I happen to be related to Miguel Ángel López (his grandparent is one of my father's uncles). If you happen to not know who he is, he was in the Astana Pro Team and had an infamous short stint at Movistar. A few days ago UCI informed he was suspended from professional cycling due to an AAF, and was involved into a doping scandal but allegedly his name got clear about that.
I haven't met him personally so I can't tell if he's actually done any wrongdoing intentionally or not, but I do know for a fact he has spoken several times about retiring due to the mental toll competition has had on him and several colleagues of his, as far as back as 2017.
And if you take a look at it, it's something that it's not talked enough on the sport circles. In cycling specially, if someone becomes suspect of doping every "fan" will immediately point their fingers at them - unless it's one of your favorite cyclists. It happens everywhere online, from Facebook to Twitter to the rampant tribalism of r/peloton - immediately you'll become public enemy #1 no matter what. Cycling has had a bad story with doping and if the pressure to give results is not big enough, the stress of being labelled as a doper is a new whole level. I still can recall people throwed urine to Froome at some stages in the Tour de France.
MAL's finding is not exactly surprising, and Astana has been suspect since they became a thing in the wake of the demise of Liberty Seguros after Operacion Puerto
What's worse (and likely the reason this is being posted here today) is the announcement that the global organization, WADA, is appealing the country-level organization's (UKAD) decision in this case: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cycling/2024/06/07/lizzy-banks-w...
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.
UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) is the organisation responsible for protecting sport in the United Kingdom from doping. It is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and is structured as a company limited by guarantee.
Maybe I'm confused, but the issue here is with UKAD, which is a public body?
I hate to think of other agencies that act this negligently. Not enough funds/competence to do their task properly but a ton of power to destroy people's lives, the problems too complex to tease out without real focus.
rarely is the real issue a lack of funds either - they somehow have no issue coming up with plenty when it comes time to punish whistleblowers or make someones life hell.
> how a private organization can ruin someone's life
Believe it or not, the cyclists signed up for the possibility of ruin. Maybe there is an argument for some legal intervention to prevent people from agreeing to something so egregious?
Bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman etc all have untested federations. A lot of the money in these sports comes from the athletes themselves, so the athletes have a lot more voice, and scope to find a federation that lets them compete the way they want. Compare this to the UCI where it's a meme that any innovation that comes along gets banned in order to preserve the "spirit of cycling"[1].
[1] maybe a bit less so recently, and I definitely approve of the safety-related bans such as the supertuck
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".
So you’re saying we should legalise children taking PEDs because “it’s their choice.” What other things would you like to do to children under the auspices of “their choice?”
Because science. Imagine the lack of morals required to build truly scientifically the limits of human ability. Pushed beyond all peaks and limitations of natural ability
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.
There's very little voluntary about signing up to rules that you're required to sign up to in order to have a career in your field.
The policy position that detection of prohibited drugs at arbitrary low levels should result in a punitive finding, even though it is not consistent with an attempt to enhance performance or with industry standards on permissible cross-contamination, is untenable.
If the goal is to establish the "cleanliness" of sport, then subjecting people who have almost-certainly done no wrong to the same treatment as those who almost-certainly have in fact undermines the moral position.
The goal is never to establish cleanliness, but to establish the perception that you are establishing cleanliness. Also, a lot of people just enjoy seeing others get punished.
> There's very little voluntary about signing up to rules that you're required to sign up to in order to have a career in your field.
The rules are signed well before a career even becomes an option. Everyone who holds a race license, even if you buy a bike yesterday & start your first race today, signs the anti-doping agreement
> The rules are clear and can realistically not work any other way
Here's one way it can work differently: if someone has to spend any amount of money to clear their name, WADA (or whomever) should have to reimburse them.
It's criminal that the author of this article drained her savings merely to prove that she did nothing wrong.
But she hasn't - WADA has appealed to CAS and will likely prevail. At which point she will get the 6 month or so backdated suspension she was always going to get in a case like this. The whole "spend all your money" part was entirely unnecessary.
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.
A great deal of the money trickles down from the Olympics/IOC (WADA).
Individual sporting bodies are also under a great deal of pressure to comply with WADA standards, since there is a very real threat of being kicked out of the Olympics for insufficiently draconian enforcement (a perennial story with Weightlifting / IWF). So in many cases the athletes themselves pay for it via their dues to their sporting body.
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.
Most asthma medications aren’t steroids. The types of steroids used to treat asthma aren’t anabolic steroids - they’re corticosteroids and are generally performance-reducing when taken long-term. The asthma medication discussed in the article is also not a steroid, but even if it were, inhaled corticosteroids have zero utility as a PED.
