Run to Win

The IOC has announced that it is going to retest all of the samples collected from the Olympic games in the wake of the positive tests found by the Tour de France for the latest version of EPO, Continuous Erythropoiesis Receptor Activator. CERA is a stamina boosting drug which was not detectable until recently. It increases the number of red blood cells produced by bone marrow, but lasts longer and requires fewer injections than older forms of EPO.

“There will most definitely be some athletes who thought they could escape being caught because they thought the test would not be ready,” said Christiane Ayotte, director of a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory outside Montreal. “We knew it came to the market just before springtime last year and if there were positives in the Tour de France, then we think there will be positives from Beijing.

“Why the technique was not put into place in Beijing, I have no answer to give you,” she said. “But we’re not missing anything. The opportunity to have those samples retested one or two months later is great.”

The President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is planning on making retroactive tests a normal part of the Olympic Games in an effort to discourage doping in the future. The statute of limitations states that an athlete can be found guilty of doping for up to 8 years following an athletic contest.

Christiane Ayotte is positive that there will be more cheats found from the Beijing Games, which is a very cynical point of view that I’m afraid will turn out to be the correct one. There were only 9 positive tests out of 5000, which is less than 0.2% coming positive at the games.

(More Info: NY Times – Photo Credit: Kevork Djansezian)

The Court for Arbitration of Sport is looking for a new president, and two names have been floated. The first is Geneva-based lawyer Robert Briner.

The other nominee? Former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound. He was nominated by the International Olympic Committee, and a vote could come as early as April on who the next president will be.

If Dick Pound is elected to be the head of CAS, then I hope that he does a better job there than he did at WADA. He did a lot of good work at WADA, but he also turned his office into a laughingstock at times and seemed more interested in his private vendettas than in finding real proof or following legal procedures. He finished his time in office there on a high note, though, so if he is elected then I hope that he carries it forward into his new career.

(Further Reading: CBC Sports)

Less than a month after the World Anti-Doping Agency passed the Madrid Resolution, WADA President Dick Pound met with former BALCO owner Victor Conte about ways to prevent and catch athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. The Madrid Resolution calls for stiffer penalties for those caught cheating, as well as the ability to offer reduced penalties for those who help bring in others.

These changes go into effect in 2009, whereupon athletes serving bans for illegal doping will no longer be allowed to train with their parent organizations.

Victor Conte seems to be turning over a new leaf now that he is out of prison, and is providing WADA with the different methods that he encouraged athletes to use when he was developing his drugs.
(Click here to continue reading…)

Last Summer, a letter was leaked to the Los Angelos Times that Lance Armstrong had written to the International Olympic Committee. In the letter, Armstrong called for the forced resignation of Dick Pound due to his slanderous public comments and his lack of ethical involvement in athlete affairs as the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. It did not take very long for Dick Pound to respond and insult Lance Armstrong for writing the letter in the first place.

It took a while, but the IOC has decided to officially reprimand Dick Pound for his comments.

In a rebuke considered rare because it involves one of its own members, the International Olympic Committee officially reprimanded Pound for comments that might have damaged the legendary cyclist’s reputation. [...] According to the IOC’s decision, dated Feb. 2, the organization’s ethics commission recommended that Pound had “the obligation to exercise greater prudence consistent with the Olympic spirit when making public pronouncements that may affect the reputation of others.”

This of course did not phase him in the least. If there is one thing that Dick Pound lacks it is tact. In response to his public reprimand, he told the newspapers that this was the IOC’s way of trying to get Lance Armstrong to stop bothering them, since “Lance Armstrong has probably killed a Brazilian rain forest with all the paper he has used to file his complaints [...]”

Whether Lance Armstrong cheated or not, I think that Dick Pound has continually overstepped his authority and shown that he is not impartial and that he does not adhere to any sort of ethical standards in the way that he deals with athletes. A reprimand is a nice start, but I do not think that it really goes far enough and I doubt that it will be very long before the next controversy is publicized between him and somebody who may or may not be doping.

While he may have done a lot for WADA early in his career, I can not imagine that the circus that he keeps around himself and all of the embarassment that he has brought to the position in the last half dozen years is really worthwhile. Lance Armstrong seems happy to at least have gotten the reprimand out of the IOC, and that is likely all that we will see.

(Source: ESPN.com)