Your every post is a reflection of your intellect.
We were comparing Houlihan's burden with USADA's burden. The CAS has no burden but to adjudicate within the artificial framework defined by the WADA Code.
In both cases, the respective tribunals found Houlihan/USADA failed to meet their burden. The CAS could not find Houlihan's ADRVs "not intentional", as all of the evidence was insufficient, and the AAA Panel could not find any NOP athlete ever committed an ADRV, because the evidence was insufficient.
Whether you say it, effectively say it, or don't say it, the similarity is there.
With USADA, we don't simply talk about failed tests of one athlete, but failed tests of *all* NOP athletes, all time, even while under heightened scrutiny and increased testing during the investigation, and -- did I mention -- it was a multi-year intensive investigation including 30 witnesses, a wide range of evidence including eye-witness proof, testimonies, contemporaneous emails, and patient records, more than 2,000 exhibits, and 5,780 pages of transcripts, reviewed by 4 separate anti-doping organizations.
All you are saying is that a burden of proof will apply in all cases. What a trite and mundane observation. The similarity between the NOP investigation and Houlihan's ADRV ends there.
But now that you have conceded this trite and mundane, but quite obvious, fact, the implications are that Houlihan simply failed to collect the evidence necessary to meet the "balance of probability" (50%) burden to prove "not intentional". I'm not convinced such a burden is possible, without a sample to test.
If, for emotional and non-intellectual reasons, you want to use other verbs that the CAS didn't use, like "reject" and "rule out", then the similarity and consistency requires you to realize that USADA, the AAA Panel, the subsequent CAS Panel, and a WADA investigation, all similarly "rejected" and "ruled out" any allegation that NOP athletes ever doped for the same reason -- even moreso as all four anti-doping/adjudication bodies gave an explicit statement to that effect, after, in addition to the normal course of anti-doping testing, having reviewed the evidence from 30 witnesses, a wide range of evidence including eye-witness proof, testimonies, contemporaneous emails, and patient records, more than 2,000 exhibits, and 5,780 pages of transcripts.
What difference does it make whether the figure is annual or is an accumulated total over 4 years? $300million in a year seems to be a lot more than $80 million a year. I would have thought a self-declared "mathematician with a statistical bent" would have grasped that.
I explained where the Al Jazeera estimate of the black market in doping came from. Because it doesn't have a single source you cannot grasp that either. Your stupidity is reaching Olympian proportions. The only medal you will ever get.
The arbitrary point you seem to want to make is that $350 million is too small and puts anti-doping in the cottage industry, while 1 billion crosses that arbitrary cottage industry threshold. I have no opinion on why it is important to call it a cottage industry. It doesn't seem like an important point.
You did not specify annually, before I gave you that value added source. You can take the reported data for what it is worth -- I didn't ask you to do more. But you don't seem to grasp that the IOC is also not a single source. I should also note that since the 2013-2016 Olympic cycle, WADA has increased its budget in investigations, post Russian/IAAF scandal, so the anti-doping industry has grown since then.
Although you made up and wrote words that purport to explain the Al Jazeera estimate of the black market, most importantly Al Jazeera did not. Keep in mind that I watched the Al Jazeera documentary, and there was no attempt to explain or otherwise substantiate that black market estimate. They came up with a large, but unexplained, estimate, probably for shock value, to stir the emotions of the most gullible and ignorant among those who watched it and want to believe everything they hear.
Accurate figures from published accounts and up to date.
The fugues have never been refuted as they are audited unlike the IOC guesses of a very limited part of the industry spend.
No they are not. They are merely your delirious speculations.
How can they be my delirious speculations when they are taken from the up to date published and audited accounts.
Are you saying that the audited accounts are delirious speculations. Are you capable of reading them.
What do you think the current total annual spend of the doping control industry is.
And ….. have you got round to reading the Wada code yet and agreeing that the standard of proof is comfortable satisfaction for convictions or are you content to wallow in your uneducated mire?
