Another World Class Swimmer Caught Cheating

So either start issuing prison sentences for performance enhancing drug users or just stop the testing and fuggedabouddit?

Prison is not the all in all fix. But, it is a good start toward the fix. My point is a simple one. The lack of punishment or consequences fosters abuse of these rules. The results of illegal performance enhancing drugs are often hidden and very difficult to quantify. But it is killing sports. Who ever thought a home run baseball would auction for close to a million dollars and then get branded with an asterisk before being sent to the Hall of Fame? If we really want to stop it, then make it unpalatable and very expensive if caught cheating. Anything less then severe consequences is a joke the cheaters laugh at. Let's face it; it takes a very brave SOB to step over the corpse to see if the gun is still loaded….figuratively writing.

figuratively writing. Or were you “literally typing” And by the way, most of us got your stance on tougher punishment on your first or second post on this thread. Some maybe on your sixth or seventh. Hopefully we all have it by post number 10. Personally, I’m more interested in Graham Johnston's wood kick board. But that’s just me.:whiteflag:

That magnificent kick board on display in Fort Lauderdale at the ISHOF is interesting. And forgive me for boring you with my later posts. Being redundant, redundant is somewhat boring I guess.

Noodles.... no one said that cheating is not cheating if your not in the top 8. Try to stick with the topic which is about trying to make drug testing more effective given the limited resources. Note Victor Conte's response in a recent interview ..... "How could the doping police do a better job? Conte insists that he has answered these questions. He has had three meetings with the US AntiDoping Agency and in February 2005 he spent three hours with an official from Wada. “And I didn’t do it in exchange for leniency,” he said. “I did it for the right reasons: to create a fully cooperative acknowledgement of the massive drug problem in elite sport.” "For the doping authorities to be more successful, he recommends better target-testing. “When you see that the fastest two men in the world are both from a track club in Los Angeles, for instance, or the Bay Area, or North Carolina or Jamaica – this should be worth looking at. What you need to do is take the dollars you have and the number of tests you have and focus your resources on the top ten in each event. Why test the top 100 – the people who are not winning races and not winning dollars? Why test everybody two times when you could test the top ten ten times?” He also recommends better timing of the testing. “The testing used to drop off hugely in the fourth quarter of the year. But my point is, this is the off-season quarter when the athletes are using substances for their intensive weight training. Why did the testers decide to take a nap then?” This is why, he said, Balco’s level of sophistication is not required to be a cheat. “I know of people who have very little information and are still able to get round the procedures. The authorities say they are improving – and they are. But is it still relatively easy for athletes to use drugs and beat the system? The answer is yes.”

