Doping in Sport

[Stavros]

I used to watch the Tour de France in the 1980s and 90s before the drugs scandals were public knowledge, but I really lost any interest in cycling in the 2010s when it became really apparent that it’s not the best rider who wins, but the best team at hiding the doping.

I agree with you, as I used to watch Channel 4's coverage, but drugs and booze were problematic for the Tour in previous decades, as the death of Tommy Simpson showed. At some point one either accepts it, or rejects it. I just lost interest in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Tom_Simpson

[sidney111]

I’d not heard of Tom Simpson, what a sad story.

[Stavros]

Hmmmm....Russians attack the British journalists who confirmed that skater Kamila Valieva has -allegedly?- used a banned substance. One Duma member, Dmitry Svishchev, said

“Unfortunately, some journalists can find the strength to talk to a child as if they were their comrades somewhere in a pub,” he told the Russian website.“Let them sit in London and ask such boorish and provocative questions to each other. Let our athletes not be touched. And even more so young athletes like Kamila. We won’t let her hurt! Children should not be asked such questions, she is still too young. We believe Valieva, we believe in her – she did not use anything forbidden.”
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...ts-from-russia

Maybe men (or women) so much older than Kamila Valieva should not have provided the "child" with the drug in question, or did she wake up one morning not so long ago and say to herself 'I really need some trimetazidine today'...??

My sympathies are with the teenage girl who clearly has a lot of talent, who has been let down by a regime that begs more questions than are answered, those answers obscured by the hysterical reaction of the Russians quoted in the link above.

[Stavros]

Powerful argument on the skating crisis here eg

"A confirmed drug scandal of this scale would put a fist right through China’s Games, and do so at a time when the spectacle has basically become the Xi-Putin show, a summit on the sidelines to a soundtrack of shifting tectonic plates and pistols drawn at the border posts.
What stands out for now is the basic cruelty here. This process automatically casts the athlete as the villain. Valieva will be banned, Valieva asterisked in the annals. But Valieva is also a child. If she was given a performance-enhancing drug then what we’re talking about here is abuse, an offence committed against Valieva not by her.
The more urgent questions should be addressed to her coach Eteri Tutberidze of the high-functioning Sambo-70 school in Sochi, where very young children are taught to push their bodies to the limits, to live off “powdered nutrients”, to burn briefly as child‑puppet athletes in pursuit of that sweet, sweet, physically ruinous power-to-weight ratio."
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...n-beijing-2022

[MrFanti]

To re-iterate in a previous post of mine, been around for decades (and centuries). The only solution is to legalize through 3rd party physicians and arbitration with a "set" amount of what's legal to take. Athletes then can only take them through the prescribed 3rd party physicians and legislation group.

Given how long it's been happening, it's curious to see why folks are "shocked" when it's discovered.
Drug-taking in Ancient Times
https://physicalculturestudy.com/201...ancient-times/

[Stavros]

I hope you are not suggestig a 15 year old should, even if legally, be given drugs to enhance their performance, or for some other reason? Surely the tragedy of Kamila Valieva is that she is a talented skater and she ought not to be manipulated by people whose interests, I suspect, have little to do with the person, and more to do with their jobs, their income and some need to be 'winners' all the time. Perhaps one way out of ths is to ban the participation in Olympic Games of anyone under the age of 18

[MrFanti]

Perhaps one way out of ths is to ban the participation in Olympic Games of anyone under the age of 18

That's a decent compromise since there's no way to stop countries from doping their athletes - regardless of age.

So are the Olympics an Adult and Youth sport since she's 15?

[Stavros]

So are the Olympics an Adult and Youth sport since she's 15?

Good question. If someone can leave school and start work at 16, and legally get married, should 16 be the minimum age? Voting for 16 year olds is also on the agenda in some countries. I think somewhere between 16-18 even though at that age some are more mature than others, and the pressures of 'the team' can affect people's behaviour who are much older. I don't know what the answer is, but I do wonder if the Olympics cares as much about the welfare of athletes as it claims to. At the very least, I think a debate needs to be had.

I think Tennis is the other sport which allows teenagers as young as 16 to compete against adults, and there have been 17-year old footballers in the Premier League in the UK (Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney come to mind).

[MrFanti]

Good question. If someone can leave school and start work at 16, and legally get married, should 16 be the minimum age? Voting for 16 year olds is also on the agenda in some countries. I think somewhere between 16-18 even though at that age some are more mature than others, and the pressures of 'the team' can affect people's behaviour who are much older. I don't know what the answer is, but I do wonder if the Olympics cares as much about the welfare of athletes as it claims to. At the very least, I think a debate needs to be had.

I think Tennis is the other sport which allows teenagers as young as 16 to compete against adults, and there have been 17-year old footballers in the Premier League in the UK (Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney come to mind).

And furthermore, what's the delineation between, child, youth, teen, adult?

If you say Olympics are a Teen and Adult sport, the doping will still be problem unless a controlled legalization happens.....

Think of the ones that weren't caught - she stands out because she was caught.

[Stavros]

Think of it in terms of the dangers of children being put into public life, whether as children in films or tv programmes, child prodigies or in sports. I am sure there are children who emerged from being in flms and tv without being damaged, but some have been. There is the celebrated case of Ruth Lawrence, who entered Oxford at the age of 12 accompaned by what some people thought was a 'creepy dad', completed her first degree in Maths in two years, and by the age of 17 had another degree, in Physics, and a DPhil in Maths -she is happily married and lives in Israel. Mozart was put on stage by his aggressive dad when he was six years old; Daniel Barenboim first performed as a soloist in London when he was 13, two examples of men who excelled in their chosen careers. But in both cases, was it a 'freak show'? Had they not appeared in public at that age, would their careers have been so different?

Damage may be hard to assess, but I think in the case of the use of drugs in sport, the rules are too elastic. The cases of the female East German athletes who were given so much steroids and other drugs that they effectively changed their gender is notorious, and of course when it comes to drug abuse, Florence Griffith-Joyner is a sad but in her case probably inevitable conclusion to a list of what must now be considered bogus performances.

People will do things they ought not to do wth their bodies to win, often led or encouraged by their trainers, and I suspect that with enthusiastic teenagers the opportunity for mischief is there, and that includes the sexual abuse that has been part of the US Gymnastics teams over the years.

If there are so many warnings, would it not be more sensible to stop children of a certain age group from appearing in major sports events? Just today, reading about Valieva's flop yesterday -and her coach's less than sympathetic response- I read that in female skating, 17 years old is pretty much 'over the hill' -! Jayne Torvill was 27 when she and Christopher Dean won the Olympic Gold in 1984.

Just change the rules. And stop exploiting teenagers at that age. But I don't know, 16 or 18?