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

Actually TUEs for testosterone are generally not accepted in cycling due to them being abused.

Desperate to the end wrote:

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.

Hi Alberto!

codaayyee wrote:

Y'all act like the NOP are always winning.

Galen doesn't win all the time.

Centro had an Olympic hangover.

Jenkins has been struggling.

Engels is hot and cold.

Murphy had a hiccup in 2017.

Suguru didn't immediately have success until the the marathon.

Mary Cain clearly burnt out (mentally).

Nothing wrong with not being perfect 100% of the time. But the point I'm making is that if they were "doped to the gills," they would be 100% all the time and not losing, especially considering the high-level training they do.

That assumes their competitors aren't also doping. Wrong assumption.

Crystal Nards wrote:

Actually TUEs for testosterone are generally not accepted in cycling due to them being abused.

I think you can get a "Recreational Competitor TUE" (RCTUE) for testosterone or steroids if a recreational athlete meets certain criteria:

The basic problem is that a lot of drugs on the banned list have perfectly legitimate medical uses - in fact they were developed to this end. If a qualified doctor can be persuaded to say that an athlete needs to take this particular substance for his/her general health or to aid recovery from illness/injury how can the sport's governing bodies go against this medical judgement?

I am nowhere near elite level but do suffer occasionally from asthma and a few years ago had problems with an over active thyroid that necessitated medication to sort it out. Should I be banned from competition because of these medical problems and the medications I took/take to deal with them?

Yes. One could argue the other way: since so many at the top are doping, and NOP is highly competitive...

Also, remember that Tara, Ritz, Rupp and Co. risked 4-year bans for l-carnitine injections - why would they shy away from testo, EPO, etc.?

How many are doping? About half of them, likely more:

These TUEs are just a smokescreen.

It will also be safe to assume that there will be more winners than losers amongst the 43% estimated by the Harvard study. In general terms, the top 3 in any elite race have to be the first likely suspects.

Well...if ~50% of all elites are doping then athletics has a gargantuan problem and it would be almost impossible to tell which top performances are clean or not. And yet the public has been sold a bill of goods that drug tests, including the more aggressive OOC tests, are working and that they're cleaning it up toward a drug-free sport. However, a widespread doping problem where near almost half are doping, the evidence from the study completely points to the opposite.

Sad situation - I'm losing interest already. ?

codaayyee wrote:

Y'all act like the NOP are always winning.

Galen doesn't win all the time.

Galen just did a 2:06 marathon on a frayed achilles. We know Chicago is about a minute slower than Berlin. If the achilles cost him 1sec per km on average that's a 2:04:30 in Berlin, no non-African is doing that. Again NOP is incredibly suspicious.

Armstronglivs wrote:

It will also be safe to assume that there will be more winners than losers amongst the 43% estimated by the Harvard study. In general terms, the top 3 in any elite race have to be the first likely suspects.

Yes. There are even some numbers to that, discussed in the Sunday Times 2015 review of the IAAF scandal.

I find the op by Robert to be pretty sad.

Years of pot banging by lrc has resulted in nothing...

Tygart found nothing , so he makes a great ‘grey area ‘ statement.

I don’t know who comes off as more of a mope/sad sack, rojo or tygart?

Might be a dead heat.

casual obsever wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

It will also be safe to assume that there will be more winners than losers amongst the 43% estimated by the Harvard study. In general terms, the top 3 in any elite race have to be the first likely suspects.

Yes. There are even some numbers to that, discussed in the Sunday Times 2015 review of the IAAF scandal.

That still won't be enough to puncture the denial that floats like a balloon around this place.

This isn’t new

Armstronglivs wrote:

casual obsever wrote:

Yes. There are even some numbers to that, discussed in the Sunday Times 2015 review of the IAAF scandal.

That still won't be enough to puncture the denial that floats like a balloon around this place.

People like denial...it's much easier than to face the truth. ?

We probably disagree who is in denial. I noted once again with great interest, while "casual obsever" tells us the doping prevalence is "43.6% (95% confidence interval 39.4–47.9) at WCA", he provides us a link to the Guardian, where we see that 43.6% leads us to a big question, according to co-author Andrea Petróczi: "The big question is, how sure can we be that athletes were actually compliant and they understood and they followed the instructions and answered as they were told?" Then the Guardian's Nicola Davis gives us a new estimate from "the team": "the team estimate that at least 30% of athletes at WCA ... doped in the last year." After the Guardian tells us at least 30% is the team estimate, they include a quote from another co-author, Harrison Pope Jr., that "In the great majority of those different scenarios it turns out we would have undershot the actual value", justifying the use of the qualifier "at least". NOTES: - The 57% (or 45%) from the Pan Arab Games, includes athletes from a pool of 28 sports, and not just athletics. - Kenyans and Ethiopians do not participate in the Pan Arab Games. - The 43.6% survey result comes from men and women, across all athletic events, and not just endurance events, and includes all forms of doping, and not just EPO or blood transfusions (e.g. that could produce high blood values in a leaked blood database). I guess we can also see what we want in the Sunday Times statistics. The basis for the Sunday Times are high blood values, which combines "yellow" and "red" results flagged by at least one of the "experts", and not actual findings of doping. We also know that altitude is enough to trigger high blood values, and that the best athletes often train at high altitude, and the "experts" could not always identify altitude. From the statistics we see that for events like 5000m and 10000m, 28% of the Olympic or World Championship medals, or about 2 out of 7, were won by athletes who recorded a high blood value at least once, not at that event, but in their career. This means that 5 out of 7 medals from the Olympics and World Championships, were won by athletes who never recorded high blood values, in the leaked database spanning 12 years. For the marathon, this figure jumps to 8 out of 9 medals won by athletes who never recorded high blood values in the leaked database. 5 out of 7, and 8 out of 9 are pretty large evidence gaps, which are often filled in with assumptions and faith in a powerful endurance drug. It is in this factual background I interpret your "safe assumption" there are more "more winners than losers" in the "43%" that doped.

