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Which sports do you think have under-reported doping problems?
SirMickTravis
Posts: 2,607 Forum Member
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I'm going to start off and say Rugby and Tennis. I'm amazed there aren't more Rugby players testing positive for banned substances. The temptations seem obvious in a sport like that. As for Tennis, the spectacle of men playing 5 hour matches and recovering the next day is hmmm. A few of the women players seem remarkably built too. Obviously not to name names because that would be potentially libellous.
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Tennis, as you say. I think tennis has a fantastic image generally compared to other sports. If I had a sporty kid I could do worse than encourage them into tennis.
Rugby - possibly. I don't really watch it to be honest.
Football, I would say. I know there's been some but most tend to be recreational offences.
Golf.
And the sports that seem to have the most common offenders (no stats, just my perception).
Athletics (across the whole spectrum).
Cycling.
Swimming.
Baseball. I never watch but I've read they've had a steroid problem.
Whether the disparity is my faulty perception, the strains of different sports, the stronger testing in some sports vs less frequent in others, the culture in some sports, or any other reason I do not know.
It's an interesting subject because there are conflicting pressures on the head of a sport. Do you try to eradicate drugs and have a string of stories linking your sport to drugs, and take the commercial hit on that, or try to suppress any drug use and have a cleaner reputation? There may an argument that the sports with the biggest drug problems are those not finding any problems! That's the cynical viewpoint. We may be looking at an iceberg as far as the visibility of drug problems go. Perhaps not and some sports just have bigger problems than others.
The thing is.....if you put a potential reward (olympic medal, fame, fortune, national glory) in front of enough people, and they know taking a PED will make them a bit better, and they think that the rest of their competitors already do the same then chances are that there will always be people willing to break the rules and hope to not get caught. I sometimes think "just let them take what they want and at least then it's a level playing field" but I really don't want to see sprinters dying at 30 odds through heart attacks either. I suspect drug masking is pretty advanced these days and the ones getting caught in some sports are just those not quite as good at it as others. Sadly for the individuals there will always be doubt in some spectators minds due to the drug cheats who have come before but there's no way around that really - cheats smear their own sport by putting additional doubt on everyone. All you can do is profess your own innocence and pass the tests as they come.
Do you think it should be a life ban? Or should we give them another chance?
Boxing is a big one for me. And Tennis - the Andre Agassi case where the authorities just accepted his explanation just makes me wonder how serious they are about drug testing as a whole even if Crystal Meth isn't exactly performance enhancing & it certainly wasn't in his case as his ranking tumbled to over 100.
The Puerto case & cover up also makes you wonder how much goes on in football as well.
And I'm definitely in the lifetime ban camp for the serious offences such as steroids, EPO etc. I don't get the 2nd chance brigade - there are plenty of professions where you are banned for like for serious misconduct and I really don't see why professional sport should be different. It doesn't mean you can't get on with your life generally just not in sport.
Football is the number one though for me. How many professional players are there, how much money is involved in it, and how many of them have tested positive for PEDs? Something doesn't add up.
There have been a couple of high profile cases where players have been banned for a short time because they have violated the rules but yes it does seem pretty unique.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/nov/08/andy-murray-viktor-troicki-marin-cilic
How many people in football and rugby are tested baring in mind as pointed out above the huge numbers that play it?
As for athletics, these two years bans are ridiculous. Will be interesting to see next years Olympics, there will be 8 competitors in the 100m final and perhaps only one who hasn't been banned in the past.
If some of them are running faster now than they were with PED's, why were they taking them in the first place?
The dopers and their administers have become so good nowadays that no athlete can be above suspicion.
Micro doping gives huge gains but is undetectable through current testing procedures.
You will only be caught out if you start behaving like Lance Armstrong.
As Jim said the rewards for being the best are such that the mindset of many athletes is to win at any cost.
One of the things that they've started to do in recent years is freeze samples from Olympics & other major events such as the IAAF World Champs for testing further down the line when testing improves. Some people have been caught retrospectively. I believe the samples from Beijing are due to be tested soon. I wonder if this is a deterrent to some or not. Financial deterrent isn't there but if you have to give medals back and your reputation is ruined even if it's 10 years later.
You could envisage that some of those micro dosing now will get caught further down the line even if they're getting away with it now
They aren't huge gains, probably 3% depending on the type of sport. It takes great discipline as well not to get caught.
A study by Pierre Sallet of the Athletes for Transparency was carried out with the blessing of the World Anti Doping Agency.
Athletes were tested before and after micro dosing with varying gains.
As low as 2.1
As high as 6.1 and these figures are averages.
One participant said, Its another planet, its not human. Its very worrying when you think we were only micro dosing.
Interestingly none of the athletes would have fallen foul of the Biological Passport.
Clean passport does not equate to clean athlete.
Yes it does take great discipline not to get caught but the best athletes have the best teams around them who check and double check everything.
The thing is, if you have an athlete taking a substance that is undetectable, is it cheating. How do you prove the athlete is taking something?
