LetsRun anti-doping challenge #1 - What can the sport do to clean itself up?

Not to be a Debbie downer but I think the roided up cow is out of the barn. But I'll be very interested in what the LetsRun braintrust comes up with.

Mandatory drug tests once per week, but never at a specific time.

This won’t catch newly developed drugs they can’t test for, but it’ll work for other drugs. And testing at a random time means they won’t have time to clear the drugs - for example, EPO clears in 3 days - from their system.

There needs to be more than expanded drug testing. Create more incentive for people to spill the beans on their peers, e.g. make it worth their while financially. If their information leads to a suspension, then they should get rewarded for it. This pool of funds could be crowdsourced. I know I would contribute to it.

It's very likely that runners are taking substances or utilizing methods that the drug testers aren't even aware of. This would help expose some of the mysteries.

Drug testing but they are doing that already.

Any system will always have flaws and somebody will work around it sometimes. That just how it is.

What is not helpful is that people like the Brojos put out unsubstantiated doping allegations on some runners. That needs to stop NOW!

All WA-certified road races should contribute 10% of the prize money to the race’s in-competition anti-doping program on behalf of the top N athletes for both male and female, where N depends on level of the race and should cover at least X percent of the ranks that have prize money:
- X=100% for Olympics, World Championships, World Marathon Majors and Platinum labeled races
- X=70% for Gold labeled races
- X=50% for Silver labeled races
- X=30% for Bronze labeled races
For example, assume a race offers prize money for top 10 athletes, then
- N=10 for WMM and Platinum label races
- N>=7 for Gold label races
- N>=5 for Silver label races
- N>=3 for Bronze label races

In my opinion this should become a requirement for any race to be certified by WA as a label race where the athletes themselves become one of the major contributors to in-competition anti-doping tests, which makes sense to me as this is one way for the top athletes to show their support for clean sports.

I choose 10% because it seems small enough to make the prize money still meaningful to the athletes while big enough to make it also meaningful in terms of anti-doping. Taking Boston Marathon 2022 as an example: total prize money for top 10 in men’s and women’s open divisions are $706,000. With the proposal above, given that Boston Marathon is a WMM race (N=10), $70,600 (X=100%) would be used for the anti-doping program during the race weekend.
With help of $70,600, the anti-doping program should at least cover the followings:
- post-race drug tests for top N athletes for both male and female
- at least N random drug tests before race for both male and female
- small number of random drug tests after race for both male and female who rank outside top N

Did a quick research and some articles from a few years ago mentioned that each test might cost $400-$800 (not sure how the costs have changed in 2022) but with the above money the test coverage could hypothetically be greatly extended.

Any remaining portion of $70,600 should be donated to AIU. And the race organizers are required to make it public how the fund is used.

All contributions should be exempt from taxing, if that matters.

For smaller label races without huge prize money this proposal might not make sense since the total contribution might not be meaningful for anti-doping. In this case we can require the race organizer to have a minimum amount dedicated to the anti-doping program, for example:
- $100,000 for WMM and Platinum label races
- $75,000 for Gold label races
- $50,000 for Silver label races
- $25,000 for Bronze label races

Doping bans should be lifetime, and convicted dopers should have all their results/records wiped out and prize money should be paid back. This is the only way you can effectively disincentivize doping. If I embezzled money from my company, I would be arrested, disbarred from the industry, and would face fines. No idea why we accept cheaters/liars back into the mix sometimes as short as 2 years after the conviction (And give them cushy coaching/announcing jobs post retirement).

If you really want to get spicy, make it so convicted dopers can keep x% of prize money if they start turning on people. Agents, coaches, fellow dopers, the more names you bring down, the more you can keep. This is more ethically ambiguous, so I probably wouldn't propose this, but it would clean up the filth in this sport real quick once someone got popped.

Remember how the problem of false starts was addressed? By giving the athlete an auto DQ if they false started?

Do that with PED violations, except your professional running career is automatically over.

You need to DQ all runners from an elite field if someone tests positive.

Example: 2024 Olympic Mens 1500. Lets say the guy who comes in 2nd gets popped 4 weeks later.

Nullify the entire race. It was compromised, throw the results out. No prize money to anyone, no medals to anyone. The race essentially never happened.

You'll see athletes and coaches take matters into their own hands.

