trail wrote:
mauricemaher wrote:
My understanding is that USADA does do WTC testing, look at Dan Stubinski an amateur on here who has been tested twice.
Is there any other accredited body that does testing in the US?
Maurice
You could be right, I'm not sure.
According to this ST article it's kind of both. WTC contracts w/ USADA at times, but at other times acts as its own testing authority, particularly with pros. But that was 2011 so not sure of the current state of affairs.
the last i heard, USADA was a contractor for ironman. what USADA did was perform the tests. USADA has its own DCOs around the world it uses, who are other contractors (doping control officers). USADA doesn't send someone from colorado springs to, say, nice, france, or chattanooga. it's like when jason bourne was in tangiers. the CIA didn't send a hit man to tangiers. it texted the local contract hit man in tangiers. same sort of thing. then the sample is transported by the DCO to the contracted lab.
ironman may choose to use USADA worldwide, or it might use someone else to perform this in other countries. there are other NADOs who'll do this for a price, and there are private contractors. what USADA does not do, in the U.S. at least, is results management. in other words, USADA does not contact the athlete, tell him he's popped, and then get into the process of convicting the athlete, hearings, the ban period, all of that.
in other countries ironman might do results management and it might not. i don't know. ironman might turn an adverse finding over to, say, the brazilian federation if it's a brazilian athlete. or it might not if it thinks the brazilians are going to just whitewash it.
i don't know what the current state of results management is with ironman but they clearly have handled a lot of it themselves. it creates a conflict of interest. for example, if a kona champ gets busted is that good for business? if you think it's not, then you might handle it in some way other than textbook. however, it's a fiction to think USAT, or the french or german federation, don't have a conflict. the only entities that don't have conflicts are NADOs but we saw a couple of years ago that the jamaican NADO was very conflicted. so, who is the purest? i don't know.
if you think USADA is the purest, and you give all worldwide ironman results management to USADA, okay. but what would USADA charge to accept that? i don't know. i've never gotten a straight answer from anyone on that. this economics of results management is quite opaque.
does a test carried out by USADA, but where its simply a contractor to ironman for the mechanics of sample collection, accrue to USADA's dbase? i don't know. i don't think so. but i don't know for sure. i forgot a lot of what i knew since the last time i reported on this.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman