No love for Soto?

[Justin Clouder]

If something is banned, even with less than rock solid evidence that it is a PED, it's on the banned list and athletes can avoid having their lives ruined by simply not taking it.

Not necessarily. The rules do not require that an athlete have any knowledge off what they are taking. To say they could "simply" not take it assumes it is always easy to tell the banned from the not-banned and that an athlete can always know what is in everything they consume.

This question has not yet been answered in this thread: is it right to label an athlete a cheat when they inadvertantly take a PED? Is it right that the rules make no distinction between active conspiracy and accidential consumption?

An example: in the Winter OG a few years ago Brit skier Alan Baxter had a medal taken away because the US version of a branded medication he used contained an additional ingredient, which was not on the label, compared to the UK version. Not only did he have no intention to cheat, he had no way of knowing he had broken the rules.

Observer2 would presumably damn him to hell as a cheat. I think he was appallingly hard done by.

Justin

[tandfman]

The rules actually do take such things into account these days.

[EPelle]

Torri Edwards:

5.12

• In the Panel's view, the Appellant herself has been negligent in not paying attention to the obvious fact that the tablets contain two different substances. In fact, the sachets of the individual tablets given to her state : "0,125 g/ 1,5 g" without specifying what substances these numbers refer to. This fact alone should have alerted the Appellant. In addition, and more importantly, the Appellant's chiropractor had access to the box of "Coramine Glucose" which stated the substances contained in the tablet (including nikethamide) and to the leaflet which even contained a warning for athletes (see above). To ignore these facts was at a minimum negligence on the part of the chiropractor and such a negligence must be attributed to the athlete who uses him in supplying the athlete either a food source or a supplement. It would put an end to any meaningful fight against doping if an athlete was able to shift his/her responsibility with respect to substances which enter the body to someone else and avoid being sanctioned because the athlete himself/herself did not know of that substance.

6.6 In the Appellant's written brief to the Panel there were seven grounds of appeal.

• 1. The sanction imposed on Ms Edwards so overtly wrong and violates every principle of fairness in sport.
  
  The Panel finds that there was negligence on the part of Ms Edwards and also negligence on the part of support personnel employed by her. In those circumstances a two-year sanction which is the uniform standard sanction imposed by the WADA Code does not violate principles of fairness in sport even though it may appear to be harsh.

[26mi235]

Re: Say what?

This thread is quite long and I have not yet read all of it. However, there are positions taken here that I think are surprising.

First, to think that you need to have a study that proves that there is performance enhancement and that such a study needs to be a Level 1 study is .... well, just not realistic. The 'test' here is the wrong. If you take the 'null' hypothesis and the standard level of 'statistical significance' think what might be required to rule something out. I would say that an advantage of 0.05 in the 100m has a large impact, so we want to rule out drugs that confer that level of advantage. At a guess you might need a sample size in the thousands (and possibly in the millions) even if you could clearly specify an appropriate metric (100m sprint time with and without the drug being used for x weeks). Furthermore, you do not really want the test on ordinary people, but on sprinter types, so you would need to take all of the sprinters out of competition for a season at least.

It always was a surprise to me when I would read the sports/exercise journals back when. There would be a study and they would find no significant effect of some 'treatment'. They would have a sample size of 10 or 20 and the rejection region was such that some training effect that could have made me from a good recreational runner into someone performing on malmo's level would not have been statistically significant. There was no need to waste time on the study and the referees should never allowed publication because given the expected signal-to-noise ratio and expected effect there was almost no chance of getting a result where a 'null' outcome would tell us anything

I also think that WADA has no business of placing drugs like marijuana in a category that would affect the degree of ban of 'real' drugs like steroids and EPO. I am not certain cocaine is quite in the same class, as I seem to recall that there can be some enhancement, but that is not of primary interest to me. In to the anecdote category I will note that Jan Ullrich did hit a problem with beyond-marijuana rec drugs before more serious transgressions started to surface.

As for the question of do drugs provide real assistance, I think Exhibit A is the current state of the world records and the top performances list, in combination with the notion that women get greater advantage then men from several categories of drugs.

I do not think WADA should ban nose strips even if there is a placebo effect (and can you tell me the placebo effect that occurs in Harry Potter -- I just finished the last book last night but I am referring to an earlier volume)?

[By the way, I concur with the following post in most things, I am not trying to counter it]

Am I reading this thread aright? Are several people here seriously arguing that you should be allowed to take any damn thing you like - the latest "clear" or whatever the labs have developed - and continue to do so (presumably openly and shamelessly) until the "Class I" medical evidence, based on a double-blind trial, is in?

At which point, presumably, if it is proven to be an actual PED you simply stop taking it, and withdraw with your honors and records intact, since you cannot be penalized for taking something that was legal (not banned) at the time you took it! ops:

Maybe I've misunderstood the technicalities here. Maybe there's a world in which all substances are immediately identified and fully analyzed, to a medical certainty, in virtually no "real time" at all. But if there's as much as a six-month lag - to say nothing of the 2-3 years that I suspect is likelier in such precise and prolonged medical testing - that gives a huge advantage to whoever is on the chemical cutting edge and doesn't give a hoot for fair competition.

[gh]

One concern I've long had about banned lists is having been told by people somewhat close to the program (back 20 years ago, in the infancy, admittedly) that certain things had been placed on the list because in the ongoing testing of samples, substance X, although not illegal, was showing up in a lot of samples. The reaction therefore wasn't, let's figure out if it's indeed a PED, or just the latest vogue supplement. Instead, it was, "let's ban it anyway; if they think it works, maybe it does." I'm wondering if it was this kind of rush to judgment that led to the in/out listing of caffeine.

[tandfman]

If that were the case, how do you explain the fact that creatine has never been placed on the banned list? Anecdotally, a lot of athletes take it.

I suspect, by the way, that this had nothing to do with the treatment of caffeine, which I think a lot of us know from personal experience with the stuff is a stimulant.

[bambam]

One concern I've long had about banned lists is having been told by people somewhat close to the program (back 20 years ago, in the infancy, admittedly) that certain things had been placed on the list because in the ongoing testing of samples, substance X, although not illegal, was showing up in a lot of samples. The reaction therefore wasn't, let's figure out if it's indeed a PED, or just the latest vogue supplement. Instead, it was, "let's ban it anyway; if they think it works, maybe it does." I'm wondering if it was this kind of rush to judgment that led to the in/out listing of caffeine.

I agree with this and this probably best encapsulates what I'm trying to say. I know that Level I evidence would be hard to obtain, but I do not like this rush to judgment when all we have is hearsay and anecdotal evidence. People's lives can be ruined because of this. Several have argued that "Well, is he/she didn't think it was performance enhancing, they would not be taking it." I would counter by saying that virtually everything an athlete does, at the highest levels, is intended to enhance their performance. And this refers not just to substances they take, but the way they live their lives.