Olympics

mos dan

mos dan

fact music
syed's article is fascinating, cheers.

Mr. Tea said:
Also, sporting excellence isn't exactly encouraged in most state schools. PE at the schools I went to was an absolute joke.
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yeah the PE at my school was pathetic, it's a small inner london school with crap resources: no full-sized football pitch, athletics track or anything.. and yet randomly, nathan ellington was in my year and jade johnson was in the year above. i don't really know what that proves. probably nothing.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Bear in mind that the whole Team GB effort was heavily sponsored by the state - excelling at every sport seems to require vast dollops of cash. At least public schools foot most of the bill for the transport sports themselves rather than commandeering the general public's donations.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just reading about the Paralympics today. Looks as though the UK did even better than in the other Olympics, coming second in the medal table (I guess there are more of what the Australians called sitting down sports) but some of the statistics are amazing. "Nathalie Du Toit, a South African swimmer who lost a leg in a car accident, came 16th in the 10,000m swim at the Olympics before winning five golds and breaking five world records at the Paralympics." I'm gobsmacked - someone with only one leg is the 16th fastest woman in the whole world over 10,000m!
 
CHAOTROPIC

CHAOTROPIC

on account
IdleRich said:
My friend told me today that more than forty percent of the British medal winners went to public school. An interesting statistic I think, if true, although I can't find the reference.
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I got sent to a public school for a single term when I was 11. After lunch, every day, we did sports for the whole afternoon. Athletics, field sports, team sports, the works. That's five four-hour stints a week. Parents came to pick up the day boys at 7pm, & we all had lessons on Saturdays until lunchtime. Crazy.

After that, I went to a local state school, which had the usual three hours of sport a week, a third of which we spent walking unsupervised around a field ('cross country running'), standing around in the freezing cold ('hockey'), or walking aimlessly through town ('bunking off').

The only comparison between the two is the boredom, violence & vindictiveness of the sports masters. Pricks seem to be classless.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I wonder....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympic_games/7658852.stm

The International Olympic Committee has revealed it will retest 5,000 doping samples from the Beijing Games to check for traces of a new blood-booster drug.
The IOC said its doping lab in Switzerland would be specifically testing for Cera, an advanced version of endurance-enhancing hormone EPO. The decision comes after French officials detected Cera during retesting of Tour de France samples.
However, it is thought the retests will cover all sports, not just cycling.
The IOC's announcement comes 48 hours after reanalysed samples from the Tour de France using the new technology unearthed two drug cheats - Germany's Stefan Schumacher, a double stage winner on this year's race, and Italian Leonardo Piepoli.
The original urine tests had raised suspicions but proved inconclusive.
"Basically, the IOC have a policy that allows them to go back up to eight years to retest a sample, but this is the first time they've done so on this scale," reports BBC sports news correspondent Gordon Farquhar.
"What they're looking at is a new test for third generation EPO. It's a blood-boosting drug which allows more oxygen to be carried in the system, therefore aiding stamina.
"At the moment, cyclists from the Tour de France are having their samples retested and already two more have been found to have been cheating using the substance Cera.
"Now the IOC is going to do the same. They will talk to the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) to create a protocol for this, which basically means creating a legal format for the retests, so they can go ahead and examine a substantial number of samples."
The IOC disqualified six athletes for doping during the Beijing Games - Ukrainian heptathlete Lyudmila Blonska, Ukrainian weightlifter Igor Razoronov, Greek hurdler Fani Halkia, North Korean shooter Kim Jong Su, Spanish cyclist Isabel Moreno and Vietnamese gymnast Thi Ngan Thuong Do.
Three other cases are still pending, with Belarusian hammer throwers Vadim Devyatovskiy and Ivan Tsikhan having been given until 17 October provide more information explaining why they tested positive for testosterone.
A decision is due shortly in the case of Polish canoeist Adam Seroczynski, who tested positive for clenbuterol.
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"EPO is specifically for endurance events, right?"
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I dunno. The guy who knows the most about athletics out of anyone I know is convinced that Bolt (amongst others) was doping. Apparently the tests (and the number of tests) conducted on him (and his team mates) during the Olympics are utterly meaningless because if they were going to cheat systematically they would not be using drugs at that point.
His other arguments are based on the fact that almost every other sprint champion of the last twenty years is either discredited or at least tainted and it seems unlikely that someone unassisted could beat all those times.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"your friend sounds very cynical"
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True up to a point. The thing is, he's the biggest cycling fan I know and probably the biggest athletics fan and I think that reluctantly he's had to accept that the sports he loves are totally rotten. A big thing for him was that letter from the guy involved in the doping thing with Dwayne Chambers which explains exactly how they used to cheat and what steps would be necessary to begin to counter their methods. As the IOC and other athletics bodies are in possession of this information but have taken no steps to act on it - preferring instead to do loads of meaningless tests during competition and trumpet the number of clean tests - it seems clear that there is a lack of will to even admit that there is a problem.
Thingy Armstrong (can you tell I'm not a fan?) the cyclist is (or was) often described as the most tested athlete in the world but again the tests were done at the wrong time and so they do not prove what they are claimed to (apparently it's also not actually true to say that he's the most tested but that's beside the point).
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
True up to a point. The thing is, he's the biggest cycling fan I know and probably the biggest athletics fan and I think that reluctantly he's had to accept that the sports he loves are totally rotten. A big thing for him was that letter from the guy involved in the doping thing with Dwayne Chambers which explains exactly how they used to cheat and what steps would be necessary to begin to counter their methods. As the IOC and other athletics bodies are in possession of this information but have taken no steps to act on it - preferring instead to do loads of meaningless tests during competition and trumpet the number of clean tests - it seems clear that there is a lack of will to even admit that there is a problem.
Thingy Armstrong (can you tell I'm not a fan?) the cyclist is (or was) often described as the most tested athlete in the world but again the tests were done at the wrong time and so they do not prove what they are claimed to (apparently it's also not actually true to say that he's the most tested but that's beside the point).
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What's the deal with WADA? Do they have the authority to to test an athlete or is it up to the national association?
 
3

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
"sprint events only use epo in early-ish season training, but they might have kept going if they thought it was undetectable."
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And surprisingly, after European and American sporting bodies have instituted training season drug testing, all the top sprinters come from countries too poor to have such stringent testing disciplines.

Also note that there are many chemical variants of EPO that are probably not tested for with current methods, though they have similar effects.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"What's the deal with WADA? Do they have the authority to to test an athlete or is it up to the national association?"
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Dunno but I will find out.

"And surprisingly, after European and American sporting bodies have instituted training season drug testing, all the top sprinters come from countries too poor to have such stringent testing disciplines."
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Yep, that's also what my friend said - US sprinting has declined as the testing has increased. It does make you a little suspicious of Jamaica doesn't it?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I think they should allow it -- make sprinting a collaboration between athlete and drug companies."
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Well that's another debate but if that is what we are to have it should be admitted. At the moment we seem to have something in between while they pretend that drugs are completely banned.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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Athletics should be discontinued - relaxing drug use will not prevent unfair doping, as there will doubtless still be restrictions on dosage or type, which restrictions will still be flouted unevenly.
 
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