I would say yes and no. He can race because the rules say he can race. In that aspect no one is limiting his ability to do that by “roasting” him as you put it. No where in the rule book does it say you have to high five with fellow podium winners. If you want to ignore him, you can ignore him etc. while you each celebrate your result. There’s no rule that says pros have to like each other.

So if you’re standing on the “rules are rules” that’s just not always a hill I’d necessarily want to stand and scream from the mountain top on certain infractions.

There’s a reading the room aspect that imo “rules are rules” doesn’t take into consideration. I think it’s obvious these type of infractions will always be a sore spot for others in the sport. I think in that aspect you just have to put your head down, and ignore the “roasting”. I would think coming back with “rules are rules” to the “roasting” is likely only going to show lack of understanding. Thus it’s almost best to just roll with it, even if you get “roasted”. Clapping back rules are rules just makes it worse for yourself.

ETA: And no I'm not suggesting "harassment" be allowed in these instances, but no where is that being shown to be the case atleast now 10+ years later with the commentary.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

There's strong evidence to suggest that steroids carry a lasting advantage for many years after use. There is little reason to believe that blood transfusions carry an advantage beyond a few days. Now you need 10-15y studies on a rainbow of substances. //

You are falling into the old trap of thinking only about the drugs effect on race day. Of course all drugs will clear the system at different times, but dont be fooled in just thinking that a high HCT% is just a Raceday benefit. For endurance athletes the main advantage of the common drugs used is for recovery. They allow one to train harder for longer, over and over. This leads to building muscle memory and an advanced quickness in the sports, which then translate to faster races without any of the drugs in their systems.


As an older athlete who knows a ton of others like me, I have found that the speed you achieved in your youth, does have a translation decades later. One could be 20 years from their last performances, and with a little bit of training, rocket through the levels to be within some % of their old selfs. If your old self was a 5 minute runner, then you may get to 6 minutes rather quickly, while someone new to running may never get there no matter how hard they try. It is getting back to that old muscle memory that enables swimmers who have been out of the water for 30 years, to get back in for a couple months and leave most AOS swimmers who have trained hard for 2 decades in the dust.


So taking all these cases into account, it seems quite logical to me that someone who used drugs, any drugs to train harder and get faster, would also retain some of that advanced muscle memory too. I really dont see how a study could be done on this either, there is just no base cases to compare to, and the differences are quite small. If you doped as a pro and got a 5% advantage, how are you going to measure that 20 years later, assuming they are still not doping? So blood bags or EPO absolutely make athletes able to train harder and faster, and more often, so in the same category of steroids or T..You dont have to retain the higher HCT% to call upon the muscle memory it built during the training season..

bingo. i come down on two places here:

a) as monty says, the 'benefit' of the drugs isn't just their continuing presence in your bloodstream. it's the training load (and subsequent physiological adaptations) that they allowed you to take on. getting to spend even a little while training at the levels that modern drugs allows would be a great advantage.

see this article if you're wondering what some of those advantage look like for an amateur, middle-aged endurance athlete. https://www.outsideonline.com/...rformance/drug-test/

b) whether the drugs still benefit you after you're done your ban isn't the most important thing. in fact, even if the drugs never benefitted you at all, the point is that they're banned. so taking them is wrong - really, really wrong - and that's a breach of the sport community's trust.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Not for nothing, but it *is* worth noting that Weiss - and we're still talking about Weiss, right? - wasn't accused of, or sanctioned for, drug use. The allegation that led to his suspension was that Bernard Kohl had seen him in the same lab that Kohl himself was using to bag blood for later use. That is the full extent of the charges, and the publicly available evidence laid against him. There is no question that blood doping is - and was - a banned process, and 100% cheating, but it seems important to point out the actual basis for Weiss' ban given some of the content of this thread.


...and yes, I know the obvious response to this is something along the lines of "come on, do you really believe that that's all that..."
To which... kinda? Yuck, but maybe?

I've been around long enough to have heard athletes from the Eddy B blood doping days in cycling expound at length upon the difference, and it's clear that they have at least convinced themselves there is a difference. More to the point, though, this forum has long had a policy against levelling non adjudicated doping claims upon athletes. Perhaps this is parsing that policy a bit finely but I think it applies, at least to the extent that we should note that Weiss is - at least implicitly - here being assumed guilty of offenses he was never even formally accused of.

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Tech writer/support on this here site. FIST school instructor and certified bike fitter. Formerly at Diamondback Bikes, LeMond Fitness, FSA, TiCycles, etc.
Coaching and bike fit - http://source-e.net/ Cyclocross blog - https://crosssports.net/ BJJ instruction - https://ballardbjj.com/

He is a euro so the policy does not apply, same for any AG cross fitters who go faster than people on ST

I'd never forgive an unrepentant doper. An early step in being forgiven is owning up to what you did wrong. This is fundamental.

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http://www.jt10000.com/

absolutely correct, and bears repeating. thanks.

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

so do you believe michi was a clean athlete?

When did you stop beating your spouse?

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Tech writer/support on this here site. FIST school instructor and certified bike fitter. Formerly at Diamondback Bikes, LeMond Fitness, FSA, TiCycles, etc.
Coaching and bike fit - http://source-e.net/ Cyclocross blog - https://crosssports.net/ BJJ instruction - https://ballardbjj.com/

In races? Never.

not necessarily responding to you specifically, but to the folks in general regarding dopers and apologies.

