London Olympics - will the drug cheats win again?

What are the chances of a drug-free London Olympics?

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is finally going to charge Lance Armstrong with using performance enhancing drugs. For several years now, various ex-teammates of Armstrong have been telling the media what was going on. Tyler Hamilton told 60 Minutes recently that riding in Armstrong’s team was ‘a life filled with secret code words, clandestine phone lines and furtive conversations.’ He said, ‘Riders led double lives that revolved around performance-enhancing drug use, while publicly insisting that the team was clean.’

Hamilton talked about white lunch bags filled with the blood-booster EPO, human growth hormone and testosterone being handed out by team doctors ‘as if those bags contained sandwiches and juice boxes. The riders were also given little red pills that contained a testosterone oil they squirted beneath their tongues for a performance boost.’ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/sports/cycling/tyler-hamilton-lance-armstrongs-teammate-describes-doping-system.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Drug Testing? What drug testing?

It wasn’t just Armstrong or Floyd Landis or Alberto Contador – in 2006 and 2007, entire teams were sent home for taking PEDs. The list of Tour de France riders caught doping is a long one, but I suspect the list of those who weren’t caught is much longer. What does it say about the effectiveness of drug testing, when a team like Armstrong’s can use all kinds of drugs year after year and pass every drug test? Armstrong says he passed 500 of them, and never tested positive.

Landis told the NY Times that the US Postal team's former doctor, Garcia del Moral ‘worked out of an office in the back of the team's bus, where he administered drugs and blood transfusions to the cyclists behind closed doors.’ Landis also said he used to go to del Moral's office in Valencia to have blood drawn and this blood would then be transfused back into him appear at the Tour de France. Meanwhile, Italian investigators say they’ve uncovered an almost half million dollar payment to another team doctor who has been sanctioned for doping – Michele Ferrari  http://www.businessinsider.com/four-lance-armstrong-teammates-support-doping-allegations-against-team-doctor-2012-6

Not just Cycling

Garcia del Moral works with many other athletes in other sports such as tennis. How widespread is doping in tennis? This game has become very physical in recent years. And what about the London Olympics? Will these games be clean or have the cheats just become smarter? In the run-up to these games, the BBC ran a documentary on Olympic history called Faster, Higher, Stronger http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v9bs4 .

In a review of that program, The Guardian’s John Grace said: ‘It should be impossible to make a documentary about the blue riband of the sprints without mentioning the use of illegal drugs, but this film just about managed it. Anyone with little knowledge of sport would have come away thinking that Ben Johnson was a lone rogue athlete ... ‘

As it happens, SBS ran a program last week titled ‘The Dirty Games’, which probed into the 1988 Olympics at Seoul and revealed that 6 out of the 8 runners in the 100 meter men’s final had used drugs. When you look at the muscle mass and their striations here, it’s pretty obvious.

Modern era sprinters have come to look like body builders, and that’s a worry. Here are some recent champs who’ve never tested positive: Maurice Green from the USA, Ato Boldon from Trinidad & Tobago, and Asafa Powell from Jamaica.

They sure look more like bodybuilders than sprinters, don't they? Have a look at Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, where he ran a still almost competitive 10.2 seconds. British sprinter Adam Gemili next to him is only 18 but has run a 10.05 and won a gold medal at the World Junior titles in Barcelona just now. Surely he’s too young to be doping, and he looks refreshingly normal.

 Seoul 1988 - the dirty games

Anabolic steroid use tends to be easier to spot in female athletes. Flo-Jo famously set records at the 1988 Seoul Olympics that have not been equalled since. 12 months earlier, sports writers recalled, she hadn’t been running anywhere near as fast. Others reported that her muscles grew bigger and her voice deepened. The after and before photos here are pretty dramatic yet she never tested positive. She died at 38 from a seizure.

Note the complete lack of muscle definition in Flo-Jo’s legs in the early shot, and the enormous, ripped leg muscles in 1988.

The Seoul Olympics became known as ‘the dirty games’, but the LA games four years earlier may well have been worse. There were lots of positive drug tests, but they simply disappeared (they were lost in transit). In the run-up to the LA games, at least 34 U.S. track and field athletes had tested positive or had possible positive tests during six weeks of testing by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1984, according to the Orange County Register. The USOC simply covered it all up http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/2009-08-03-1984-testing_N.htm.

It is now well known that the US cycling team used systematic blood transfusions – either reinfusing their own blood (‘autologous’ transfusion) or the blood of relatives/friends – to improve their performance at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. By the 1990s, EPO injections had become a more effective and convenient means to blood dope than transfusions. http://siab.org.au/what-is-blood-passport/passport-explanation.php

Sydney 2000 - systemic doping

The 2000 Olympics saw another female athlete win a string of gold medals (three gold and two bronze): Marion Jones. Here was one of the most frequently tested athletes in her sport yet she never tested positive. She only admitted to using drugs after her husband C.J. Hunter revealed all at the infamous Balco trial, and she was charged with perjury.

The picture tells the story once more. Victor Conte was the brains behind the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), which produced and supplied designer steroids to many top sports stars in athletics and baseball. Conte has served time in jail, and seems to have gone through a reformation of sorts. Last year in an interview with La Gazetta dello Sport, he said all eight 100 metre finalists at the Sydney Olympics were drug cheats – including Maurice Greene, Ato Boldon and Obadele Thompson.

Little change after the BALCO affair

Conte told the magazine: ‘I believe that, before the Balco affair, 80 per cent of athletes were using steroids, today that figure stands at about 65 percent. Conte also said he believed the enormous success of Jamaica’s athletes was suspect. He said: ‘It is very obvious that Bolt, Powell, Gay, Cheryl-Ann Fraser and many others are doping. Cheryl-Ann dropped her time by half a second in 2008. The ONLY way that is possible for a world class sprinter is to use PEDs.’

