Not that surprising. There are is a range of valid criticisms of USADA/Tygart.

One of them is not that USADA is corrupt or that Tygart isn't an anti-doping crusader.

WADA absolutely got caught with their pants down in not following the required practice of having publicly published the violation. It should absolutely never have been covered up even if it had been deemed no-fault contamination (which is a whole other very questionable determination).

Well, its China. And you don't argue with China.

point of order mr speaker

CHINADA decided not to proceed with anti-doping rule violation charges against the 23 athletes that were concerned. And as a result of that, there was no basis at that time for them, and still less for WADA, to make any sort of publication about these cases. If WADA had chosen to have done that, it would have been a breach of the code and a breach of the privacy standards.

Im sure you have been over to swimswam, some indefatigable contributors to the comments going there. Check out Slow Breastroker. They have been punching well above the output suggested by their user name.

What a difficult and perhaps flawed system this all is - overlaid with strong and sometimes uninformed opinions from athletes and fans. Unlike the usual system of law in Western countries which is predicated on open justice and open courts, these disciplinary / regulatory arrangements are private and seemingly difficult to understand from an outsider's point of view.

Is that the same as there is no transparency, well I think what is more important is consistency and trust that a reasoned and evidence and fact based decision will be reached.

Tygart is absolutely kicking off over this - but a real bull in the china shop (ha ha ha). Cases of non reported contamination must not be unusual. WADA referenced a 2014 case involving 10 US athletes.

The general counsel of WADA said this at the presser (full press conference - GitHub - BriarWillow/WillowBriar_
:

WADA has never, at least since I've been involved with WADA's litigation since 2010, appealed a case of no anti-doping rule violation in order to obtain a finding of no fault violation; that has never happened. I also want to stress that this case is not without precedent. There are other examples, often involving contamination of groups of athletes, food or environmental contamination. There are multiple examples in the past involving WADA, where an ADO (Anti-Doping Organization) has decided not to bring forward the case as a result of the violation of the law, and WADA, whether or not it would have agreed technically with that approach under the code, has decided not to appeal in order to obtain a finding of no fault.
To give one example — and obviously, I won't give names or nationalities — there was a case involving a significant group, more than 10 athletes, that occurred on US soil in 2014. After investigation, the case was described by the results management authority, and also WADA accepted this, as meat contamination. That case did not give rise to a provisional suspension of any kind on any of the athletes, and also, it was not proceeded with as an anti-doping violation.

Don't be too swayed by USADA as the anti-corruption good guy. They're still 50% funded by the same organization that makes money by producing entertaining competition, which is absolutely enhanced by athletes being... enhanced.

***climbs up on soapbox***

While other nations have systematic doping SOP's in place, the USA effectively has willful negligence as it's primary system of allowing moderated efforts at doping to fly under the radar. Sometimes blatantly willful. In my short 4 years of athletics in the international testing pool, I saw four violations that went unrecorded. The blind eye was very blind (because it was closed!)

1. My wife was supposed to assist in doping control at a national meet. She was asked to pick at random the next athlete to test. She chose the one she thought looked the most doped. She was told, "no, we're not testing her today." That athlete won her weight class by the largest margin at the meet.
   
   
2. My wife went home from the OTC because she was quitting bobsled. She came back to try pilot school, many months later. The doping control officer said they had been looking for her for months. She had missed several tests because she had completely ceased reporting her whereabouts, because she intended to quit the sport. They took her urine sample and never recorded that she'd missed a handful of drug tests. Was their decision ethically/morally right... yeah probably. Are they completely lucky that my wife wasn't a doper? Also yes.
   
   
3. I was located by a doping control officer and her male assistant at my place of work, in the off-season. Her assistant turned out to be a person I'd played computer games with extensively and knew vicariously through a close mutual friend. He was the one who watched me provide my urine sample. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to be friends with the person you're testing and you're supposed to declare that you know the person if it turns out that you do. I think there might even be something you sign stating that you have no relationship with the person. I believe he signed the form and then I did because I didn't want to waste anyone's time (including my own).
   
   
4. When I left the bobsled team to go train for a year or two back home, they took me out of the International Registered Testing Pool (ITP / RTP). I no longer had to report whereabouts because I was no longer on the national team. I came back the next year and competed on an international circuit without returning to the testing pool and could have been doped to the gills. The process was supposed to be "the only way you get off the RTP is retire. If you un-retire, you have to pass whereabouts reporting and drug tests for at least 6 months before re-entry in to the sport." Yeah, that didn't happen. All I did was not show up for the national team qualifiers. I had every intention of returning to the sport and the national team after some physical preparation and made that very clear to the sport admin. And they still took me out of the testing pool. How convenient!

