In the wake of a Chinese doping scandal, Michael Phelps doubled down Monday on his support for tougher sanctions — including a lifetime ban for anyone who tests positive for a banned substance.
“If you test positive, you should never be allowed to come back and compete again, cut and dry,” Phelps said. “I believe one and done.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency and World Aquatics have acknowledged that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned substance ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. The results were not made public until media reports surfaced this year, with both bodies accepting the Chinese explanation that the positive tests were caused by tainted food.
Nine of those swimmers won medals - several as part of relay teams - n Paris, leading British star Adam Peaty to gripe that the playing field was not even.
While interesting, I’m not convinced it would stop pressure from an athlete’s home country. Just increases the personal conflict against those pressures.
Consider a 4 year ban for the country instead. Make it a serious offense.
If you have a situation like Russia where there is a provable government doping program, agreed. But if an athlete makes the personal decision to use performance enhancers that happen to slip through the initial screening but then get caught by the Olympic testers, I wouldn’t hold that against the rest of the athletes from that country.
I would. Well not against the individual athletes but against their country of origin. Countries screening would need to be better than the IOC ones or en par.
The basic framing is: “your boss fucked up, you’re part of the fallout”.
An alternative would be to allow all doping.
But at the moment the approach is to reward the smartest cheaters and at least for me removed all interest for most sport events.
Just keep in mind, a lot of countries are not the US/Europe/China. There are small island nations and city states sending a number of athletes you can count with one hand. They many not have the technical/financial resources to pre-screen and rely only on the Olympics’ own testing process.
That is a very good point which I haven’t considered!
Thanks :)
Also none of the countries is Europe.
And? The fallout of losing access to the games is much smaller, so it balances out.
If you fuck around, be ready for what your own country does to you when they find out.
How about lifetime for the athlete, 4 year for the country.
Make it 20 years, but only if it proven to be a team issue and not individual.
While we’re over-hauling doping punishments, we have to confront the deeply broken doping testing system and widespread contaminations of many foods and medications. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its country-level entities (UKADA, USADA, etc.) don’t like to talk about how laughably bad their systems are, and how often the pop false positives. It wasn’t as well known until cyclist Lizzy Banks challenged a false positive last year and spent €40,000 in legal fees and testing fees to get a “no fault or negligence” ruling. And that wouldn’t have been possible at all if Banks didn’t have a medical background (she went pro just before finishing a medical degree) and was able to read the faulty reports herself and challenge the claims of UKADA. Thanks to her, we now know that WAY more common foods and over-the-counter medications have contaminations with banned substances, which produces positive results with trace-amounts of banned substances.
I’m all for cracking down on dopers and cheaters, so long as we fix the system so it doesn’t create false-positives.
The entire system is deeply corrupt beyond false positives.
We know for a fact that Russia was systematically cheating testing and the grand sum of the punishment they faced for it was having to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia” for two years.
Not only should they get a lifetime ban, but every athlete should be tested 100% of the time. There is no reason why something as huge and prestigious as the Olympics, with the kind of money it brings in, should not be doing this.
Also randomly along the year when they are training and having to tell exacty where they are at all times (so no hiding away doping & flushing them out) , as cyclists are.
Cyclism went so bad but now they’re tested really hard and often.
What was that videogame, where if they caught you hacking, they wouldn’t ban you, they’d just put you in lobbies with other hackers?
Imagine having an olympics where all the caught dopers compete against each other.
But they’d probably, like, die or some shit. I’ll have to rethink this when I’m in my morning zone.
Northern Lights is a great strain yall
I don’t care about the Olympics themselves (I think they’re important, I am just not personally interested in catching more than highlights), but I would watch the shit out of the Dope Olympics. Dude on steroids and cocaine throwing a javelin ten miles? I’d pay to watch that.
Of course I’d also watch the Pitch-O-Mat 5000 fire balls at Wireless Joe Jackson, so I’m not anyone’s target audience except possibly Futurama’s from 20-odd years ago.
I’m all for it. However, the show was stolen by Dennis Miller’s hair. It’s a shame about him. I remember him mercilessly mocking pretty much every politician and being ever so slightly left leaning when I was a kid. The older he got the worse he got. He went from slightly left leaning, to calling himself libertarian while supporting neocon ideals, to whatever the hell happened a few years ago.
The modified howitzer?
Futurama is still running, as i found out last week.
It is! And the new ones are fine. I happen to be partial to the first few seasons.
