinese women went from zero medals in mid long distance in their history, to capturing nearly ALL the medals, and then back to zero medals since, without any Chinese being in the top 20.
those kind of stats, you can concluded something.
like when Jamaica with a very small population, had 4 out of 4 top 200m sprinters in the world at the same time.
and then, Jamaica has zero or one in the years since some semblance of testing arrived in Jamaica.
not saying Bolt, Blake, Powell are not among the best, you just weren't going to beat them with a penalty of 3-5 meters without PEDs
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Kobbs Hessler wrote:
Yuriy Borzakovskiy is Steve Ovett's son.
The Russian gold medalist at 800m in 2004 sure looks like Ovett. And Yuriy was born nine months after Steve won his 800 gold in Moscow in 1980.
This is a great one, they do look and run very very similar...
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Yuriy Borzakovskiy being the secret love child of Steve Ovett.
They kind of Look alike - Borza born April 1981 and his mum competed in 1980 Moscow Olympics… timeline holds water
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Kinda ends the debate:
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Where's Maury Povich when you need him?
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Kobbs Hessler wrote:
Yuriy Borzakovskiy is Steve Ovett's son.
The Russian gold medalist at 800m in 2004 sure looks like Ovett. And Yuriy was born nine months after Steve won his 800 gold in Moscow in 1980.
LOL! DNA test now.
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I honestly think that Kelvin Kiptum was about to blow the lid off of some doping-related stuff, and athletic authority figures in Kenya said "Well, we can't have that happen, now can we?"
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Hotstepper wrote:
Similar to the El G one, FloJo's 100m WR was definitely wind assisted.
lol Flojo was assisted alright.
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Conor Healy Portmarnock wrote:
Yuriy Borzakovskiy being the secret love child of Steve Ovett.
They kind of Look alike - Borza born April 1981 and his mum competed in 1980 Moscow Olympics… timeline holds water
i have always believed this to be absolute truth, and nobody can convince me otherwise.
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