I think I had a whopping total of 2-3 other drug tests that actually went to protocol in those 4 years. I think that's roughly a 35% success rate for "following the protocol that are supposed to ensure clean sport."

The patterns of taking years "off" in certain sports, by some athletes, smells a lot like conveniently dropping out of the testing pool and coming back after a year or two of doped training.

Either there is negligent oversight, or it's corrupt top-down. I'll choose to believe negligence. But it does leave gaping holes for dopers to exploit the system. </soapbox>

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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I almost posted something about this earlier this week but I got busy and forgot about it.

What I was going to post…. Does this change anyone’s thoughts that there isn’t cover ups in triathlon? I for one believe that there is.

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blog

Agree completely that the system is completely full of holes and athletes know exactly where and how to take advantage. If 75% of the athletes are on PED's, I wouldn't be surprised. I am certain at least that many are on stuff in NFL, MLB, NBA, soccer, NHL, track, and swimming. As ugly as cycling's history has been, it may actually be the cleanest of the sports at the moment.

Which is why is am surprised USADA is going so hard after WADA. There must be another angle that they would be benefitting from all this rather than them being the white knight in all this.

I am sure there is especially IM being the police in their own events. Conflict of interest much?

IM's not their own police -- remember, they use a third party admin (https://ita.sport/) for stuff. It's how the Chartier announcement came.

General reminder for doping threads -- no accusing athletes without first-hand information of illicit behavior -or- a published sanction.

Now back to writing about the upcoming Olympics after being in Paris all week...

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

If you're going to bring points of order, better bring The Code!

Quote:

If WADA had chosen to have done that, it would have been a breach of the code and a breach of the privacy standards.

Not at all. While they maybe had a legal pathway to not publicly release, it is absolutely not a breach of The Code to choose public release.



Also, athletes can be provisionally suspended during an investigation, and that also involves going public.



Provisional suspensions must be public. You can't secretly suspend someone.

Tygart is arguing both of these should have happened.

It's what USADA does. Here's a very recent example. If nearly two dozen athletes got contaminated with a powerful drug from a hotel kitchen, that's good information to get out there to protect other athletes. I like the call for reform in that USADA release. Sunlight is better to reform rules related to contamination. Secrecy is not a great way to handle mass contamination events - to change the testing rules to not have positives on trace substances or else to instruct athletes how to avoid contamination.

It's also good for the whole thing to be above board in this case.

Edit: Maybe your argument is this was all CHINADA's discretion, and WADA had no authority to question CHINADA's decisions? I admit I don't know the conditions under which a WADA can review or override the decisions of a national results management body.

But it's not a good look that WADA did minimal-to-no review of any of it. Just stamped it and moved on.

Edit: I'm also mildly suspicious of Aldrich Bailey's "ostarine on the leg sleeve." But at least I'm allowed to be mildly suspicious and question it. Unlike with the 23 swimmers.

that is not how i understand the code working. whenever a WADA-accredited lab unearths an adverse finding it must by the code inform 3 entities: the testing authority (whomever ordered and paid for the test); the IF (FINA in this case); an WADA. if there are inconsistencies, as there likely were WADA has the power to: 1) investigate; and 2) decertify an anti-doping authority. what i don't understand - but i haven't followed this - is why the angst is all about WADA while FINA gets off scott free.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Moved on and appointed a Chinese woman as the VP of WADA. That $2M coming from China seems to have been put to work quite effectively.

there's history here. in 2004, after a long-brewing feud, and a pair of cases brought against IM that the ITU (now world triathlon) lost at CAS the charasmatic, talented, and also vengeful late Les McDonald (then head of the ITU) engineered a vote in the ITU's annual congress that kicked IM out from under the federation umbrella (also getting the boot were Life Time's events, Powerman, XTERRA as i recall). all those race orgs were very quietly embraced back into federation governance 2 years later but during that interregnum IM had to scramble to find a solution for anti-doping at its races, officiating and so on. this is why IM today has an anti-doping staff as well as a staff of officials run by jim riccitello. IM was granted the designation of "IF equivalent" by WADA back in 2005.

anti-doping and officiating at IM do good work. they are accretive to, not instead of, USAT's officials and USADA. IM works fist-in-glove with USADA, contracting out much of the anti-doping mechanics. not all countries are reliable at anti-doping, as we see here with china. but IM is worldwide and so are its athletes. so, IM might contract out to a private entity to manage doping control officers in a country, to bypass corrupt officials. IM can't do any of this if it doesn't manage its own house.

there is one and only one area where IM could reasonably be accused of a conflict and that is in results management. IM could contract that out to USADA as well. background: you can pay USADA just to run all the tests, that is, to arrange DCOs to be at events or to show up at athletes' houses; to get the results to labs; to inform organizations of results and so on. results management refers to what you do with the results. this is the issue with the china thing. what china's NADO did (apparently) was sit on / ignore / explain away the results. this is because the chinese NADO was - like the jamaican NADO several years back - devoted to the performance of their country's athletes, not the fidelity of the athletes. because IM handles its own results management it could, theoretically, make a business decision about an adverse finding. but a lot of people would be in on that secret and there's a terrible business risk to that.

as to tygart, he's absolutely incorruptible. at this point in his life he's willing to publicly challenge WADA. he wasn't always willing to do that.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Point of order -- IM doesn't internally own results management anymore. That's the purview of ITA.