One can say the first few seasons are very fine
What was that videogame, where if they caught you hacking, they wouldn’t ban you, they’d just put you in lobbies with other hackers?
Many games do that but GTA is easily the most popular/famous to do so. Though it hasn’t done that in a long, long time, that is how it worked at launch. You also got a little dunce hat, so you knew you fucked up.
It would be highly unethical, but I do wonder how much faster you could go if you were allowed to take absolutely anything.
See somebody run 100m in 8 seconds before their heart explodes. Watch a man lift a whole car before he shits his entire digestive system out of his body.
Those are called the Enhanced Games.
Ugh, sponsored of course by Peter Thiel, the fascist transhumanist.
If they over-dope to compete in the dopers olympics and die as a result, that’s not any different than driving without a seatbelt or motorcycling without a helmet and dying as a result. If you don’t want to risk death you can just not be stupid.
True, I think a doping league is something we could try. We just have a year or 2 of ONLY doping league, then open the clean league and have 100 % controls. But not all doping is testable, currently…
That was GTA4
I like the idea of Dopelympics. Let everyone participating be fully aware they’re in for the time of their (very short) lives
Northern Lights is a great strain. Man I miss smoking weed
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I think that the problem there would be that so many eyes would follow a full on doping Olympics that that’s where the money would also go. And there’s no way you could spin that sort of league/competition to be amateurs only like the Olympics is so it would have to be professional which means the best athletes would go there because they’d fucking get paid
The Olympics haven’t been amateur for at least 30 years. Not only do professionals compete, but the country olympic committees usually pay competitors for winning a medal.
Everyone who competes at these level is already doped
Fine and well, but coming from a gear-doping genetic freak created in a lab run by fish…
I don’t really have an end to that, I just wanted to call him a gear-doping genetic freak created in a lab run by fish.
I believe in the Sun Tzu method. You are allowed to fuck up once. Fuck up again, off with the head (well, or a lifetime ban in this case). One and done would ruin too many careers with false positives or people that made a youthful fuck up.
Not that I think it should be, but isn’t cannabis a banned substance? If so, doesn’t that apply to him?
Isn’t the idea of banning doping in the Olympics to deal with people using banned substances while actively competing? That is to say, even though Phelps uses weed, has he tested positive during an active competition for being on weed (or any other substance)?
What competitors do in their off time is fine as far as I’m concerned. But if they’re using right before or during actively competing, then I can see where it’s a problem. No?
Athletes who compete on an international level don’t have off time.
They’re training year-round, and there’s a lot of performance enhancing drugs that speed up recovery during the training season. Faster recovery gives the athlete more time to train, which enhances their performance during competition.You do realize that no one can work literally all the time without time off, right? Olympians are super athletes, but they’re not superhuman.
You do realize there are millions of people who train for their sport all year long? I’m one of them.
So wtf are you doing here on Lemmy? Get your ass back to training! /s
Ok, so he goes home at night, smokes a joint before bed, and is back in the gym the next day. Working year-round doesn’t mean you have zero free time.
In February 2009, a photograph of Phelps using a bong went viral; this resulted in the loss of Kellogg’s as a sponsor, as well as a three-month suspension by USA Swimming. Phelps admitted that the photo, which was taken at a party at the University of South Carolina, was authentic. He publicly apologized, calling his behavior “inappropriate”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps#Legal_issues
USA Swimming is who selects people for the Olympics.
With all due respect, you are conflating what somebody does in their personal time with doing something to cheat in a sporting event (the topic at hand). Despite Phelps having made some poor social and legal choices, his stance on zero-tolerance to doping in sporting events is no less relevant. What you’re suggesting is a red herring.
Literally Sha’Carri Richardson was banned from competing in the Tokyo Olympics by the US Anti-Doping Agency because she smoked weed to help cope with the death of her mother. You’re making a big deal arguing that something that really does actually happen doesn’t for some reason.
I am not doing so. The USA swimming organization is.
His choices were only poor because there are cooler drugs to do that don’t harm your lungs and heart.
You need your lungs and heart, Phelps! Cardio is literally your career!
He won 28 Olympic medals. He’s the most decorated Olympian of all time. I think his career was fine. But no random internet person tell us more about what Michael Phelps should have done to be a better swimmer. LOL.
Imagine a Michael Phelps on meth swimming for medal 30.
Simply superior. The man wouldn’t have even needed water.
Yeah. He was sooooo close to not winning almost thirty medals… Weed was such a huge factor right?
Yes. They can’t test as easily for LSD.
