Gran fondo world time trial and US masters road champion provisionally banned in the latest doping case from the sometimes-murky world of masters racing.
That doping is found amongst over-the-hill athletes - even septuagenarians - where there is nothing more at stake than personal vanity, shows that doping will be rife amongst elites and professionals, where fame and their living are very much on the line.
I'd like to end this which doesn't mean I will. But I'll go back to the topic of this thread, that most people getting caught doping are masters. That doesn't surprise me for two reasons.
One is that overall you are dealing with a population that is much more likely to be getting prescriprtions and taking supplements than a younger population is and therefore much more liely to dope inadvertently than a younger population is. Obviously that doesn't mean that there aren't people in this population deliberately taking things they aren't supposed to in hopes of getting away with it and that should be dealt with. I'll even go you one further here and suggest that it's easier for people in that group to get away with deliberate doping than if they were in open competition because it's really unlikely they'll get tested anywhere but at major competitions and should be able to adjust their doping schedules accordingly.
Which kind of leads to another reason that I think explains why you'd see more masters getting popped than you do open athletes. Masters runners probably don't have agents, coaches, shoe company employees, advising them about what to take, how much, when not to take it, and so on and should be able to adjust their doping schedules appropriately.
I don't have any more sympathy for deliberate cheaters than you do as far as I can tell. But I am willing to believe that there will always be a percentage of busted athletes in all age groups who really did not know they were doing something illegal. Even among open athletes who are caught it's possible to avoid punishment by showing that you did not cheat deliberately. And so I am more likely to believe a busted 65 year old who claims not to have known what he was taking was banned than I am 25 year old.
If you are fast enough to get tested as a Masters athlete at a major Masters competition, you know exactly what you are doing and just so stupid that you think you won't get picked or too much of an egomaniac that you will get away with it.
I've been thinking about this and Derek Turnbull eventually came to mind. He won nearly every major masters' competition he entered. I knew him a little and I would bet very heavily that he would not have known what he was doing in terms of taking or avoiding stuff. And certainly in the unlikely event I was fast enough to get tested at a major masters' competition I would not know what I was doing. Before reading this thread I didn't know what TRT is.