Quote directly from the Chartier sanctioning release:

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

But they are in effect their own police aren’t they? Is their budget sufficient for proper testing? The only deterrent is to have a comprehensive out of competition testing programme and it appears to only come from NGBs and National Olympic authorities.

Nearly everyone moving from ITU to Long Course jokes about the lack of testing once removed from the NGBs testing pool. Chrissie Wellington, Jodie Swallow, Leanda Cave all complained about it and that is just the British women from years ago.

One fairly high ranking pro recently commented on a SM post that they have only been tested a handful of times.

Wasn’t that out of competition test as a result of an athlete integrity report by someone to a NGB?

Or I think 3) appeal. I'm reasonably sure that WADA could have appealed 1) the decision to not publicly disclose an adverse analytical finding, 2) the decision to not provisionally suspend. And also 3) the decision to regarding the rapid no-fault finding. Not necessarily asking to immediately overturn the no-fault finding, just asking for deeper review from outside CHINADA.

Quote:

what i don't understand - but i haven't followed this - is why the angst is all about WADA while FINA gets off scott free.

It's complicated. I think FINA has its own anti-doping program through the ITA - like IM does. But I believe this particular event was not that. It was "Olympic" testing under the WADA umbrella, and very possibly FINA was never in the chain of decision making or notification. FINA - her rheisler and IM - may not even be involved in results management for its own ITA testing.

If those things are true - it's probably good. There's ample evidence from the 80's, 90's that sports governing bodies cannot be trusted to drop hammers on their own star athletes. When their star athletes are key to the sponsorship and other deals that fund governing bodies.

I can't recall circumstance.

The broader point is that IM does not internally handle results management.

With regard to the IM testing pool -- Their RTP (which you can find published on their Anti-Doping page on the website) calls out that they specifically look at who is in their respective NADA's programs to make sure they get as many people under their umbrella as possible. It's certainly broader, and more comprehensive, than it used to be when IM was relying on working with the existing NADA framework. Using ITA is an improvement.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But it's progress.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

good then. i haven't updated my reporting in recent years on doping. i just found out that kate mittelstadt isn't heading up IM's program any longer (for the past year or 2). maybe her leaving is and IM's move to ITU for results mgmt happened concurrently. i'll investigate. in any case, seems to me this closes the door on IM's exposure to a conflict of interest.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

it would be news to me that the IF is not notified of an AAF. there are (or were) certain bedrock elements to the code and notification is central to that. i'll ask around on that.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Help us out here. Give us your (very rough) definition of "proper testing" you think Ironman should adopt, perhaps in a combo of quantity (how many M and W) and quality (PTO Rankings - can't think of an IM equivalent; guess might morph to IM Series standings or last year's IMWC and 70.3WC results).

A lot of the athletes on the ProTriNews RTP list are shown as in the IRONMAN pool/list (as opposed to a national ADO pool). And there are fair few more athletes in that pool who are not T100 contracted or wildcards and thus not named.

Who is paying ITA's bills and salaries? I can't find it online. I know who pays WADA which is why they are a dumpster fire.

Here's my shot:

Athletes sign contract with Ironman.
They lose all federation arbitration/trial rights. Arbitration is exclusively with Ironman.

Ironman requires full transparency of testing, results, TUEs, etc.

Athletes agree to sacrifice privacy and some degree of due process in order to ensure wealthy connected athletes can't escape the system.

What anti-doping funding mechanism is free of any potential issue?

I have a hardish time thinking of one. Governments, "public" governing bodies, private leagues, corporate sponsors. All potential conflicts. A few organizations have tried an "anti doping surcharge" for recreational athletes. I think that makes sense, though is unpopular with some. But I'm not sure how that'd work for elite athletes...once again it'd like be the governing body paying the surcharge for the athletes...with the surcharge going....through the governing body. On paper it's a separate line of accounting. But it's still money going through the governing body.

At some point you just have to trust the process and the people. Or not. The ITA's business model arguably rests on credibility. I haven't heard any suggestion that they've undermined that.