Y’all know that doping usually refers to performance enhancing drugs right?
Wrong.
Doping refers to deliberate use of compounds or procedures explicity banned by WADA, in some clearly-defined window around a competition.
Pot is still on the list. End of story.
I think they were joking, but that’s a good clarification.
But it’s called Dope!
/s
I’d imagine microdosing cannabis could be performance enhancing in shooting sports, for example.
Cannabis doesn’t enhance your performance in swimming.
That’s not the point.
It absolutely is the point.
It’s still a banned substance.
Despite what some weirdos think doping has a very specific colloquial definition. It indicates performance enhancing substances. Drugs that give you an edge in competition. As pot does not do that it’s clearly not the point. Everyone on Earth knows what Phelps is talking about here.
But cannabinoids are on the WADA banned list. https://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibited-list
CBD is excepted, but he wasn’t using just CBD, he was smoking weed out of a bong. He was getting everything.
In February 2009, a photograph of Phelps using a bong went viral; this resulted in the loss of Kellogg’s as a sponsor, as well as a three-month suspension by USA Swimming. Phelps admitted that the photo, which was taken at a party at the University of South Carolina, was authentic. He publicly apologized, calling his behavior “inappropriate”.[286]
USA Swimming selects U.S. Olympians.
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This is about Anti-Doping not banned substances. Do you not understand the discrepancy?
I’ll just keep pasting this…
In February 2009, a photograph of Phelps using a bong went viral; this resulted in the loss of Kellogg’s as a sponsor, as well as a three-month suspension by USA Swimming. Phelps admitted that the photo, which was taken at a party at the University of South Carolina, was authentic. He publicly apologized, calling his behavior “inappropriate”.[286]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps#Legal_issues
USA Swimming selects American Olympic athletes.
And it’ll keep being irrelevant.
Sort of… CBD isn’t, and anyway I imagine the exclusion of cannabis won’t be around much longer. There are many studies that show it has no impact on athletic performance.
CBD was unfortunately on the ban list when he got in trouble. It was only just removed a decade later in 2019.
It’s also one of the few chemicals in cannabis that can affect performance, unlike THC which just bugs me. Like they are almost picking and choosing, purely to just be finicky
I think the window for the testing is what matters more. Whatever they do off-season is their business, as long as its not in their system during training and competition
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Wasn’t he banned from competing for a while because he tested positive for it or am I misremembering?
Yeah, I found out I wasn’t misremembering.
This sports stuff is expensive and controversial. Just ban sports competition. Solves the drugs shit and the trans stuff.
Don’t ban the competition, ban doping being illegal.
The ratings would be through the roof to watch some freak with more drugs than blood run a sub 8 second 100m right before his heart explodes.
I don’t think we should be promoting self harm for entertainment purposes.
Don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely watch the Monster League game every Sunday, but it will guaranteed lead to huge swaths of athletes destroying their bodies for ratings. They already do this without destructive performance enhancers, we don’t need to encourage it to be worse.
Strongmen manage it, why wouldn’t other sports?
Its russian medicine not doping /s
Absolutely. Yes.
Ehhhh I think there might be place for a little more subtlety. Someone who’s admitted to doing so probably doesn’t deserve to be banned from participating in a sport they probably love. And a hard line might encourage people to take the denial till death approach which can make things annoying
I would say that rule should only apply to purposefully taking something for an unfair advantage to juke the competition, like most steroids.
For the ones where the only reported reasoning is being harmful to the user or has a potential for abuse, I would say the decision be on a case by case basis.
My reasoning is that there are also people who’ve turned their lives around and quit the substances in question. Being banned when you are fully “legit” would be extremely demotivational and can increase relapsing. It could also be controversial to one of the ideals of the Olympics; overcoming adversity to be the best you can be.
They did it too they simply weren’t caught.
As long as there is an appeals process. And it seems there was.
What if they test positive for marijuana? 🤔
That’s like the opposite of a performance enhancer.
Yeah; it’s a joke referencing Micheal Phelps who was caught smoking weed while not even at the games any more and had this big controversy where people were demanding he have his medals taken away.
It’s only a performance enhancer if they have a giant chocolate bar at the end of the event waiting for the winner.
Improves endurance and recovery time. Especially from injuries like broken bones
Still it was on the list for many years, like alcohol. They can reduce competitive stress.
Research disagrees
We’ve seen this time and time again. Banning things outright just doesn’t work. Regulation works.
Also, almost every profession athlete uses steroids in some way or another.
