A few days ago I was direct about the “rumours” of positive findings and how, whoever leaked there were positives coming out of Kona, should be fired because whoever it was broke the very process that is written in the code controls. Low and behold Slowman does his thing and here is the result.
“It was an out of competition test conducted on one of the athletes in the ITU testing pool,” says the ITU’s executive director Loreen Barnett of the “positive” result. “However there were no adverse findings,” she continued. “Upon further investigation we have discovered that all levels were within the various thresholds.”
So rumour mills start, fingers are pointed etc. The whole time Les MacDonald is the culprit of the leak and “oops” it is one of his athletes (by that I mean ITU) that had the, quote, “non adverse findings”…
Les, you gotta go. I do have so much respect for everything you have done for triathlon. Without you I would probably never have that feeling I had watching Simon win in Sydney; pure patriotic joy. Sorry mate, you are a Canadian and all that but this said, you just can’t be above the process and rules of your own governing body and that of WADA.
First off, Dan got quite a few zingers in, in the followup article. Do I detect a significant presence of pissed off regarding the machinations of the ITU and its president.
Second, I called the first half of the follow up correctly:
"OTOH, the implication that names were known and might have been ITU athletes with TUEs, is that Les is just stirring the mud because the system is flawed. Specifically, nobody seems to clear the air after a positive result is detected but then cleared by a TUE. So, even if it is your (ITU) athlete at Ironman with a positive, but cleared by a TUE on file, the athlete is never named, but you can out the result and tarnish the image of the race without hurting yourself (ITU). I know this is really farfetched, but do I inderstand the process well enough that this scenario could actually occur? "
I might have gotten it all correct, if Slowman hadn’t called ITU and McDonald out on the original rumors.
“Do I detect a significant presence of pissed off regarding the machinations of the ITU and its president.”
the first article i wrote was news and labeled as such. the second article was opinion and labeled as such (it’s in our OpEd section, and has been so-labeled for the past 7 years).
yes, i do have opinions, which i occasionally, write, and did so this time because i had enough facts at my disposal so as to create an informed opinion. no, i don’t think there’s ever a good justification for an A sample to be leaked if the aim of the leak is to excise the “good” athletes from a sport filled with a lot of supposed “bad” athletes. if that’s not what the ITU’s president was doing, then i’m open to an alternative explanation.
others can disagree with me, and that’s what this forum is for.
Slowman, my bad for refering to the followup as an article rather than an editorial, and within an editorial, most anything is fair game.
As far as my comment goes, I was neither endorsing or refuting your opinions. The editorial just came across that you were letting out a lot more from the vest as compared to how you normally comment. You may ask probing questions but always in an objective fashion. It seems that in this OpEd piece you may have reached a tipping point regarding this matter in general.
What is funny…I am just a run of the mill MOP guy…who is this Les guy? Sure, you Dan and many others here know the day to day minutia of IMNA, WADA and ITU…the rest of us…we only read “Positive Drug Test” and don’t know the politics behind why some guy called Les would “leak” this. Gleaning from reading this thread three times now it seems to me that is a political argument much akin to fighting within the ranks of the Democrat party…sure, some of us read the story, but we will never get it. If what I read is “true” - and if “Les” was working in a regular Corp America business - I can only presume he would be at best fired, at worst charged with slander and or defamation.