National pressure wrote:
Larkimm, you either work for Uk Athletics or are close to the people being discussed in this thread because you are an apologist to the nth degree for those parties. Anybody who followed Emma Jackson's story and the reaction from some fellow athletes, including on her twitter feed would know what UKA was recommending. Take a look at a few athletes twitter feeds and you will see how people feel.
It's amusing how nothing could be further from the truth about who I am!
If you want an analysis of me, then I'm just an argumentative bugger. But I do like to see evidence.
I well remember the tweets etc that came around when the Emma Jackson story came about (though to be honest I couldn't have remembered the details of the story without your link).
I tweeted to Jo Pavey at the time that I thought her contribution to the debate was inappropriately lacking in any evidence base. I know from their tweets how many of these athletes "feel" (felt at the time). But none of them came forward with any evidence at all that the fears that they had of thyroid meds being abused was actually happening. All I could see they were doing was reiterating the rumours that were around at the time about Rupp, Farah, NOP etc, which (it seems to me) have subsequently been discredited. I think Pavey etc jumped on the same bandwagon that forum posters had done by giving volume to badly sourced chinese whispers and plain lies about thyroid meds abuse in certain training camps.
I recall Chris Tomlinson and Andy Baddely also tweeting about it, with inane content - Tomlinson said something along the lines of TUEs should all be made public (not something I necessarily disagree with), but trying to give the distinct impression that there were long, long lists of athletes with TUEs all over the place (likely pointing the finger towards NOP etc), when the reality is that in Salazar's rebuttal and in NOP data release about 18 months ago, there were hardly any in place.
You might think I'm an apologist or that I'm somehow involved. You've got no-one's word for it other than my own, but I'm just a forty something working dad whose only connection with athletics is that three of my kids attend a very small athletics club, I've run a few half marathons (I max out at 25 miles per week) and I like to debate stuff on forums.
It is my honestly held opinion, based on the information that is in the public domain as far as I have read it / heard it, and my digesting / understanding of it, that there is more smoke than fire in most doping allegations, and that sensationalist reporting and discussion of it has given lots of armchair fans the opportunity to draw their own conclusions which in my view are not substantiated.
Look, it would be a boring thread if we all agreed with each other, wouldn't it!
(If you want to see some of the tweets around this stuff from Pavey, Tomlinson etc, see for example
https://twitter.com/LongJumpChris/status/582525709375180800)
Even Jo Pavey herself only calls this stuff rumour (https://twitter.com/jopavey/status/606212893705695232) and whilst some of the rumours she has heard have been true (e.g. Abeylegesse) I personally need more than that as evidence.