I would love it if an athlete, in any sport, that gets pinched for doping would simply get up and have the balls to say the truth....yes I did a cost benefit analysis and decided that doping and making big big bags of money far outweighed the miniscule chance of getting busted, so you can take your apologies and gather them up with your show horses and unicorns and go off in your own little world.

To me, there are a ton of things that people legitimately are owed an apology. I just don't think this is one.

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"one eye doubles my eyesight, so things don't look half bad" John Hiatt

Depends on the people. I'd agree generally about most of us. But since in the somewhat zero-sum world of endurance competition prize money and endorsements, the big bags of money of a doper would take money away from clean competitors (assuming clean pros exist, and I think they do), the clean pro might be interested in an apology.

Fair point. In hindsight, my frame of reference was geared more to "fans".

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"one eye doubles my eyesight, so things don't look half bad" John Hiatt

Just a general reply, as I often debate this in my head about the return to competitive sport after doping violation. My closest experience was when I did Kona in 2004, the year that women's winner Nina Kraft was later suspended and stripped of her title because of a positive EPO test. After rereading the following article, I still go back and forth. Kraft admitted to the offense after being caught, then wanted, and needed to be involved in the sport, and continued to give back to the sport after she retired. It made me also think of Collin Chartier, who after his ban was announced, on Jack Kelly's podcast, said he would never return to the sport. People are on both sides of the fence on this. I get both sides.


https://triathlonmagazine.ca/personalities/remembering-triathlete-nina-kraft/

One thing that often doesn't come up in the "should dopers be allowed to return" is false positives. The EPO test in particular is somewhat subjective. I don't know the exact science behind it, but the number positive A / negative B tests for EPO doesn't instill confidence.

How accurate does a test need to be to give a lifetime ban? Surely we can ban for life after a 90% certainty test. 95%? 99%?

In the 30+ years I've been watching pro cycling and other endurance sports, I've never heard of this. Maybe it doesn't make the news?

Edit - OK, quick google search shows a few examples over the past 10+ years.

So you don't really know how it works...yet you are arguing that it "doesn't instill confidence"?

If you don't know how it works (I don't either) then we can't really have an intelligent argument about the accuracy of it.

in my experience, the folks who are really against doping and i mean, *i can out-doper you*. i don't care how anti-doping you are, it's not enough for me. you're still in league with the dopers because you aren't as anti-doping as i am. that kind of person. the anti-doping cancel culture folks who shut down any conversation about doping because to even talk about it is to sanction it. that's the person whose door needs to get a knock from a DCO.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Well that's just not true. You can have an discussion about the outcomes without a full understanding of the process. We do this all the time with aerodynamics right here. Someone does Chung testing (correctly) and finds their new position is 10w faster but doesn't understand the specifics of why it's faster. Do we invalidate the test result because they don't understand high level aerodynamics?

i can honestly say that:

if i got to the point where i was one of the best in the world at sport but never quite actually nailed it and got the results i wanted and i was presented with an opportunity to use a PED and was convinced that my chances of getting caught were quite low

i'd have a pretty hard time saying no. the vanity of the result and recognition might outweigh the hypothetical shame and disgrace of getting caught.

that being said, i'd like to think that i'd give it a real hard think and i'd like to think that i'd turn it down.

that all being said, if you get a penalty and a ban for using a PED (and let's be honest, the chances that m. weiss wasn't a little dirty are pretty low given the testimony and circumstances), i don't think you should get to be a pro anymore.

i don't care about whether michi weiss should be allowed race or not. i care about how we treat each other here in the marketplace of ideas. it's not anti-doping talk that i mind. i hope we will never get inured to doping. i hope we always maintain our strident reaction to doping. what i mind are the anti-doping fascisti.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The reward is high, the risk is low. Just read about some new woman’s world record in track and first thoughts were about doping. Not a day went by in the TdF where I didn’t wonder if it was clean. Listening to various training techniques, diets, etc., from professionals and wonder are these just smoke screens to hide that the real performance gains are from doping. Still have the Carmichael cycling videos that he touted as Lance’s method for achieving cycling glory!

The damage is done. Professional body building forums had conversations like these years ago, guess which side won out.

the same Norwegian scientists that did the steroid research, had previously published a study identifying how the muscle memory works.. and already in 2010 had hypothesized,

Quote:

because anabolic steroids facilitate more myonuclei, nuclear permanency may also have implications for exclusion periods after a doping offense.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20713720/


The subsequent paper that mathematics mentioned above, just served to confirm the hypothesis. I find this persuasive.

Quote:

They found that three months after the drug was withdrawn, their muscles grew by 30% after six days of exercise. A control group of mice saw growth of just 6% in the same time period.
"It is rare to have data that clear cut, I was pretty satisfied with that," Prof Kristian Gundersen, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News.

That theory also works for non-steroidal doping - because the doping lets you train harder for longer, that training is going to affect the myonuclei too, and those effects last. Even if it's not specifically the myonuclei, as you say the experience of athletes has always been that the training effects do last.


Even so I can't support lifetime bans. Those would be a good idea if we had perfect tests for doping, but it runs into the same problem as capital punishment, human justice is fallible.

Sadly, I echo your comments and will add in my AG I look at some results the same way.
I recently commented to a buddy about the winning time in my AG at a "big" event - we both agreed, "that seems reasonable."
It shouldn't be that way, I know.

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I saw this on a white board in a window box at my daughters middle school...
List of what life owes you:
1. __________
2. __________
3. __________

Donald Trump has entered the chat.