I tend to agree with a lot of things you say. From your posts I sense you are someone with deep insights into the sport, as well as having life experience and you come across as a serious-minded person. With that said, I disagree with you on this one. You are correct, athletes 'should' not have to be food experts, but that is the same as me saying I 'should' not have to pay as much taxes as do...sometimes you have to do what you have to do. After the well published Ajee Wilson case involving food trucks, the smart thing all athletes to do is simply avoid them. Just like missing 3 whereabouts, there are penalties in life for simply being stupid. "The main issue that Houlihan faced is the same for all cases of potential accidental ingestion" (Not so) Ajee Wilson and Jarrion Lawson for example, with much less support than Houlihan where able to put forth a credible defense mainly in the form of only having trace amounts of dope in their system, being able to provide complete and verifiable traceability from a purchase to a source, etc.
Then there is also an issue in the Houlihan case and not so much in the aforementioned athletes of the analytical findings in which the athlete test positive when there is a somewhat suspicious performance improvement. When Houlihan went from 4:06 in 1500 2017 to 3:57 and someone who had never broken 15 minutes in the 5K to 14:34 the following year. This is what you hope for in an athlete and these types of improvements do happen cleanly, but they certainly become suspicious when they just happen to coincide with a doping positive. My 2 years of premed (micro, chem, org chem, cell bio) and being a CSI/forensic science buff tells me that WADA/AIU was very thorough in their analysis and it is highly (very highly) likely they got it right. In terms of my prejudice / prejudgments, they still exist but hopefully to a lesser extent. The fact is in Kenya and some other 3rd world countries, dope is easily accessible, most transactions can't be traced, testing is lax and federations are reluctant to pop athletes who are national heroes. This not so much the case in the U.S.
You are free to disagree -- what interests me is the basis for your disagreement.
Ajee Wilson ordered beef at a Jamaican restaurant, not a food truck. Lawson ate a beef bowl from a Japanese restaurant.
After the experiences of Lawson and Wilson, there is no obvious reason for any athlete to avoid food trucks. It is also not obvious after these public experiences, where it is safe for athletes to buy meat in the USA. Who can they trust, and on what basis? We see time and time again, that USDA approved meat can contain sufficient quantities of banned substances, including nandrolone in pork, that can produce the small amounts found in Wilson's, Lawson's and Houlihan's samples.
The difference in these cases is that Wilson was prosecuted by USADA, who is sympathetic to the athletes in cases of potential accidental ingestion (helping 27 athletes arrive at no-fault convictions), and Lawson was able to appeal to a sympathetic CAS panel, who discounted misleading "expert evidence" that materially lead to the initial conviction, and was persuaded that although, like Houlihan, Lawson didn't actually prove the source, Lawson did the most he could in his circumstance and that that failure to prove the source still met the burden of persuading the panel of "not intentional".
I don't find Houlihan's performance improvement suspicious -- many athletes have similar breakthroughs after years of training (e.g. Wejo after 5 years of university) -- so these arguments that doping would be more likely fail to persuade me. It looks more like confirmation bias from those who believe that such performance improvements are more likely by doping.
As a premed student, surely you must know what "first pass filtering" means. The small amount of nandrolone found (recall WADA routinely expects less than 10ng/ml from intact boar ingestion, and occassionally much higher), and the undisputed point that it was ingested, and the fact that most of the nandrolone is filtered out on first pass, never making it to the blood stream, suggests against any performance improvement effect from the small percentage that did enter the blood.
Not sure what to make about your CSI/forensic science experience. The sample analysis is right, but the questions that arise after that are all legal or mathematical in nature: In the interest of justice to the athlete, should the AIU have treated the result as an ATF, despite the WADA lab reporting, as foreseen in the WADA TD2021NA? Should the AIU have relied on the CIR test when the TD2021NA says it may not be used to determine exogenous origin? Did the AIU model and argue the right probability of a scenario that presents 121,000,000 opportunities per year for an unlikely "less than 1 in 10,000" event to occur?
Your other facts only become relevant after someone has made a correlation between 3rd world (or 1st and 2nd world) performance and doping, and whether testing (that is reportedly easy to beat for the sophisticated) is a deterrent, or has any negative correlation with performance. These correlations have yet to be established.
Accurate figures from published accounts and up to date.
The fugues have never been refuted as they are audited unlike the IOC guesses of a very limited part of the industry spend.
No they are not. They are merely your delirious speculations.
How can they be my delirious speculations when they are taken from the up to date published and audited accounts.
Are you saying that the audited accounts are delirious speculations. Are you capable of reading them.
What do you think the current total annual spend of the doping control industry is.
