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TrackCoach wrote:

Clerk wrote:

[quote]USA USA USA wrote:

[quote]Clerk wrote:

...

Russia has very good doctors and scientist; I doubt a wealthy tennis player and an entire hockey team would take a drug if it had not been proven effective. Meldonium is a very good PED, it does not do any one thing as effective as a steriod or EPO, but overall it has several good PED properities. Besides, even if it was a placebo, why are atheletes taking a perscribed medication for which there is no ailment?

I agree with you. Like I said, I don't think there is any debate that athletes taking meldonium were doing it for any other reason than performance enhancement. But the thing worth discussing is the way WADA bungled this whole thing:

rjm33 wrote:

Evidence for "potential to enhance" or "potential to have health risk" should not be very hard to establish; as we already talked about both on the other thread. This is like letting people off on a technicality with the people taking meldonium as the victims of an incompetent WADA; who should of at least determined clearance rates.

The Mildronate in Professional Sports article, which highlighted the intended use of Meldonium (used for performance enhancement) and studied about detection methods was published April 5th last year. WADA announced in October that it would be added to the banned list.

Here is the Prohibited list expert panel, and links to a database of their publications and contributions:

Audrey KINAHAN (Chair)

Ireland

Vibeke BACKER

Denmark

Martin BIDLINGMAIER

Germany

Xavier BIGARD

France

Richard BUDGETT

United Kingdom / Switzerland

Michael CULLER

USA

Bryan FINKLE

USA

Thomas J. HUDZIK

USA

Marilyn HUESTIS

USA

Mark STUART-

United Kingdom

Justice TETTEY-

Ghana/UK

Mario THEVIS-

Germany

Detlef THIEME-

Germany

These aren't WADA employees per se. As in, they don't show up to work in Lausanne or Montreal to put on a lab coat and clock in. Some of these individuals have other significant positions, such as United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

From a brief glance, the publications since the beginning of 2015 are focused on LCHF diets, various hormone receptors, cannabis (like, three of these people spend the last year working on cannabis...) and all sorts of stuff. Only Thevis and Thieme have work in the last year-and-a-half specifically on anti doping. Thevis was an author on that Mildronate in Professional Sports article. In fact, he has published A LOT in the past year monitoring different substances, and reporting on detection methods of substances (such as Xenon, urinary Nickel in horse racing or Mitragynine (Kratom)... interesting stuff (seriously)).

In fact, Thevis seems to be the workhorse of this group in terms of actual anti-doping work. Thieme only has a few publications since 2015, but at least they are related to anti doping.

I looked at the other authors of the Mildronate in Professional Sports article to see if THEY knew what was up with meldonium, but they haven't done other work with it either (those authors have worked together a lot recently.)

And given the national make-up of the WADA expert group, with no Eastern Europeans, no one likely had real familiarity with the drug.

Now, WADA doesn't need to publish everything they do. They're not an academic institution. But the fact that of their Prohibited List Expert Panel, only one researcher had one connection to one study (he was the last author btw), shows that WADA messed up.

Like rjm33 said, performance enhancement or potential to have health risks should not have been hard to prove, but they didn't. Any graduate student could pea-hack their way to conclusive evidence given the way this drug was circulating around athletes and teams. Having looked more into this situation, the WADA process is especially troubling. And that's not to mention the bureaucratic troubles: Director General is sailing off to retirement in a few months, Craig Reedie being up Coe's ass on every move he makes, suspicious contributions during his run for WADA president, and talking down the only tools WADA has to combat institutional doping. He's an IOC vice president, despite the fact that WADA and IOC have opposing interests (promoting the sport vs. controlling its doping-fuelled spectical) The guy wants a magic box to detect doping "

"I'm looking for the scientist who says we don't have to test for urine or blood any more and has got a much better idea. You know that machine you go through at the airport which says you've got a gun. Well, could someone say we've got that technology to show the last time an athlete took a dose of steroids? I don't know that answer but what we do need is to think outside the box and something easier would be helpful."

but gives his "President of WADA" scientific opinion on thyroid hormone or as if its holy gospel. anyways. I'll save that for a different thread.