Your behavior in this thread is shamefully arrogant and misinformed.
Nothing of the sort was glossed over, I'm not sure how you failed to read so spectacularly. Quotes from the article:
> Formoterol is a medication I take for asthma. I have been taking it for years well below the anti-doping threshold
> I refused the use of a nebuliser for asthma when I was so unwell I couldn’t walk upstairs because I knew I would need to apply for a TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemption).
It sounds like you skimmed over the part above at least, but misread it to mean the opposite
> My sample tested positive for 2.9ng/ml of formoterol. Formoterol is a medication I take as part of an inhaler called Symbicort. I have been taking this medication since summer 2020. It is listed by WADA as a threshold substance, meaning that it is allowed to be present in urine up to a concentration of 40ng/ml on the basis that it was likely the result of permitted therapeutic use.
> Although the WADA rules state that formoterol is allowed up to 40ng/ml [30], the problem is that the WADA rules also state in conjunction with a diuretic that ANY LEVEL of formoterol is considered an AAF [31].
And for extra credit, if you were to do one web search (or citation check) worth of "research" you can corroborate the last bit with info direct from WADA:
> Inhaled formoterol is permitted to a maximum delivered dose of 54 micrograms over
24 hours. The presence in urine of formoterol in excess of 40 ng/mL is presumed not
to be a therapeutic use of the substance and will be considered as an Adverse
Analytical Finding unless the Athlete proves, through a controlled pharmacokinetic
study, that the abnormal result was the consequence of the use of no greater than 54
micrograms delivered over 24 hours. If a dosage in excess of 54 micrograms over 24
hours is required by the athlete, then a TUE must be requested
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.
She did not because she tested positive for a diuretic.
> Diuretics affect the way the body metabolizes and excretes beta-2 agonists. If you are on a diuretic medication (or on any other substance in the S5 category of the Prohibited List) for any reason and you are using an inhaler that contains salbutamol (albuterol) or formoterol, then you may need a TUE. Please see the TUE section below.
Except she wasn't "on" a diuretic, it was a contaminant orders of magnitude below the therapeutic dose.
Which is covered in the article.
And one of the main points of this article is that the rules are inconsistent and not based in reality.
To paraphrase the article (but don't take my word for it, I highly suggest reading it yourself), the rules are fatally flawed because of the bimodality where contaminants at arbitrary concentrations determine whether other medications in urine samples are allowed or not.
She claims it was cross-contamination. Given that she was already likely gaming the system with the asthma steroid (it's really common in cycling and swimming to do this), I don't believe her when she says there was a contamination.
You’re changing the subject now. The TUE would be for the asthma medication, not the diuretic. She was below the limit for asthma medication, so didn’t need a TUE.
Edit: if you’re about to talk about how it affected the ruling for the asthma medication, then you’re just repeating the article and should just read that instead of arguing in the comments.
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.
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?
Who am I to believe? UKAD, who fought like hell to deny her defence before accepting it based on her work, or random internet commenter who can’t even be arsed to read the article before commenting?
I geniunely think "anti doping" as a policy practice stands against everything that makes human as a speicies progress as a physcially being. 'Doping' should proudly inducted biomedical research, regulated and commercialized. Because anti-doping is fundamentally a flawed concept, it does not surprise it's application is marred with corruption, negligence and incompetence.
Any kind of regulated doping has the same problems as the current anti-doping regimes. Whatever regulations you have, some people are going to try to get an advantage by breaking them. You need to catch some of those people or you don't really have regulations.
I suppose you're getting downvoted because there's just no simple answer, except that it can't be that ?
If you push that to it's logical conclusion, the whole marketing angle around sport falls apart (you can sell aspiration and lifestyles, you can't for drugs), and if there's no money left, no professionals will be left as well, and we end up with Guinness book record types of chalenges.
It's the same reason all major sports have seemingly sily rules or performance limitations (cycling and the bike bans are my favorite ones), you need to care about the business side to keep a sport alive
I haven't met him personally so I can't tell if he's actually done any wrongdoing intentionally or not, but I do know for a fact he has spoken several times about retiring due to the mental toll competition has had on him and several colleagues of his, as far as back as 2017.
And if you take a look at it, it's something that it's not talked enough on the sport circles. In cycling specially, if someone becomes suspect of doping every "fan" will immediately point their fingers at them - unless it's one of your favorite cyclists. It happens everywhere online, from Facebook to Twitter to the rampant tribalism of r/peloton - immediately you'll become public enemy #1 no matter what. Cycling has had a bad story with doping and if the pressure to give results is not big enough, the stress of being labelled as a doper is a new whole level. I still can recall people throwed urine to Froome at some stages in the Tour de France.