And ….. have you got round to reading the Wada code yet and agreeing that the standard of proof is comfortable satisfaction for convictions or are you content to wallow in your uneducated mire?
There's a new congressional report on the meatpacking industry that came out today. I defy CAS or anyone to say the pork supply chain was normal in 2020. It turns out Tyson Foods essentially wrote the Executive Order issued by President Trump allowing the plants to stay open even as their workers were dying. One could've sent a lamb through the pork assembly line and no one would have batted an eye. Article summarizing the report:
In several instances where state or local officials temporarily closed down meatpacking plants due to high rates of coronavirus infections among workers, USDA leaders intervened on the companies’ behalf and pushed public health officials to reopen plants.
On April 9, 2020, South Dakota officials temporarily shuttered a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls after hundreds of workers had tested positive for COVID-19. Two days later, Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan reached out to his counterpart at Tyson Foods, Noel White, with an idea — an executive order that would prevent authorities from shutting down meatpacking plants.
The full PDF report by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis:
And the positive did not coincide with the improvements you indicate.
If you think they do go get a refund on your science class.
And these type of improvements are quite common. Houlihan improved 6 seconds in two years in the 1500m. She later improved another 2.35 seconds in a very fast WC race. Many other runners have seen a similar improvement. The 5000m wasn’t her race, being an 800/1500 runner, so it’s to be expected to have bigger jumps when you start being serious with pro training for a longer race.
And it's also quite common for clean athletes craniums to enlarge post adolescence.
There's a new congressional report on the meatpacking industry that came out today. I defy CAS or anyone to say the pork supply chain was normal in 2020. It turns out Tyson Foods essentially wrote the Executive Order issued by President Trump allowing the plants to stay open even as their workers were dying. One could've sent a lamb through the pork assembly line and no one would have batted an eye. Article summarizing the report:
In several instances where state or local officials temporarily closed down meatpacking plants due to high rates of coronavirus infections among workers, USDA leaders intervened on the companies’ behalf and pushed public health officials to reopen plants.
On April 9, 2020, South Dakota officials temporarily shuttered a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls after hundreds of workers had tested positive for COVID-19. Two days later, Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan reached out to his counterpart at Tyson Foods, Noel White, with an idea — an executive order that would prevent authorities from shutting down meatpacking plants.
The full PDF report by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis:
If she could find even one farm or supply chain that disproves McGlone’s confidence in the system, surely she would have played it?
To then conclude:
Given Houlihan’s inability to find experts to even try to refute pretty much all of his claims (let alone do so successfully), we have to conclude that it is, that he is correct, and that his testimony is true. He was the star witness for World Athletics, because his testimony revealed that the sequence of events required by Houlihan were so unlikely as to be next to impossible, and he did it without any significant opposition.
Oh, and Tucker commented on the stomach burritos - that twoggle falsely claimed were pure speculation from Prof. McGlone:
Importantly, Houlihan’s claim is that she ate pig stomach (see points 40 and 99). McGlone explains that the only part of the stomach that is sold to the food industry is the outer stomach, which is metabolically inactive and has a very low steroid concentration compared to the whole stomach.
Occam's razor would point to the simplest solutions. Purposeful ingestion or contaminated supplements. Athletes world wide (and shady supplement manufacturers) would be wise to avoid nandrolone and go with steroids for which a plausible explanation can be manufactured if the athlete is caught.
Oh, and Tucker commented on the stomach burritos - that twoggle falsely claimed were pure speculation from Prof. McGlone:
Importantly, Houlihan’s claim is that she ate pig stomach (see points 40 and 99). McGlone explains that the only part of the stomach that is sold to the food industry is the outer stomach, which is metabolically inactive and has a very low steroid concentration compared to the whole stomach.
Why do you ignore the new point about the state of the meat packing industry at the time?
What difference does it make whether the figure is annual or is an accumulated total over 4 years? $300million in a year seems to be a lot more than $80 million a year. I would have thought a self-declared "mathematician with a statistical bent" would have grasped that.
I explained where the Al Jazeera estimate of the black market in doping came from. Because it doesn't have a single source you cannot grasp that either. Your stupidity is reaching Olympian proportions. The only medal you will ever get.
The arbitrary point you seem to want to make is that $350 million is too small and puts anti-doping in the cottage industry, while 1 billion crosses that arbitrary cottage industry threshold. I have no opinion on why it is important to call it a cottage industry. It doesn't seem like an important point.