"Pee" test the top 25 seeded runners prior to a significant road race, and everyone prior to track. Pee test the top three after the event. Regularly pee test the top 10 in the world unannounced. Whereabouts misses can add up to one. If you're out of touch for 24 hours in the world of smart phones 24/7, that's a ban.

Violations are a lifetime ban.

Here is another proposal similar to the prize money one but about the appearance fees. The basic idea is that all athletes that are offered appearance fees will contribute a portion of it, compulsorily, to AIU’s anti-doping program. The percentage of contribution depends on the athlete’s nationality:
- 30% contribution for athletes from category A countries
- 15% contribution for athletes from category B countries
- 5% contribution for athletes from category C countries
For example, assume an athlete from a category-A country is offered $10,000 appearance fee then his contribution to AIU would be $10,000 x 30% = $3,000.

For me the appearance fee represents two things: the influence an athlete has and the trust between race organizers and athletes. Right now the trust level for good performance is low, at least from a fan’s perspective but the money is still paid out which doesn’t make sense to me. For this reason the percentage of contribution here is higher than my proposal for the prize money.

The contribution will be used to fund future testing of the contributor himself if applicable. For example:
- If the contributor is not in AIU’s testing pool then his contribution will be used to setup his profile in the testing pool and cover anti-doping tests for himself in the following years. After the contribution runs out, and if the athlete is no longer eligible for AIU’s global testing pool, the athlete will then be moved to the national testing pool if applicable.
- If the contributor is already in AIU’s testing pool, more testing could be conducted in the following years for this athlete.
- Any remaining contribution should be used to fund AIU’s anti-doping programs of the country where this contributor represents.

Race organizers should make contributions on behalf of the athletes and are required to make this information available to AIU and all contributing athletes. All contributions should be exempt from taxing if that matters.

Im sure everyone will say this is too extreme. But...when you consider the damage PEDs do to others careers in real monetary terms and when you consider the infringement on others rights to enjoy their careers it's reasonable to suggest this be a crime punishable by something that really gets peoples attention.

The risk/benefit profile is still strongly on the side of benefit to take PEDS, esp if you are from a poor nation. If you get away with it...it can change your life. If you get caught, you are no worse off than when you started? I hear people say its too "harsh" to go back and take away medals and records from before you were pinched? Why? I get that they might have not been taking the PEDs before, but that's just part of the punishment /deterrent! If you use, you lose it all. How about the people who facilitate getting these athletes to do these PEDS? Why shouldnt they spend a decade in a dark prison? We have no patience for recreational drug users and esp dealers historically, lock em' all up we say? Why not here? We are still not serious enough about PEDS. Russia had state sponsored doping!! They still compete with silly rules about their anthem and a new flag that is the same color as their normal flag! What a joke. We are not serious at all about this issue. We put too many eggs in the race to keep up with new drugs . We need to cut the head off. Prison time would be a moderate to severe deterrent.

Severe CRIMINAL CHARGES for dopers, including jail time.

Charge them with theft and fraud because they are stealing money away from the clean victors.

The punishment for doping needs to be so great as to discourage everyone from even risking it. Who would risk a couple years in prison and massive fines?

This would no doubt be controversial but I think the sport has already lost the perception that everyone competing is clean. Therefore, drawing attention to the following at each World Championship and Olympic Games would not do more harm than good.

The convicted dopers need to be more publicly shamed than just the little news blurbs that come out months, if not many years, after their last competitions. At some point during each World championships or Olympics, there should be a few minutes of video dedicated to drawing attention to every medalist doper convicted since the last championship. The images or video footage would show Doper Athlete X winning their tainted medal(s) in their international federation’s kit (this would add further pressure to the federations to implement better state-sponsored testing whether or not the federation was actually involved in the doping). The doper exposé for lack of a better term would be played both on televised broadcasts and in the stadium. There could be moments to highlight the next highest finishing “still-clean” athletes at the same time.

Marathon majors should have the same testing requirements for athletes from countries on the AIU doping watch list, as are in place for major track championships (3 tests in the 6 months leading up to them, or something like that).

Agents like Rosa and Pineda need to be drummed out of the sport. Any training group that has a doping positive should be at least placed under stricter testing requirements, similar to above (i.e. after the recent Sang athlete positive, every athlete in that group for the next 2 years ought to have to 3 random tests in every 6 month period to able to compete anywhere outside of Kenya), as well as the coach and management agency fined heavily. And yes, something similar for the BTC group.

