PED Offences And Russian Sport

The Olympic Games And Their Dwindling Appeal

With every passing year the Olympics loses its lustre and allure. Maybe I'm saying that because we've had ours in Sydney and it's fading into memory and history every year. Yeah 2000 was grand but every Olympic since has made you wonder if it's really right or worth it. 2004 Athens and the Greeks who ended up with the GFC and austerity?; 2008 Beijing and the self-congratulatory navel-gazing?; 2012 London which was okay, but then it's London so it's hard to go wrong; and now Rio with all the reported problems that make you not want to fall in to the water at all. As for the Winter Games? There's been Sochi with guards beating up on Pussy Riot and all the other unmemorable events, and if you're an Aussie it's hard to take the Winter Games as seriously anyway, seeing that we'll never stage one.

Now that I think about it Baseball got kicked out of the Olympic Games because of the doping scandals in the mid 2000s. They kicked out Softball with it, which was a bit like punishing Table Tennis because Maria Sharapova tested positive. And they added Golf and none of the top players in Golf are going to play at Rio because... Zika virus, apparently. I guess golfers are susceptible to acephalic medical conditions. All of which makes you wonder if the Olympics actually have relevance to the rest of the world of sport. Think of all the sports that aren't contested at the Games and they now include Baseball, Softball, Cricket, and Rugby. But hey, they have Volleyball AND Beach Volleyball as separate, discrete sports. Sports we don't watch unless it's on because of the Olympics.

Quite simply, the Olympic Games is like a bundle package of obscure sports we only want to watch once every 4 years. The sports that aren't there are the staple sports we like to watch regularly. It's a big gap. Baseball, Cricket and Rugby don't need to be at the Olympics at all and can sustain their global audiences quite nicely. It's sports like Track and Field and Swimming that need to be at the Olympics, and probably Table Tennis too. Golf and Tennis? Clearly not so much. Basketball of course started the joke of inviting highly professionalised sport into what used to be the pinnacle of amateur sports. 1992 USA vs. Angola Basketball game was 'fun' (if you enjoy a team of professionals smash through country amateurs), but totally not in the Olympic spirit.

Anyway, all of these things have made me reconsider how I feel about the Olympic Games, and I have to say I'm less enamoured of them today than I was in 2000.

So, here's the news that Russia's Track and Field athletes are out for Rio.

Russia's Whole Track And Field Team Is Out For Rio

It's quite disturbing really.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Thursday it had rejected Russia's appeal against the exclusion of its track and field athletes from the Rio Games starting on August 5, opening the door to a full ban on Russian athletes from the Olympics.
"CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes," CAS said in a statement. 

The ruling by the CAS, sport's highest tribunal, will be taken into consideration by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it ponders whether to impose a blanket ban on Russia from all sports. 

The affair has triggered a crisis in world sport, with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking of the risk of a split in the Olympic movement. 

Russian track and field athletes were banned from international competition in November after an independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency found rampant state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics. 

The ban was imposed by the IAAF, the global governing body for athletics, which reconfirmed it last month, saying there were still considerable problems with anti-doping in Russia. 

The appeal was launched by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and 68 Russian athletes who said they were being punished despite not having failed drugs tests, and that they should be eligible to compete in Rio.

Thus, if you're an innocent little schlub whose only talent is chucking a spear and you've never done any PEDs, you're still out thanks to those who did in your country and got caught which includes your whole nation's sport administrative institutions. The problem is you don't choose to which country you are born. There is no point at which the innocent go unpunished in this WADA regimen.
Clearly it's unfair on the innocent, there's no presumption of innocence that would happen in a court of law, and this was the appeals court that just cited precedent to punish the innocent with the guilty. Way to go guys. I can really feel the righteous burn of justice right there... not.

This isn't like the 1919 Black Sox where knowing about the match-fixing and not blowing the whistle got Buck Weaver banned for life from organised Baseball by Kennesaw Mountain Landis. That was done to send message forever eternal that match-fixing threatened the integrity of the game and won't be tolerated. That's kind of a worthy sacrifice. What this is, is like punishing Svetlana Kuznetsova because Maria Sharapova got banned for a failed drug test - even though Kuznetsova had no idea about Sharapova's doping let alone anything to do with it. I'm amazed they're doing this with a straight face.

That's not to say the Russian sports federation doesn't have major issues with doping. Clearly they do.  But 28 years after Ben Johnson, and with what we know today, you'd think the thinking about PEDs might have moved on from the ban-everybody-in-sight routine they've been trotting out forever. There's got to be a better way of dealing with PEDs than what WADA is doing.