You did not specify annually, before I gave you that value added source. You can take the reported data for what it is worth -- I didn't ask you to do more. But you don't seem to grasp that the IOC is also not a single source. I should also note that since the 2013-2016 Olympic cycle, WADA has increased its budget in investigations, post Russian/IAAF scandal, so the anti-doping industry has grown since then.
Although you made up and wrote words that purport to explain the Al Jazeera estimate of the black market, most importantly Al Jazeera did not. Keep in mind that I watched the Al Jazeera documentary, and there was no attempt to explain or otherwise substantiate that black market estimate. They came up with a large, but unexplained, estimate, probably for shock value, to stir the emotions of the most gullible and ignorant among those who watched it and want to believe everything they hear.
Your alacrity at shifting goalposts is truly spectacular. A claim was made here that anti-doping expenditure was 1 billion dollars. It was not and the claim cannot be substantiated. You then put forward a figure from the IOC of over 300 million. This is a 4 year figure which means that annually it is around 80 million. Can you see how far this is from 1 billion? Or are you going to shift the goal-posts further to measure expenditure over a period of ten or even fifty years? The one thing you are unable to accept is that spending to combat doping is a bare fraction of what the doping black market is estimated to be, an estimate arrived at by organisations and individuals involved in anti-doping. But that is your self-assigned and utterly self-deluded role here, to deny the hold doping now has over elite and professional sport against all evidence.
Occam's razor would point to the simplest solutions. Purposeful ingestion or contaminated supplements. Athletes world wide (and shady supplement manufacturers) would be wise to avoid nandrolone and go with steroids for which a plausible explanation can be manufactured if the athlete is caught.
She did not argue contaminated supplements, for which there was no evidence. The Razor therefore points to intentional doping - as CAS duly and properly found.
No they are not. They are merely your delirious speculations.
How can they be my delirious speculations when they are taken from the up to date published and audited accounts.
Are you saying that the audited accounts are delirious speculations. Are you capable of reading them.
What do you think the current total annual spend of the doping control industry is.
And ….. have you got round to reading the Wada code yet and agreeing that the standard of proof is comfortable satisfaction for convictions or are you content to wallow in your uneducated mire?
All you are saying is that a burden of proof will apply in all cases. What a trite and mundane observation. The similarity between the NOP investigation and Houlihan's ADRV ends there.
But now that you have conceded this trite and mundane, but quite obvious, fact, the implications are that Houlihan simply failed to collect the evidence necessary to meet the "balance of probability" (50%) burden to prove "not intentional". I'm not convinced such a burden is possible, without a sample to test.
If, for emotional and non-intellectual reasons, you want to use other verbs that the CAS didn't use, like "reject" and "rule out", then the similarity and consistency requires you to realize that USADA, the AAA Panel, the subsequent CAS Panel, and a WADA investigation, all similarly "rejected" and "ruled out" any allegation that NOP athletes ever doped for the same reason -- even moreso as all four anti-doping/adjudication bodies gave an explicit statement to that effect, after, in addition to the normal course of anti-doping testing, having reviewed the evidence from 30 witnesses, a wide range of evidence including eye-witness proof, testimonies, contemporaneous emails, and patient records, more than 2,000 exhibits, and 5,780 pages of transcripts.
The reason that Houlihan failed to collect the evidence to show that her doping "wasn't the result of accidental contamination and wasn't intentional" was that there was no such evidence. Next please - as CAS effectively said.
Once again - for beginners - there are no factual parallels between the NOP investigation and the Houlihan case. Except they both involved dopers.
Oh, and Tucker commented on the stomach burritos - that twoggle falsely claimed were pure speculation from Prof. McGlone:
Importantly, Houlihan’s claim is that she ate pig stomach (see points 40 and 99). McGlone explains that the only part of the stomach that is sold to the food industry is the outer stomach, which is metabolically inactive and has a very low steroid concentration compared to the whole stomach.
Point 99 clearly states that the food truck owner said there were two items on the menu with pig stomach, buche and chorizo. Chorizo can contain other pig organs and glands as well. It was only the prosecution witness (McGlone) that speculated that these dishes only contained the outer stomach muscle. I will agree that neither Houlihan nor McGlone could prove which organs and glands were in the Chorizo.