The Sporting News August 19, 2002 by Dave Kindred Naturally, athletes were eager to pay for advice from Charles E. Yesalis. The Penn State professor knows steroids. He has written three books on the subject. He has testified to Congress. He has worked with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI, the American Medical Association, the NFL Players Association, the U.S. Olympic Committee and the NCAA. So athletes sought him out. Not for help in getting the drugs that are legally obtained only by prescription; anybody smart enough to buy Milk Duds can score steroids. Nor were athletes concerned about health risks; who sweats the small stuff when you believe you're bullet-proof? They came to Yesalis in hopes of covering up the crime. "They wanted to hire me as a consultant to make sure they don't get caught," he says. He says he turned down the requests, once prompting an athlete to say, "Well, Chuck, I figured you were going to say that. But, you know, I would even take it off my income tax as a business expense." They shared a laugh there. Such a world we've made. Steroids as business tools. Every home run hitter a suspect. Now we hear Major League Baseball making noises about a steroids-testing program. Though any testing is better than no testing, Yesalis says the hard truth is that not even the most stringent program, let alone the namby-pamby deal likely to come from current talks, will eliminate steroids in baseball. "With drug testing in place in the NFL, NBA, and every major Olympic sport, there's still a steroids problem in those leagues and federations," he says. "It would be naive to think that if baseball had a steroids-testing program, they're still not going to have a huge problem." The problem will persist because world-class athletes and chemists generally stay a step ahead of the science posse. Or, as Yesalis has come to believe after 23 years of research: "Drug tests catch only stupid, careless and foolish people." There are, as we know, locker rooms filled with the stupid, careless and foolish. But Yesalis draws a distinction that applies to baseball's millionaires. "If you're talking about an elite, wealthy athlete," he says, "they'll go to people like me to make sure they don't flunk drug tests." For Yesalis, a test by eyesight is enough: "When you see mature men who have already strength-trained for years, and all of a sudden they gain 30 pounds of lean mass, I am tremendously suspicious because that doesn't happen naturally. You don't need to be a steroid scientist to know that is incomprehensible." Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, two suddenly bulky strongmen, have denied using steroids and pledged to abide by any testing program players help devise. Many people, including borderline omniscient sportswriters, have insisted that Bonds and Sosa pass a test because a simple test would end the suspicion. No, it would not. Passing such a test can mean ... 1) The athlete doesn't use steroids. 2) He uses steroids daily but with a masking agent. 3) He uses steroids, but all traces are flushed out of his system within two or three days. 4) He uses a steroid recipe fashioned by a designer famous for undetectable potions. 5) He used steroids as training aids two years ago, bulked up, kept buff with madman workouts and now needs a juice refill only every January. 6) He uses human growth hormone, or insulin-like growth factor I. These replicate steroid enhancement, but no test exists for them. The question: "So a negative steroid test really proves nothing?" Yesalis: "You are absolutely and totally correct."

This has been an interesting thread. I feel that because of the endless possibilities of who's cheating, who's not, to what degree one is cheating, etc., you just have to focus on your own accomplishments. This is not to say that there isn't a solution to drug testing, perhaps there is. But it's definitely a complicated subject. Just out of curiosity, and perhaps this is another thread subject, but I wonder what opinions are out there regarding the "cleanliness" of say the top 8 finishers in any major international swim meet, male or female? In addition, what's the opinion of whether or not one can set a world record in an event as a clean athlete? Just curious. :groovy:

Perhaps the authorities and governing bodies of sports could combine their knowledge and prosecute drug cheaters. After all, it is against the law to use these drugs. This is completely untrue, there are substances on the banned list that are not illegal, and it differs from country to country. An example in the US is DHEA which is perfectly legal to buy as a supplement, and metabolises to testosterone in the body. You also have the problem that they are testing for metabolites of substances, not the substance itself. You could take a legal supplement that has a metabolite in common with a banned illegal substance, and there would be no way of knowing which one the person has consumed. This is fine for banning them from sport, because the metabolites are themselves banned substances, so there is no question they have broken the rules of the sport, but it does not tell you they have broken the law because you have no way of knowing what they consumed to cause the metabolite to be present in the body.

Gull, The more I learn about this crap the more depressed I get about the future of athletics. John Smith

John, You make a great point. But I do agree with Matt that this sends a pretty negative "you're not important" message to the rest of the field. I can think of a few examples of why test more than the top 8... 1 - relays. Lets say 8 countries are represented by one swimmer each in the top 8. one country has three swimmers ranked 9,10 and 11, and all with very close to top 8 times. They win the gold medal. #11 is juiced. I guess this is where testing the top 8 swimmers for each nation come into play. 2 - preventative maintenence. You can bet the Tour de France was embarassed to dethrone a the tour winner and kick out the main frontrunners mid-race in two successive years due to doping. Catch the guy/gal on his/her way up the ladder so you don't have the embarassment of having to pull them off the Olympic medal stand. 3 - continuous leveling of the playing field. Lets say all I wanted to do was be the best 500 freestyler in NCAA Div II. I could juice my way to the top in Div II. Sure, I'd probably make a national cut in the 400 LCM Free at some point, but since there's all those Div I guys ahead of me at nationals, they all get tested and I, finishing a paltry 13th or whatever, get off scott free. And still have my Division II championship crown.