Bubba Olaf wrote:
The statute of limitations on this sort of thing ought to be about a week. People such as Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong (to name just a couple) shouldn't be stripped of their medals/titles YEARS after the fact. If the drug testers are too incompetant to nail the cheats immediately then it's on the governing bodies, not the athletes.
The above is just my opinion. Now I'm asking for fact: How long did it take them to nail Ben Johnson? Seems to me it was almost immediate, perhaps even while the Oly Games were still in progress? If memory serves, Floyd Landis was caught fairly quickly as well.
Ben was caught almost immediately. Obviously we'd all prefer that kind of result. But the hope is that keeping samples for eight years and retesting will act as a better deterrent. New cheatin' substances come out all the time, and they can't test for those substances until they know what they are, so testing will always be one step behind. All Ben had to do was pass the only test he took and he'd have been free. Now people know that even if there's no test now, there probably will be in eight years and are, hopefully, less likely to dope. Or if they do dope, they're infinitely more likely to get caught.
I'd love to see them retest all samples every time - it sounds like they only retested a small percentage of the 2004 samples this last time. I wonder how many doping medalists from Athens are now wiping their brows in relief as the statue of limitations runs out?