Doping question (Read 1858 times)

 

Yeah sucks for her to miss out on that day's experience though, even if it is corrected...probably will never see the additional prize money either.

She must be absoutely livid.  i doubt she'll see any money - these dopers never seem to pay it back - but even if she did, she'll never get the experience she missed out on. If it were me, I'd be angrier about missing the experience, I think, though it's hard to say for sure. She will have missed out on other earning opportunities that would have come her way as Boston winner.

The closest scenario I can think of from my own life would be watching someone get promoted over you who uses backstabbing and gossip to get promoted and who is actually not that much better at their job. The money is annoying but what really pisses you off is the knowledge that this person didn't earn it...and any schadenfreude involved in the person's eventual humiliation/demotion doesn't make up for it...

I regret every Tour I watched with rapt attention, thinking I was following a real athletic endeavor.

I agree, sort of, but who since about 1990 who thought they were watching an unaided endeavour? I've enjoyed the drama whilst suspecting all the contenders (they're all from well funded teams) were doped to more or less equal levels. My gripe with cycling is that when the cyclists return from their bans they are back in the fold and it's not even an issue anymore.

Another kettle of fish - Galen Rupp has a therapeutic use exemption for a product which improves performance - if he wasn't a runner would he use that drug? Who knows. But we can guess…

Just came across this today. I have to say I'm pretty uneducated on this stuff but I do think this video of Frank Shorter's talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival from four years ago is good. He also gives a nice introduction about the marathon in general at the beginning. I think it's worth a watch for sure.

Frank Shorter at Chicago Humanities Festival 2010

I really enjoyed that clip, Youtube is a wonderful resource.

 

As the OP I hope I can change topic a bit... I have tickets for events at the Pan Am Games in Toronto, specifically track events at York University. This led me to wonder hoe doping control will be organised.

There are medical labs at York and University of Toronto but they were designed for teaching not testing, and even if extra equipment is available I doubt we have enough qualified technicians to test 6,000 competitors. Although we hosted the winter Olympics in Vancouver recently and a level of testing was presumably undertaken, we have not hosted summer Olympics since 1976. Testing was not quite at the current level in 1976!

So will WADA or the IAAF supplement the existing labs or simply take over most of the responsibility?

Labs must be certified to run the tests.  Samples will be transported to a certified lab.  It is doubtful York or U of T will be involved.  Beyond that, I have no idea.

A single EPO test takes a technician 3 days, by the way.

"Unlike sprint events on the track, a marathon start line doesn't feature action figure physiques that lead to speculation. Everyone is scrawny. They only run the event a couple of times a year. The banned substances that would help them train harder and recover faster are less apt to transform them outwardly."

Given how little ESPN cares or knows about non-ball sports, it does not surprise me that they think doping in distance running is some new thing.

 

Nah it's worse that that.  It's like one of these people who pads their resume with a degree they never completed....fake training they get credit for but never earned.  They may in fact be inferior at the job without the cheating.

Disclaimer: I think the sport is better off without doping and consider dopers total cheaters. However:

It's not fake training. It's real training. It's just that doping allows you to train harder and more often without breaking down or overtraining. Just like some people have genetic gifts that allow them to train harder and more often without breaking down or overtraining. It's not like people take EPO so that they can get away with less training. Just the opposite: People take EPO so they can train more.

From one perspective, then, performance-enhancing drugs can help level the genetic playing field by allowing slow-recoverers to behave and train more like fast-recoverers. Then it becomes purely a contest to see who can train hardest and smartest - at least, a competition between people who possess all the other elite-runner phenotypes that can't be altered by drugs. It makes running a bit less like Formula One and a bit more like Indycar.

Thus, there's an argument that the applicable office analogy is that your coworker abuses Ritalin and was thus able to get through a prestigious graduate program in two years while holding down a demanding job. This has left your coworker better educated and better experienced than you. She is in fact better at the job because of these things.

For an absolutely fascinating read that comes close to adopting this contrarian viewpoint, check out this Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker. The basis is a review of David Epstein's book The Sports Gene (which is amazing) and the autobiography of one of Lance Armstrong's teammates.

Having paid for part of my wedding with the money I made serving as an expert witness in an EPO doing case, I am more than familiar, thank you.

 

Disclaimer: I think the sport is better off without doping and consider dopers total cheaters. However:

 

It's not fake training. It's real training. It's just that doping allows you to train harder and more often without breaking down or overtraining. Just like some people have genetic gifts that allow them to train harder and more often without breaking down or overtraining. It's not like people take EPO so that they can get away with less training. Just the opposite: People take EPO so they can train more.

 

From one perspective, then, performance-enhancing drugs can help level the genetic playing field by allowing slow-recoverers to behave and train more like fast-recoverers. Then it becomes purely a contest to see who can train hardest and smartest - at least, a competition between people who possess all the other elite-runner phenotypes that can't be altered by drugs. It makes running a bit less like Formula One and a bit more like Indycar.

 

Thus, there's an argument that the applicable office analogy is that your coworker abuses Ritalin and was thus able to get through a prestigious graduate program in two years while holding down a demanding job. This has left your coworker better educated and better experienced than you. She is in fact better at the job because of these things.

 

For an absolutely fascinating read that comes close to adopting this contrarian viewpoint, check out this Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker. The basis is a review of David Epstein's book The Sports Gene (which is amazing) and the autobiography of one of Lance Armstrong's teammates.