casual obsever wrote:
rekrunner wrote:
Are you suggesting that maybe Baumann, Decker, Gatlin, Kiprop, and Jeptoo were also treated unfairly?
LOL, you wrote "also"... None of them was treated unfairly, and neither was Houlihan. All of them were convicted by fair tribunals after testing positive and or having "suspicious" blood values, and the various tribunals didn't buy their in part creative excuses from toothpaste to menopause to sabotage to altitude to beef burrito. And that, ranging from the late 90s to 2021 has obviously nothing to do with pre-2015 and post-2015.
This whole "intent was deemed not proven" is just obfuscation that didn't help those dopers and won't help future dopers either. Fortunately.
LOL -- I did write "also". You'd have to downplay and ignore a lot of established facts to arrive at a determination that all these prosecutions were fair.
For example, if we take all of the final decisions of all the tribunals for Gatlin as correct, his first offense should have never happened. For his second offense, he initially got a life ban, reduced to 8 years for cooperation, and reduced again to 4 years on appeal. He and his team had to work hard to establish that level of equity. Compare that to Tyson Gay, who got a 2-year sentenced reduced for substantial assistance. It's hard for me to see that Gatlin was treated fairly, when the default ban for doping was 2-years, and Gatlin co-operated.
In the case of Decker, they use a more accurate test now, since the T/E test that convicted her was considered flawed. Also the intervention of the IAAF in an affair between the USATF and the USOC/IOC seems highly irregular.
In the case of Baumann, the toothpaste was confirmed to contain nandrolone, and the doping tribunal with the doping responsibility cleared him. Again, the IAAF intervention in a matter between the DLV and the NOC/IOC seems irregular, as the IAAF was not responsible for the doping control in this instance. The IAAF referred the case it was not a party to, to its own IAAF Arbitration Panel to resolve a dispute which Baumann was not a party to. That doesn't sound like a fair process.
The case of Kiprop has its own irregularities, but my biggest question is whether Kiprop and his defense team had access to the raw test results, behind the reported result, from the WADA lab, and the ability to have it independently assessed. We have seen a number of other cases that suggest the WADA lab itself improperly reported cross-contamination of a reference test as a positive, and withheld the raw data from the accused athlete during the process.
For Houlihan, it's hard for me to reconcile the CAS ruling with the TD2021NA guidance "The origin of the urinary 19-NA may not be established by GC/C/IRMS analysis ...". Seems to me like the "fair" treatment would have been for the WADA lab, or the AIU, to determine the result as an ATF, and collect more data to remove some of the uncertainty with data, rather than a set of presumptions.
In these examples, and others, the question I raised, is not whether the athletes should have been convicted, but whether today the WADA Code, and the associated regulations and guidelines, can ensure justice and due process for all athletes, or whether some no-fault, non-negligent, unintentional, and not knowing athletes are swept up with the presumptions and railroaded to a 4-year sanction.
"Intent was deemed not proven" doesn't help dopers, but can only hurt athletes who act without fault, negligence, intent or knowledge of violating the rules. This is not obfuscation, but precisely the point I consistently raise. Sometimes (like Simon Getzmann) the athlete can limit the damage.