Microdosing with just EPO will give gains way higher than that. For instance, in a recent Panorama programme the reporter, an amateur triathlete, achieved performance gains of 7% microdosing on only EPO for a very short period and still passed every doping test.. Now imagine the gains that can be achieved microdosing on a cocktail of drugs under the supervision of the teams of medical and pharmaceutical experts available to the pros.
That wasn't a statistically valid experiment, it was one bloke.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jul/21/bbc-apologise-peter-alliss-open-sexist
Basic gist.. Peter Alliss comments that Zach Johnson's wife is thinking "if this goes in I get a new kitchen" during a put.
Somehow people were offended by this comment and flocked to twitter to complain prompting the BBC to take the predictable route and apologise publicly for his comments.
Good god. Is that where we are now? A harmless joke about a new kitchen is turned into a sexism storm resulting in a public apology?
Sometimes I think twitter is great.. other times I think it was the worst invention of all time. It gives people far too much power and quite often this results in them saying things that prior to social media they probably wouldn't have even thought, let alone complain about.
Are you on the right thread?
At a sporting level, that still means the ones weighted towards strength and endurance. Clearly, the ability to practice all year round without needing to take a break or getting injured, is a big plus for skill sports, but I maintain the theory that if a gifted 12 year old can beat a decent club regular in a particular sport, then doping provides less gains, but as many have pointed out, a gain is a gain.
I like to think that most people wouldn't want to cheat, and would take little satisfaction from those wins, so there has to be some motivation. Money is one, and in the case of the former East Germany, there was a bit of nationalistic pride and show-boating involved in the mix. So sports with a lot of money and also team sports where people let themselves get caught up in a twisted sense of it being a just cause.
Opportunity is another one. Micro-dosing makes it harder to get caught, but you still need to get access to the products, and taking them through customs is risky - just as Wayne Odesnik! If you have training camps in the middle of no-where, or at least stay in one place for long periods of time, it will make it easier, as does a team environment where there are a lot of back-room staff who can go off and do shady deals.
What interests me is how much of a gain would an athlete need to make in order to justify the risks that come with doping? If you could make a healthy living without it, would you want to risk that career, your own health and sense of pride? Or would you be able to convince yourself that everyone else is probably doing it, and you deserve to share their success? If a doping doctor told you that there was no chance of getting caught, would you believe them? It's in their interests to have everyone, including potential clients, think that. What if they made a mistake? Would a 1% chance of getting caught be low enough if you thought you could earn an extra million?
The problem is, without knowing exactly how many people are doping, we don't know how big a proportion are getting caught! Neither do people thinking about doping.
In that respect, you can see why team cycling was a natural home for doping, not just because TdF ticks so many boxes for endurance and recovery. There was the team environment, where new members could see others doping and not getting caught, and risk getting dropped from the team if they didn't join in. There is money to make it worth-while, but not so much that they'd rather retire than risk losing what they've already earned.
But to be fair to cycling, they've recognised their problems, and put a lot of effort into making it much harder to dope. It will never be impossible, but that's life. I've heard they are even thinking about allowing the drug testers to turn up in the middle of the night, which would make micro-dosing tougher, but still not impossible. As much as I'd be annoyed if a doping athlete beat me to a prize, I'd be equally annoyed if I lost because I'd had my sleep interrupted. I've no idea how they can do that in a way that is fair, because if you can't produce a sample, what happens? I presume you'd have to stay awake until you do, and athletes will then become paranoid about whether or not they heard the door-bell in the middle of the night, or if it was just a dream.
Even that approach relies on the ability of drugs testers to truly surprise their targets, so those in big houses, or who have bribed hotel reception to tip them off may still have time to take evasive action.
I feel a bit sorry for cycling, because it doesn't really matter what they do now, there are people who like to presume they are doping. It's too easy for jealous fans to presume doping because their favourite got beaten, or just as a generic insult for a sport they don't like, or is on tv more than xxxx
There was a website set-up to explain that a certain Spanish tennis player is definitely on drugs, just look at the suspicious way he's breathing, but when you realise the founder was a massive Roger Federer fan who couldn't believe his favourite was getting beaten, then you realise the information wasn't quite the cutting edge journalism and impartial scientific observation is claimed to be. I know a lot of cycling fans have latched onto that website, but their reasons are no more pure. They would love it if another major sport was caught up in a scandal, and half of their fans are already annoyed that tennis players earn more money, and Wimbledon is on the tv too much!
My view is that it's unhelpful, and morally dubious, to point the finger at any individual athletes, or even sports, but rather consider how things could be improved across the board. We'll never be able to get rid of it altogether, but there are sensible improvements that could be made - if the money becomes available. Things like freezing samples so they can be re-tested in years to come when testing technology has improved with lower limits of detection or for different metabolites. I'd also look for the anti-doping agencies and their work load to be organised in a way that makes it much harder for bribery to get you anywhere.