Any athlete caught doping should have their entire career results, including both medals and records, annulled, and so far as it's feasible, be forced to pay back their entire prize money. They should also be given life-time bans.

I agree with the earlier suggestion that caught athletes should be given incentives to spill the beans on others.
The AIU already got a committment in 2019 from the marathon majors to contribute more to the funding of anti-doping testing. They also began 'intelligence led' anti-doping, particularly in regards to marathons, and I guess that includes focusing on investigating the busted athlete's 'networks'.
https://www.si.com/edge/2019/04/02/world-marathon-majors-athletics-integrity-unit-intelligence-driven-testing-doping
BTW, I think I suggested the other day that all doping threads should be registered users only (and preferably with a minimum number of posts). It's also unfair for the poster Chen Huang to lump together the 'everybody is doping' group with the 'all the Kenyans are doping' group. There is a stark difference between the number of busts in the USA, GB, Canada, Aus, NZ etc combined (Shelby) and Kenya (200+ including 25 this year). The claim that there is a near universal doping problem among elite and sub-elite Kenyans is grounded in objective evidence based reality. The claim that 'everybody dopes everywhere equally' remains a conspiracy theory, that I'm sure for some of those posters is a form of (African and maybe Russian) doping apologism. I also doubt if there is actually a 'group' claiming that 'the first two groups are racist'. There is maybe one or two likely paid shills using multiple usernames and IPs. There are other, rather cowardly posters, who accuse me of being 'racist' even though they now accept that doping in Kenya is clearly rife, as I was claiming 5 years ago when the busts were a relative trickle. They do that simply to deflect accusations of racism against themselves when stating the obvious about Kenyan doping.

Here is a suggestion on how to distribute the prize money and appearance fees. I have no idea how this is implemented right now but post it here anyway. For the purpose of this post, prize money means prize money + appearance fees + any bonus an athlete gets from a race (basically the money paid by the race organizer rather than from his sponsors or member federation).

One important reason, in my opinion, that why many athletes dope is that the prize money is huge enough to completely change one's life, and this is particularly true in relatively poor countries where athletes are struggling to make a living. The incentive is so high and the likelihood one gets caught is still relatively low at the moment, so why not? If an athlete dopes and manages to win a race without being caught, he might as well “disappear” after the race and we will never have a chance to catch him.

It seems harder to make anti-doping programs catch all dopers but there might be ways to somehow reduce the incentive to dope while still encouraging clean athletes to train and compete at the highest level.

So the proposal here is for the race organizers to pay out prize money in installments. For example, let’s say an athlete wins $10,000 prize money with $10,000 appearance fee, here is how the money might be distributed to him:
- His total prize of $20,000 ($10,000 + $10,000) will be paid out in 9 installments over 2 years:
- 4% of the total prize ($800) will be paid immediately after in-competition drug tests come negative
- then another 12% ($2,400) will be paid out every 3 months until all prize money is paid off
- if this athlete is caught doping before all prize money is paid the remaining installments automatically stop.

The idea here is that installments can make the money feel less than it really is ($20,000 in one go vs. $2,400 each time) while each installment is still significant enough to help improve an athlete’s life. And when you don’t become a mega-rich overnight you are more likely to continue to train and compete, which gives the anti-doping program more chances to catch dopers.

If we combine this with my proposals for prize money and appearance fees, the payment amounts would look like this (assume the athlete is from a category-A country):
- Anti-doping contribution from prize money: $10,000 * 10% = $1,000
- Anti-doping contribution from appearance fees: $10,000 * 30% = $3,000
- His total prize money would be $9,000 + $7,000 = $16,000
- Initial payment would be $16,000 * 4% = $640
- Each installment pays $16,000 * 12% = $1,920

In theory this is an interesting idea although in practice there are a few more things to consider, for example the exchange rates and maybe even the interest rates for some. Also the payment process for race organizers is more complicated.

If 12 or more athletes from the same country test positive within one year, all athletes from that country are banned from competition for the following year. This way, dopers and those who help them are not only risking suspension for those individual athletes, they are also risking suspension for their entire country.

Ban the coach of the drug cheat for the same time period.