Armstronglivs wrote:

casual obsever wrote:

Yes. There are even some numbers to that, discussed in the Sunday Times 2015 review of the IAAF scandal.

That still won't be enough to puncture the denial that floats like a balloon around this place.

Getting back to the main topic, my first thoughts after the BBC Panorama/Propublica piece on Salazar and NOP, way back in June 2015: - Why so much focus on drugs not banned by WADA? - Which athlete is accused of an anti-doping rule violation? (besides Rupp with a photo of the ambiguous "testosterone medication", and TUEs for IVs which he may or may not have received). - Salazar may have broken several laws, by playing doctor, and shipping drugs, but what is USADA, not a law enforcement agency, supposed to do about that? I only see two options: 1) refer the evidence to the appropriate law enforcement agency, and 2) lobby to ban the abuse or unnecessary use of currently unbanned prescription drugs Recall that Steve Magness first complained to USADA in Dec. 2012, and the BBC Panorama/Propublica piece came out in June 2015. USADA had the cooperating testimony of 19 former athletes and employees of NOP. To date, no one has been sanctioned as a result. These investigations are supposed to be secret, but what we know from leaks is that Tygart was looking to see if the infusions of a non-banned substance contained too much liquid, a rule that his since been relaxed by WADA. And now, in 2018, three and half years after I thought this might be a possible option, Tygart says that prescription drug abuse is the next doping frontier. (And here I thought it was genetic doping ...) These are not strong indications that any NOP athlete committed an ADRV as a result of Salazar's actions or pressure.

rojo wrote:

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

And we are back to your PR statements a la Coe. Those were not "so-called experts" or "experts", but real experts, not PR shills, and they did identify altitude, and altitude does not trigger the ABP alarm.

Again, if altitude would cause athletes to get flagged, those suspicion numbers would be basically 100%.

Not just "a high blood value", but such an extremely suspicious result that doping is the most likely reason.

Note that this does not include the drug cheats who "only"

- increased their Hct from 46 to 52% for example

- used steroids

- used HGH

- ...

Neither does that include those cheats who

- didn't hear the doorbell

- didn't get tested within days of their (blood) doping

- bribed the testers

- bribed the IAAF

- ...

And note that the number of suspicious blood dopers raised to above 50% in the 1500 m.

Quite depressing, but keep painting your rosy picture, rekrunner.

Btw, the Sunday Times data were mentioned to compare the number of suspects on the top the the also-rans - but you had to go full rekrunner again.

Concerning the experts, it is their public statements which contradict their peer-reviewed statements which cause me to question their "expertise".

The WADA-IC confirmed their public statements were contradictions of their expert research, and generally did not accept their expert opinions.

The method for determining altitude was flawed.

We know they used population thresholds, and not athlete specific thresholds.

We know of results flagged as suspicious which exceeded the sea-level threshold, but not the altitude threshold, suggesting they failed to apply altitude thresholds in every case.

You are incorrect to say all the suspicious results were extremely suspicious. The Sunday Times combined "yellow" and "red" results -- something misleading and irresponsible. "Yellow" (needs further investigation), and "Red" ("requiring potential disciplinary action").

I noted the 1500m is higher, and also includes Russian women known to take both EPO and steroids. Even then, the number of medals won in the Olympics and World Championships won by "non-suspicious" athletes is nearly half.

I specifically looked at the number of medals won, as you and "Armstronglivs" suggested that athletes on the podium is the most suspicious, while the Sunday Times "evidence" shows maybe 1 out of the 3 on the podium were labelled ("red" or "yellow") "suspicious", or 1 in 2 in the case of the 1500m.

Most of your claims are plainly wrong, as you know, but btt before I head out:

Here are two direct quotes from the Sunday Times article:

1) "1 in 7 named in the files has recorded blood tests results described by an expert as “highly suggestive of doping or at the very least abnormal”. "

-> 1/7 = 14% overall

2) "A total of 146 medals had been awarded to 76 athletes who had given suspicious blood tests — a figure that included 55 gold medals. "

76/146 = 52%

52/14 = 3.7. Yes that includes double winners. Unless the average medal winner won almost 4 medals, medal winners were more suspicious. (One could go and count that...)

Gold medals are 33% of the overall medals. 55/146 = 38%. Gold medal winners were slightly more suspicious than the other medal winners by a factor of 38/33 = 1.15.