I think it’s farce anyway ever since i got to know how many of those athletes are supposedly asthmatics.
Just legalize it all and have a 2nd category for clean athletes. “Ok, you are in the freakazoid group.”
Why do we even care that much? Can’t we just let them roid up and have a good time?
This is a great question! I’d say that the reason is to actually protect the athletes, rather than protect the “purity” of the olympics. If they changed the rules so that people could do all the drugs they wanted to, then it would basically mean that you’re required to do drugs to effectively compete - those without the drugs would have a big disadvantage against those who use them.
We know that many performance enhancing drugs can have very harmful side-effects, so that would ultimately lead to athletes harming themselves to be able to compete.
That would not be a good outcome for anyone, I don’t think.
Why can’t they just all agree to have a good time
Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.
The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/
But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there’s no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn’t a system to encourage it).
While China’s WADA positive test rate is indeed low, it’s higher than the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) positive test rate, by quite a significant amount, which may suggest that the national agency aren’t policing doping as closely as WADA. The USA’s national anti-doping agency (USADA) has a higher positive test rate than WADA’s, again, by quite a significant amount. Additionally, WADA has significantly higher sample rate in the US compared to the sample rate in China - despite the fact that CHINADA has a much higher sample rate than USADA.
My point isn’t that the US is better or more honest at handling doping than China, just that the analysis of doping test rates has quite a lot of variance, and it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from them.
I’ve been looking at this data for reference:
https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/2021_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf
Where do you get your claims?
Either way, as another guy pointed out US athletes have a really quite absurdly high rate of TUEs. Maybe that’s just because the average American is unhealthy, maybe that’s just because the US healthcare system catches more of those things, but it’s still odd that those athletes coincidentally take performance-enhancing drugs as medication for their medical condition. It’s also odd how low the TUE rate is in other countries in comparison - WADA seems more willing to approve requests from the US, which maybe explains part of the discrepancy.
Slightly more recent version of the same document, as well as the ADRV report
https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/2022_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf
https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/2020_adrv_report.pdf
Global positive test rate is 0.67%. 25% of those are “legal” (~250). Of the illegal ones, 25 Chinese, 57 Americans, 135 Russians.
The Beijing lab reported 25 AAFs, for a 0.23% positive test rate over 10326 tests. The LA and SLC labs together reported 153 AAFs, for a 1.54% positive test rate over 9904 tests. So… Eh? Isn’t this the opposite result being claimed? The US is able to run interference for a good proportion of their AAFs by claiming “medical reasons” and other bullshit.
so are we just gonna ignore that cannabinoids are included in this.
Flagrant violation of the rules knowing that the US national agencies won’t give a fuck. The rules themselves might be questionable (but really, cannabinoids are still illegal in most of the world…), but it demonstrates that US athletes feel like they can basically ignore the rules because nobody will enforce them.
well when half or more of the people who admitted to using PEDs were using cannabinoids it certainly cuts into your argument that there’s a wide ranging conspiracy across dozens of disciplines to encourage doping.
You’re barking up the wrong tree with this one. The real story is the number of US Olympians that have TUEs that coincidentally are performance enhancers and the relative lack of TUEs for other countries’ Olympians (e.g., China).