He said he’d heard they were given testosterone, EPO and other drugs, and that the Jamaicans were applying the same protocol that Conte had created at Balco at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. http://thehypelifemag.com/2011/10/22/american-doping-expert-victor-conte-claims-usain-bolt-other-jamaican-athletes-cheated-during-2008-olympics/

At the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, Usain Bolt ran the fastest ever 100 meter sprint in a time of 9.58 seconds to win the gold, taking over a tenth of a second off the previous best mark - the largest ever margin of improvement in the 100 meter world record. He also won the 200 meter sprint with a time of 19.19, and won by the biggest margin in World Championships history.

Whenever a sprinter wins by a huge margin against a world-class field, as did Flo-Jo and Marion Jones, there's a problem. After all, the other guys in the race are in the top ten sprinters in the world, and their times should be extremely close over these short distances. It's even more suspect when it happens all of a sudden, as it did with Bolt at the Beijing Olympics where he broke 4 world records and simply ran away from the rest.

There is another problem: 'To assume Usain Bolt is running clean,' as J.B.Cash points out, 'one must put forth the idea that not only is he able to run faster than everybody out there now, he is able to run faster than anybody who ever “cheated” by using PEDs.' http://www.castefootball.us/archives/better-running-through-chemistry/

Cash is talking about the eight 100m finalists in Sydney, among others. That Bolt can run much faster than they did without the help of drugs is hard to believe. Cash points out in passing that Glen Mills, the head coach of the Jamaican Olympics athletics team and Usain Bolt’s trainer, has also trained Kim Collins, Dwain Chambers and Ray Stewart. All three of them have been found guilty or strongly implicated in the use of PEDs. http://www.castefootball.us/archives/better-running-through-chemistry/

Steve Mullings is another Jamaican sprinter who tested positive for the drug Furosemide, a masking agent, in August last year. The Jamaican Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel handed him a lifetime ban from athletics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mullings.

Where is WADA?

Of course, it’s not just the Jamaicans. US sprinter Justin Gatlin, who won gold at Athens 2004, and set a World Record at Helsinki 2005, received a 4 year ban after testing positive. Disgraced former world record holder Tim Montgomery recently said he took testosterone and human growth hormone before the Sydney Olympics, and does not deserve the gold medal he won in the 400-meter relay. Montgomery never tested positive for drugs.

In August 2008, the International Olympic Committee disqualified Antonio Pettigrew and his gold-medal-winning 4x400-meter-relay teammates in the 2000 Sydney Olympics because he admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Pettigrew had never failed a drug test. But he testified in May 2008 under subpoena at the federal trial of his former coach Trevor Graham that he’d used performance-enhancing drugs at the Sydney Games and had been doping from 1997 to 2001. Pettigrew died two years later at the age of 42. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/sports/12pettigrew.html

A point Daley Thompson makes in teh MailOnline is that 'The World Anti-Doping Agency has spent £118million since 2001, and £18.6m in 2010 ... and they have caught virtually nobody. That’s before you add the almost £200m spent annually by international federations and national anti-doping agencies.' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2108454/LONDON-OLYMPICS-2012-Daley-Thompson-wants-drug-cheats-kept-away.html

The main thrust of Thompson's piece is the British Olympic Association’s lifetime ban of sprinter Dwain Chambers and cyclist David Millar. They appealed their ban at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, which ruled that the BOA’s lifetime ban did not comply with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code and was therefore unenforceable. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2132301/London-2012-Olympics-Dwain-Chambers-David-Millar-win-drugs-fight.html .

Chambers and Millar will both compete at the London Olympics. It's enough to make you sick. Not only are athletes cheating the system almost at will, but even when they're caught they want to be allowed back to compete in the next Olympics. And WADA thinks that's just fine.

What happened to the Olympic Spirit?

Can anyone remember what it is? After all these years of drug cheats winning medals, in sprinting and weight-lifting and who knows where else? And just now the admission by John Coates that Aussie Olympians will be paid a bonus for every medal they win in London. 'The new pay structure rewards performance,' The Australian reports. 'The top athletes are paid up to $25,000 initially, with the added potential to earn an additional $35,000 for an individual Olympic gold medal. The relay teams will split a $60,000 bonus. The pay debate was triggered early this year when Swimming Australia signed a major sponsorship deal with Energy Australia.' http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/london-games/pay-row-olympic-games-swimmers-should-think-themselves-lucky/story-fne3a96w-1226422894906

That's enough. I'll only add just one more thing: I won't be staying up to watch the Games.

Kim

Comments

[read more]

I am trying to make a another weight class for
a Jiu-jitsu tournament, but I somewhat short (5'5). I am trying to get taller and gain more muscle and so I sought out to use HGH. I saw this medicine online called "Sytropin" but I'm really wondering if works. The reason is because I'm somewhat skeptic of it because of the price ($60). I don't know if these type of medicines should cost more. Still I wonder, does it really work?.

[Kim Brebach]

HGH works alright but you want to check out the side effects, which are pretty harsh. Gaps in the teeth and protruding forehead among them ... Check it out on the internet.

[dragon city hack cheat]

I can't tell you the details of how he was detected," Fahey told ABC Radio. "[But] I can indicate the particular substance is called CERA … which is a perfectly legitimate substance to deal with anaemia

[Kim Brebach]

Hm, that makes sense - guys who get caught can simply claim they suffered from anaemia. That explains the traces of the drug, and why they can't remember doping themselves.

[Pass any drug test]

The people who are taking drugs and wins the race are hurting the spirit of Olympics Game. Sife effects of HGH should also be considered. I am agreed with Kim Brebach.