Honestly, I've long lost faith that this approach has much merit. I know it's the minority view, but I think we're coming to the point in history where the War on Drugs has failed and we'd better take stock of what that means, right across the pharmaceutical board. That would include admitting PEDs might not be all unilaterally harmful.

Amphetamines, Ephedrine, Pseudoephedrine, Phenylephrine

Once upon a time, Amphetamines were legal over the counter, and they were also PEDs. MLB players took them a lot in the 50s and 60s from what we can gather, until the whole drug abuse thing became such a legal anathema they made amphetamines illegal. Which, I think is an over-reaction.

My ex-friend KJ (we fell out badly but that's another story) had high-powered academics as parents. One of them was even a professor of Pharmacology. They said that when they were doing exams in the 60s, they'd bolster their cramming with Amphetamines. And they didn't turn into crazed drug abusers or mentally compromised brain-disease cases. The worst they would have experienced would have been come-down after the exams, which they also related. The Amphetamines were sold as flu medication to stop nasal congestion.

By the time KJ and I were cramming for our exams at Med School, the Amphetamines were replaced with Ephedrine. Yes you could get Ephedrine over the counter in the 80's and they were really quite good as nasal decongestants. They used to have this ad where you could 'soldier on with Codral', With Ephedrine, you really could sit through days of 3hour exams even with a ringing flu. Then you crashed for a couple of days - but it worked. Even so KJ's parents said it wasn't quite as good as Amphetamines in terms of efficacy.

Of course, Bikie gangs discovered that they could convert Ephedrine into Methamphetamine, a methylated analog of Amphetamine, so they went out and bought up big on Ephedrine in order to produce their Methamphetamine,and sell it as 'Speed'. This led to legislation banning Ephedrine, and so the pharmaceutical companies came out wiht Pseudoephedrine, which once again was not anywhere near as good as its predecessor as a nasal decongestant. It sort of worked, as opposed to really working.

Years went by, and bikie gangs figured out how to make Crystal Meth, otherwise known as 'Ice' out of Pseudophedrine. 'Ice' is by all accounts, a much worse drug than its predecessor 'Speed', which was a worse drug than straight up Amphetamines. Now, the 'Ice Epidemic' has forced Pseudoephedrine off the shelves, replacing it with Phenylepinephrine, which hardly works at all as a nasal decongestant. If things keep going the way they go, the bikies will probably figure out how to make an even worse drug out of Phenylepinephrine than 'Ice' or 'Speed' before it. This will inevitably lead to an even less effective medication replacing Phenylepinephrine; and whatever that medication is, the Bikies will then turn that into an even worse drug than whatever they'll do with Phenylephrine.

The point is, it is the War on Drugs that is enabling this gradual degradation in the quality of medication available to the ordinary innocent consumer, all to stop some people abusing it to get a buzz. That's it. To that end, the Bikies work harder and harder to make worse and worse drugs. Had it just stayed at Amphetamines, and the government not banned it being sold over the counter, it probably would have stayed mundane with some kids giving themselves a buzz. Instead, it's the highly ineffectual Phenylepinephrine that's available over the counter (they might as well be selling placebos) while the Bikies are busy cooking up Crystal Meth like Walter White. It's tremendously difficult to argue we're in a better place for all of this "fighting drugs" business. We're getting all the problems of prohibition without the joy of jazz or speakeasies.

Here's the thing. Lots of these drugs that are banned are actually useful pharmacological substances. Even Heroin has uses as an anaesthetic. When they banned heroin, it took a grea tool out of the hands of Anaesthetists, and any Anaesthetist would be all too happy to tell you that their work is like having a hand tied behind their backs because they had to work with opiate analogs and derivatives when in fact what would really do the trick was Heroin. Yet instead of regulating it like they do with Morphine, they ban it, and the Anaesthetists have to work pretending they don't know about it.

The point of all this is to say, in banning more and more substances for being PEDs, it's driving people into trying more dangerous pharmacological concoctions. Maybe plain old Testosterone might not be so bad in comparison to some of these synthetic drugs that are being created just to pass WADA's tests.

There's just got to be a better way. Certainly there's got to be a better way than punishing the innocent on the presumption of guilt. The first step is admitting there's a problem. We've had 28years trying the prohibition model and predictably, it's not working. There needs to be a total rethink on what drugs are, and what even "performance-enhancing" means.