Travis Tygart says 'grey area' - using legal drugs when athlete doesn't have medical need for them - is next doping frontier

Yup. It is about time to squash team AlSal. . . . . . Rupp has the greatest pain threshold of any Olympic athlete of ever. Sure — 100 advil per day should make that work.

TUEs are made to be exploited.

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Asthma + ADHD pls wrote:

TUEs are made to be exploited.

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If Rupp had a high threshold for pain he wouldn’t need to be the most medicated person in the entire sport.

This has become common practice. In tennis, for example, there are an astonishing number of players who claim an asthmatic condition. Inhalers are a stimulant. Asthmatics - genuine asthmatics - generally have very poor "wind". You wouldn't think that was a problem for elite athletes. A lot of cyclists use them also.

As an alternative to faux medical conditions - elite athletes are remarkably sickly nowadays - is the practise of claiming an "injury" that requires an otherwise banned substance - growth hormone, for example - for which a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) is obtained from the governing sporting bodies by the athlete's doctor. Tennis is rife with these. (In the 2017 Australian Open, for example, 3 of the 4 finalists had used them. The one exception was Federer. When Sharapova was caught she was taking a product called meldonium, which is for weak hearts - weak hearts, in a pro tennis player? - which had recently been put on the proscribed list. She could have obtained a TUE but her team slipped up.)

All this is legal - which is the point - but it is doping nevertheless.

Wait, growth hormone can be legal if the athlete has a TUE for it? Is that accurate?

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Fiwkfkcd wrote:

Wait, growth hormone can be legal if the athlete has a TUE for it? Is that accurate?

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Armstronglivs wrote:
Sharapova could have obtained a TUE but her team slipped up.)

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Come on rojo, using "legal" drugs w/o medical need is as old as you can imagine.
Just to choose one post...

RE: WADA Hacked: Leaked Drug Tests/TUEs - Real or Not? 9/13/2016 3:09PM (Clerk)

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Here is the real issue revealed in the leak. Someone approved the TUE for all of these drugs for Williams:
oxycodone
hydromorphone
prednisone
prednisolone
methylprednisolone

Someone had to approve the 3rd, and then the 4th, and then the 5th, drugs, with no consideration (or maybe even malicious consideration), for what it meant for fairness and managing a clean sport.

Tennis ignored their drug problem worse than Track and Field, but this is a USADA thing. The human element in this TUE process is absolutely necessary, and its biggest weakness. That Zorzoli, who has been named in too many doping cases to count, as the only member of the supposed-to-be three person TUE board for cycling was able to rush Chris Froome's prednisolone TUE is a problem. That Chris Horner had his request denied exemplifies the system working. That there are two different outcomes for the same situation show that there are no guarantees for fairness.

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While the rolling comes around wrote:
But when the "rules" are more equal for some others, everyone loses..

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.....-----00003 wrote:

There was some tennis chick who tried to get a testosterone(-like) TUE approved, and it actually went through the dodgy doctor stage before a higher-up caught it (I guess she wasn't a big enough publicity name, and lacked a direct-dial to the tennis boss).

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rojo wrote:

The latest story from the Daily Mail's Matthew Lawton has Alberto Salazar's name written all over it.

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Daily Mail wrote:The man who brought down Lance Armstrong (Travis Tygart) has called for new rules that ban the use of medication to gain a performance advantage, describing it as the next ‘frontier’ in the battle against doping.

In an exclusive interview with Sportsmail here in Washington, United States Anti-Doping Agency chief Travis Tygart said that, although he believes the abuse of banned substances is in decline as methods of detection improve, using non-prohibited drugs when an athlete does not have a medical need is a practice that now needs to be tackled.

Over the past three years both Team Sky and Alberto Salazar, the Nike Oregon Project leader who until last year was coaching Sir Mo Farah, have faced accusations of providing athletes with medicines to enhance performance rather than treat a medical condition.....

