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Panarama - Allan Wells - Drugs
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Not according to the Sunday Times.
🙂
Personally I hope that the household names and stars can all just prove hat they are clean by handing over their files. That would end this fiasco. But if people start fm refusing to do so and say that hey are innocent unless it is proven otherwise then that in itself will be the closest we will get to a confession.
For a long time I was muddled up with the rights and wrongs of drug taking/ boundaries etc. My simple framework to make sense of this is to remember that sport is kind of pointless, other than we all love heroes who take a great talent combined with a great work ethic and then deliver a great competitive performance on a big stage against the best in the world. If behind this and in total infringement of the rules needles, TUEs, blood bags in Spain, etc are employed, as well as inevitable and prolonged lying and lawyers, then in am no longer interested. More or less all of the rules are arbitrary, so either follow them all or don't participate. If gaining a 5-10% advantage through an elaborate drug program is somehow ok, then maybe those who don't want that route can just move their blocks 5-10m further up the 100m track.
So for me what we now have with athletics (and cyclying) is a sport on the same standing as professional wrestling. I am not sure how it recovers any integrity, and as such it is actually possible that in the next 10-20 years it will just disappear all together.
I will leave you all to get on with your discussion.
Personally speaking I don't actually let this drug business impact upon what I do myself. All anyone can do is make sure their side of any business is covered as well as it can be. We can't control others.
On top of that. Even if you do take part in these activities, the gulf between the participants is so vast as to render 99% of them instantly irrelevant to yourself.
It's relative. Just because England may be playing Ashes cricket down the road, it doesn't stop the local pub cricket team from bothering. They might as well be playing a different sport for all the connection there is.
🙂
No word on the subject on Laura Weightman's twitter account either so far. This should make for some interesting chat from the commentary team in Beijing - wonder what advice Steve Cram is giving her, although its up to her of course.
Then I look forward to seeing her chart shortly...
... drums fingers
Like Jo pavey
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/33842141
...unless she's been micro dosing....
In the latest athletics scandal, it has been revealed that most of the worlds top one hundred high jumpers are abnormally tall.
I imagine that those athletes who have unusual / abnormal data on their records will be reluctant to publish. But lots of clean athletes could have abnormal data - which puts them in a difficult situation in today's atmosphere of trial by media.
If "lots" of clean athletes had abnormal data then by definition that data would not be abnormal.
These experts have the right credentials - the Sunday Times haven't gone to a couple of unknown quacks - the arguments that exceptional athletes have exceptional blood profiles doesn't stack up as these people are used to looking at the blood profiles of exceptional athletes both clean and doped.
Some experts are saying exactly that the Sunday Times has used experts who have only scratched the surface... and not properly dug into the data.
Other experts are saying that these data really do show that mass doping must be taking place.
I've not got the expertise to interpret it and I hope that it is resolved with clarity. But my current best guess is that the issue is much much smaller than is being implied by the Sunday Times etc. and that the sport, and a lot of individuals are being maligned more than they should be.
Well the Sunday Times have got two established experts - I haven't seen anyone cast serious doubt on their conclusions - I've seen someone from the IAAF say people shouldn't draw definitive conclusions on the basis of one blood value and I've seen the response of the Sunday Times experts to that.
Best guess is surely that the Sunday Times is right and there is a massive doping problem in athletics and that includes some of our star names not just the Chinese distance runners that the BBC commentators like to make comments about when mentioning their records.
Coe said it was a declaration of war.
Athletes could be falsely accused of cheating if blood data is not analysed correctly, warns the head of UK Anti-Doping.
Really! Check out the big brain on this one, guys.
Solution, Check the data correctly, duh!
🙂
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/33867962
IAAF jolted into action.
Retests. What a joke.
Quote from report
'There are no British athletes among those with adverse doping samples.'
Phew.
a few Russians though maybe?
Hopefully a fair few of those that were doping do get busted by this.
I have some sympathy for people that got drawn into doping when maybe they went into the sport believing in competing clean but not everyone gave in to the temptation to dope and more importantly it sends out a message to current athletes that there is a decent chance you'll get caught if not now then maybe down the line.
I think they need to be careful in naming individuals, because all this is based on probabilities rather than hard and fast pass/fail tests.
To say that someone's data is 'abnormal' you need to know what 'normal' is, and that won't be a simple value, it will be a bell-curve distributed around some average value and a small number of people will naturally fall in the extremes of that range without any doping. Variations in a persons numbers over time will occur naturally to a greater or lesser extent. What this type of analysis relies on is that the further from average you are, and/or the greater the variation in the numbers, the less likely it is that it all occurred naturally.
As an simplistic example, if a test result is given as a "1 in a 1000 chance of occurring naturally" and I perform 1000 tests I could expect to find 1 of those results occuring naturally. If I actually find 10 "1 in a 1000" results then I be pretty sure there is doping going on, but I can't say for sure who are the 9 dopers and who is the natural outlier.
I'm less interested in individuals for that reason, more interested in questions like:
- were the IAAF aware the overall data was dodgy as hell compared to expected profiles?
- if you look at individual countries or even groups of athletes sharing same coach, are there clear patterns of greater abnormality in one population versus another? Again - not sufficient to convict an individual of doping, but sufficient to shine a spotlight, conduct other more specific tests and investigations etc.
Loads on Marathon Talk about all this this week...even got an interview with that Mark Daly bloke (remember him?!).
I've just looked up his back catalogue of investigations - I think he might be a little bit suspect himself...
Yes, the whole test/sanction protocol revolves around probabilites.
The issue of how aware they were and what proportion had been properly followed up seems to be one of the hot issues between Ashenden and the IAAF - see his breaking open letter to Coe:
"After we had responded to each and every one of the IAAFs initial serious reservations concerning the analyses we undertook, the single remaining strand of criticism centred on the assertion that we had no knowledge whatsoever of the actions taken by the IAAF in following these suspicious profiles. For the sake of completeness, I will address that assertion too.
First, although the Sunday Times cross matched athletes with competition results and any history of sanctions, they shared this information with us after we had submitted our opinions but before we were interviewed for the publications. Consequently, we did know which athletes had been sanctioned by the IAAF. Moreover, relying on the information provided in advance by the IAAF to Sunday Times, we were also familiar with the number of ABP cases (final, under appeal, and pending).
Second, the WADA ABP Operating Guidelines indicate how targeted blood tests on suspicious athletes should be scheduled. Indeed, I participated in the development of those strategies. Consequently, by interrogating the frequency of blood tests following a suspicious blood result, I was able to form an opinion on the robustness of the IAAFs follow up programme.
"
DM reporting upgrade for Jo Pavey!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-3195258/Jo-Pavey-set-given-bronze-10-000m-2007-World-Championships-silver-medallist-Elvan-Abeylegesse-athletes-charged-doping-offences.html
If they are just revisiting old data maybe but if they are actually retesting then maybe not. If a banned substance is present that wasn't tested for previously, either because they just didn't test for it or because a test has only been developed recently, then that isn't a question of probabilities or comparing a value to the population it's more black and white.
I am interested in them catching individuals because everything else is talk not action. it's easy to say oh yes we had a problem back in 2000 but the bio passport will have sorted that out, then in 2030 it'll turn out they had a problem in 2015 but of course it'll have been in the past, it's only when athletes see plenty of cheats being caught that they'll believe they will be caught if they cheat.
Agree - the right stance for the IAAF to take is to look at the probabilities from the bio passports and investigate/retest where there is cause for suspicion.