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What does Coe having to give up a business arrangement have to do with anything, let alone his connection with the IAAF?
🙂
It doesn't affect me, in the sense that I'm a keen club athlete but well short of national/international standard. I did once run at the Inter-Counties Cross-Country, but that's because a large number of other runners were ill/injured.
Does it bother me in the sense that I follow athletics more generally, both on TV and by going to watch things like the Diamond League (and the Olympics in 2012)? Yes. I want to know that the best athlete won, i.e. the person who took whatever level of natural talent they had and then trained hard & smart to get the most out of that talent. I'm not interested in knowing who is friends with the smartest chemist or who took the greatest risks with their health.
For me as an athlete, what makes a personal best sweet is all the memories of the sessions when I was knackered and/or not in the mood to train but went and trained anyway, and then finally that hard work pays off. I can't imagine that thinking of all those short cuts you took has quite the same reward, and that's what plays on my mind when I watch dopers racing.
Talking of footballers only one premiership footballer has ever been 'done' this fact alone stinks. Along with almost non-existent testing (the FA can't afford it!) "1999-2000 season, testers were present at just 32 of the 3,500-plus league games" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_association_football this tells me everything I need to know about the sport.
And then nobody raises an eyebrow when some footballer is faster than the fastest man alive? http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/row-zed/arsenal-player-officially-faster-usain-5511747
How many times has this footballer been tested?
How come Russia are so shit at football?
Because it is a level playing field?
...as it is in athletics.....
As in a lot of sports
In my opinion a regular harvest of cheats means that the sport is relatively clean due to an effective testing regime.
While a sports governing body is in charge of testing there is a clear conflict of interests. Doping scares off the sponsors and causes damage to the sport in general (as it has in cycling) the governing body is left with a dilemma.
As they say, "Don't look under stones if you do not want to deal with what you find underneath".
Cycling should be applauded for its pioneering efforts to combat doping, they were one of the first to bring in anti-doping (the first?) tests and have had the most effective testing procedures for decades. Their reward? A 'dirty' reputation and lost sponsors....
Actually, Wenger knows.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/nov/10/arsene-wenger-football-doping-arsenal
After the Willy Voet incident the teams realised that they had to create distance between the management and the doping practices so if one of their employees was caught then they could say they had no idea what they were up to. From your article it mentions "urine testing only" for many years, this is pathetic. Some drugs are picked up in urine, some in blood but the biological passport is the gold standard. No mention of that.
You only need to read Tyler Hamilton's book to learn how to get around these tests, he claimed that it took Dr Ferrari 10 minutes to think of a way around the new testing regime in cycling.
I maintain that a lack of positive results is proof of poor testing, either that or footballers are paragons of virtue? Bulls**t.
15West wrote (see)
Possibly because winning at football is about buying expensive manchildren, and even footballers are smart enough to not have Russia at the top of their wishlist?
Because I don't think administrators of a whole sport should be connected with one specific sponsor, which has an interest in particular athletes and particular meetings. At the very least it opens Coe up to the possibility that he could be leaned on for one reason or another. It would have thought that was obvious.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. The UCI took an age to get to grips with this, and might even have colluded with Armstrong...
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/mar/09/lance-armstrong-uci-colluded-circ-report-cycling
Plus it's Nike. It would be a bit like the President of Fairtrade being on the board of Nestle.
Does it affect youngsters?
Directly not but a lot of parents may not want their kids involved in a sport with drugs. OK most aren't going to the Olympics but why even start them on that path. So people start to look at other sports.
Now as several people have said, MOST sports have this issue. The worst offenders at the moment are actually Rugby (League AND Union).
However cheating is just wrong. It does destroy the sport, any sport.
Russia is doing what it did in Soviet days (including East Germany). The athletes themselves won't have much choice and many of the East German athletes from the 80s have said how their health was impacted.
However we know there have been a lot of issues in the US, Jamaica and Kenya as well as pockets of athletes in other countries.
Currently anti-doping is done by national organisations under the auspices of WADA. WADA needs to do testing themselves to a global standard and have their testers vetted. Russia needs to be banned for four years as an organization. Individual bans need to be minimum of 4 years for a first offence and then life ban. Personally I would go direct for Life first time but legally they can't . Two years is stupid though as an athlete can miss two years through injury.
It's not just athletics but it is very depressing. Average sort watchers may not care but the real fans do. I remember Valerie Adams missing out on Gold in London 2012. the Bulgarian failed the post event drugs test and the result changed but she had been on the podium and Valerie hadn't. She had already left London so didn't get the chance to get her medal in that stadium in front of that great crowd. It is just wrong.
I think it is fair to say that whatever Lance Armstrong did or didn't do he was very careful about it Peter Collins. Tyler Hamilton admits he was called in by the UCI to account for an 'unusual' test result, Tyler was caught out after a mistake by his doping Dr.
It must have been a major dilemma for the UCI to allow Lance (cash cow) Armstrong's reputation shot to s**t. Too big to fail?
Anything involving large sums of money is always going to involve corruption and cheating, whether it is libor, cycling, football or even buying cheap oil from Daesch.
But it is not about what you know (or think you know) it is about what you can prove.
I suspect that Arsene can prove the square root of jack s**t and will have to retract his statement and apologise.
But the more money in the sport means the more temptation to cheat, along with the ability pay someone to help you do it 'properly'.
For me this is not about football it is about any sport from F1 to darts; there should be a regular haul of disgraced cheats or..... why not?
We are all human with human frailties
Speak for yourself squire!
🙂
Cheers RicF
I meant I'm not human, earthling.
🙂
Let's get one thing straight here. Drug use in sport is cheating. The only reason that Dwane Chambers went clean was because he was caught, and the same goes for Lance Armstrong.
The whole ethos of the Olympic Games is fair play and sportsmanship. Drug use goes against this ethos. The only way forward is to give sports competitors a life time competition ban if they test positive for performance enhancing substances, with no if and no buts. That way everyone would know where they stood when it came to drug use.
Before you talk about lifetime bans you need to deal with accidental doping, "contaminated supplements" for example.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/sport.tennis
Nandralone is one of the best anabolic steroids but athletes avoid it because you can test positive up to one year later. Or of course you can claim you were given a contaminated supplement
Dirty or unlucky? Who knows? Pretty harsh on someone who is unlucky to ban them for life.
Other athletes have bought what they know to be a safe cough mixture in their country, but find it has codeine in it in the country they bought it in.
And so the story goes on..... and on
http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/wada-finds-russia-and-five-other-non-compliant-with-anti-doping-code-200373?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/34419249
..and so it goes.
Ahhh but he was only taking it for 'body image reasons' Kattefjaes; you cynic you
"Cheat? not me guvnor; I just wanted to pull more girls!" (or boys)
But seriously taking steroids at a young age WILL seriously f**k your body up in many ways.
But; a few hundred tests? Is that all they do? Pathetic, no wonder the athletes take the small chance they will get caught, and again the crap about no positive tests = a clean sport.
And the good news for the future (for the dopers that is)? The UK Government is going to cut the funding for UK anti-doping!
So sport will look even cleaner! Hooray!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/34908237 At least the right man is in charge to clean it all up.