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Fighting an anti-doping finding

lizzybanks.co.uk

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UKAD accepted that the amount was far below any effective levels. The article makes this crystal clear. It also makes crystal clear that this was contamination, as Lizzy took a hair test to show she couldn’t have taken it deliberately. The reason why is actually in the article but I’m sick of just typing it out for you when you can stop being lazy and read the thing yourself.

She is clearly cheating (along with TONS of others) with the asthma medication. At this point, I don't believe anything else she says.

So you’re not going to read the article and instead make yourself look foolish by making points that the article clearly rebuts, with receipts. Who am I to question how you waste your weekend?

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#62
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's all happening above the table, I think you'd actually get better management of the drugs and far fewer adverse side effects.

And what if something is harmful yet enhances your performance? Do we ban and test for that?

It's their choice to take it, isn't it? Alcohol is extremely harmful but it's my choice.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if something is harmful yet enhances your performance? Do we ban and test for that?

It's their choice to take it, isn't it? Alcohol is extremely harmful but it's my choice.

Given the countless stories of child abuse and general abuse by coaches across pretty much every sport, I don’t think you can hide behind “but it was their choice!” when an athlete is forced to take performance enhancing drugs or be blackballed from the sport.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#64
post #6

I really hope people comment on this. It's absolutely fascinating to me how a private organization can ruin someone's life or completely jerk them around like this. With no recourse.

When they signed up to be professional riders with the UCI, they also signed up to be monitored by WADA. The rules are clear and can realistically not work any other way: the majority of violations are on strict liability, it is on the athlete to establish how the substance entered their body if they want to claim contaminant.

This might surprise you but it’s totally possible to sign up to rules necessary to do your job while also criticising said rules and wanting them to be better.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#65
On the one side, you have clean amateur athletes with the best intentions and legitimate medical exemptions who just want to compete. They're willing to tolerate a surprisingly large (but still limited) amount of hoops to jump through to certify that they're clean. On the other side, you have amoral nation-state level actors who just want at least a few of their athletes to win at any cost. In the middle, you have a testing and enforcement agency with limited resources tasked with discerning which group each athlete belongs to. I'm not convinced this is a problem that has a solution.

It's just like an overbearing IT department preventing senior engineers from having sudo access to their laptops or from using an SD card to transfer data to the new 3D printer. IT is tasked with asking "but what if our top engineer is actually a deep-cover agent for Mossad?" and that's going to lead to bad outcomes for their actual engineers most of the time. Or just like dealing with a payment processor who won't tell you why your account is suspended or transfer your funds - their opaque and non-deterministic fraud prevention algorithms are there to fight money laundering, and being fair and just and transparent with will compromise their ability to satisfy their primary objective.

Imagine someone with 1000x the resources and 0x the conscience of Lizzy wanted to cheat. They'd have a whole team of rulebook experts. They'd have agents inside WADA and their national sporting group exfiltrating data on what was being used and what was being investigated and pushing for policies that advanced their agenda and also interfering in the ability of the organization to do their job. They'd have their own lab testing athletes and supplements to find the exact threshold of detectable compounds that just squeaked under any published minimum reporting levels.

Can an amateur like Lizzy effectively compete in this environment without devoting an enormous amount of resources to avoiding anti-doping findings? Probably not. That sucks. But I don't see any way around the conclusion.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a comment: we need doping leagues. There should be athletes doped up on 10 different steroids looking like Arnie in the '80s.

Yes. Let's have a league where athletes drop dead all the time.

Welcome to Mr Olympia!

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of world class endurance athletes have asthma. See here: > is suggestive that years of endurance training may be a contributory cause. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22228581/

It's an open secret that the diagnosis is a sham because it's performance-enhancing.

That's a possibility - but the pubmed piece I linked also includes this quote:

> Athletes with asthma/AHR have consistently outperformed their peers, which research suggests is not due to their treatment enhancing sports performance.

Anecdotally, when I lived in Chicago and rode outside in cold air I had asthma like symptoms (and I didn't ride nearly as frequently as olympians do) - which lines up with this quote, also from my original link:

> Inspiring polluted or cold air is considered a significant aetiological factor in some but not all sports.

I think it's possible that it's not just a sham.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their choice to take it, isn't it? Alcohol is extremely harmful but it's my choice.

Given the countless stories of child abuse and general abuse by coaches across pretty much every sport, I don’t think you can hide behind “but it was their choice!” when an athlete is forced to take performance enhancing drugs or be blackballed from the sport.

This is in the context of a doping-only league.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#69
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is clearly cheating (along with TONS of others) with the asthma medication. At this point, I don't believe anything else she says.

So you’re not going to read the article and instead make yourself look foolish by making points that the article clearly rebuts, with receipts. Who am I to question how you waste your weekend?

She has receipts to prove she is not cheating? Sure, man. She is a cheater just like all cyclists. She just got sloppy.

Re: Fighting an anti-doping finding

#70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their choice to take it, isn't it? Alcohol is extremely harmful but it's my choice.

Given the countless stories of child abuse and general abuse by coaches across pretty much every sport, I don’t think you can hide behind “but it was their choice!” when an athlete is forced to take performance enhancing drugs or be blackballed from the sport.

Alcohol causes abuse too. I think the hypothetical you're talking about would be a social problem, and not a substance one per se.

Abuse in sports is a terrible ill. I think you're right to highlight that this is a potential vector for it, but I feel like it's a "people problem" and not a "things problem".

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