The days of blood transfusions, and open and obvious growth hormone and testosterone use we saw at US Postal and BALCO are gone,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying athletes aren’t still going to take some risks but it’s not like it was.

‘The frontier is pressure being put on athletes to use non- prohibited drugs like thyroxine, like tramadol, to gain performance advantage. Putting athletes in a position where they have to use non-prohibited drugs in a way that is not medically acceptable just to get performance enhancement. It’s a real concern.’

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-6343893/US-anti-doping-calls-new-rules-ensure-athletes-medication-ailments-not-performance.html

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While the rolling comes around wrote:

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Armstronglivs wrote:
Sharapova could have obtained a TUE but her team slipped up.)

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Unlike Westerners, Russians prefer to be philosophically opposed to TUE drug cheating. Her team didn't "slip up", her agent didn't read the new rules and relay to her. Even now, she doesn't have a meldonium TUE, no? So she suffers her pressing heart malady, just to be able to play tennis professionally under WADA drug rules, and going beyond even. But when the "rules" are more equal for some others, everyone loses. Westerners even corrupt the science behind, meldonium is not known to be "performance enhancing" outside their theories, while Scandinavians twist the science to allow their asthma TUEs. To say nothing of USA and the modern ADHD theory.

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Yes, it can wrote:

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Fiwkfkcd wrote:

Wait, growth hormone can be legal if the athlete has a TUE for it? Is that accurate?

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I don't know. Let me go ask a pre-teen USA runner (exposed by Fancy Bears) who happens to be in a sufficiently low percentile for size his age.

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TT knows what he's talking about. Everyone on Jerry's group is on thyroid meds.

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In the known wrote:

TT knows what he's talking about. Everyone on Jerry's group is on thyroid meds.

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Armstronglivs wrote:

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While the rolling comes around wrote:

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Armstronglivs wrote:
Sharapova could have obtained a TUE but her team slipped up.)

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Unlike Westerners, Russians prefer to be philosophically opposed to TUE drug cheating. Her team didn't "slip up", her agent didn't read the new rules and relay to her. Even now, she doesn't have a meldonium TUE, no? So she suffers her pressing heart malady, just to be able to play tennis professionally under WADA drug rules, and going beyond even. But when the "rules" are more equal for some others, everyone loses. Westerners even corrupt the science behind, meldonium is not known to be "performance enhancing" outside their theories, while Scandinavians twist the science to allow their asthma TUEs. To say nothing of USA and the modern ADHD theory.

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Welcome from Russia. What a complete load of bs.

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If you haven't yet subscribed to harm reduction strategies instead of this 'war on drugs' approach, this should be the tipping point for you. The problems with enforcement of grey areas would dwarf today's enforcement issues, let along that the war on drugs paradigm hasn't yet worked anywhere, in any sector.

This clearly shows that Tygart could not find any evidence of NOP with drug use that violates any laws.
Tygart will never release his findings as it would be be major embarrassment for him and his team of the time and money wasted in their investigation.
Now he will attempt to change the goal posts as to give credibility to his work.
The next extension of this then will be supplements , energy drinks, power bars etc.
BTW, The Daily Mail has been widely criticized for its unreliability as well as printing sensational and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research and for copyright violations. (Wikipedia)
LetsRun may fall into this category.

The most ironic part about this is that WADA posts a monitoring list every year with drugs that they are currently testing to potentially make illegal for the following year. These drugs have been shown to show performance enhancement potential but haven’t been fully tested to make conclusive evidence to ban them. Another factor in causing the substances to be prohibited is the prevalence.

Essentially WADA is giving people a list of gray area drugs, and when they are listed to be prohibited the following year (usually announced on October 1st) an athlete can just stop taking it to avoid being punished.

Regarding that point about how prevalence also is a point for WADA to prohibit a drug plays to the idea that there are drugs that are performance-enhancing but are not banned. This creates even more grey area.