@sevmom I 100% agree.
She was cleared to swim… End of story.
The world could be a little better place if we are polite and bite our tongue before exercising ‘free speech’
THINK before you speak
T is it True?
H is it Helpful?
I is it inspiring?
N is it necessary?
K is it kind?
@coralbrook, I spoke with a group of five second graders this week. They were all so excited about the Olympics and had watched many of the events. Their favorites were gymnastics, diving, soccer, and ‘running’.
The only Olympic athlete I actually ‘know’ is a friend of D’s from college. She is certain there is no doping on his part. He did not earn a medal, but had the experience of a lifetime!
These people are drug cheats. This isn’t 3rd grade soccer. But what should I expect from people who tune into a sport once every 4 years?
My sons were both very athletic. Regional and all state stuff awards . Chose not to pursue in college beyond club type stuff. If either had wagged a finger and said what she did, I would have been embarrassed. It is crazy even at the high school level. Reporters talking to your kid. You need to know early on when to shut up.
Clearly, there is a difference of opinion here about Lilly King. Personally, I’m “not a fan.”
“These people are drug cheats.” And you know this, how?
FINA and the IOC were widely criticized for letting her compete.
From the WSJ:
"Not least the one who beat her, the USA’s Lilly King, who said over and again that Efimova shouldn’t have been allowed to swim here, and refused to congratulate her after the race was over, because Efimova had twice failed drugs tests.
And here’s the thing: King was right to take that stand. Too few in her sport do, least of all the men and women who run it."
“Efimova failed her first drugs test in 2013 when she tested positive for the steroid 7-keto-DHEA. She said then that it was a hidden ingredient in a supplement she was using. Last night admitted that was a lie, and that she had “made a mistake.”
I always thought that sportsmanship involved fair play? Who is the better sportsman? Efimova or King?
What Lily King did doesn’t bother me provided she herself is clean. But I learned from decades of watching track sink into the dope cesspit that just because someone is loudly complaining about other people’s doping doesn’t mean that they aren’t doping themselves. Marion Jones made big anti-dope statements prior to getting busted. It’s sort of the “Best defense is a good offense” strategy. Campaign long and loudly enough against dope and people will assume that you MUST be clean. Otherwise you’d be a horrible hypocrite,
Turns out that some people are horrible hypocrites.
Now I hasten to add that I have NO reason to believe that Lily King is a doper. I know basically zero about her. My point is that being a public anti-dope crusader by itself is no guarantee that the crusader is not also part of the problem. In those cases the crusade is basically a smoke screen.
A lot of the swimmers are going on to swim in college and not become pros. Missy Franklin did it 4 years ago and swam at California for two years, giving up all the money immediately after the Olympics but picking it up last year. I’d guess Kate L will do the same, swim for 2 years and then go pro before the next Olympics. Phelps did it years ago.
I agree with @Scipio on this one. Here is a neat timeline of drug use in sports:
http://sportsanddrugs.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000017
Sometimes I wonder what is the difference between a governmental organization that sponsors cheating and one that simply ignore the test results. Here is Carl Lewis:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2003/apr/24/athletics.duncanmackay
I fail to see the moral superiority of one over the other.
@canuckguy:
The US Olympic committee is not governmental, it is a private organization and has nothing to do with the US government, so it wasn’t a ‘govermental organization’ looking the other way, it was a private sports federation looking the other way. The answer is that both are bad, but I would argue that the government organization that sponsors cheating, like with Russia, is marshalling a lot of resources towards gaming the system to allow athletes to dope and not get caught, there is a much larger scale to that then let’s say the USIOC overlooking doping. Plus, Lewis isn’t wrong when he says it was a different world back then, the IOC had been ignoring widespread doping, in large part because that would have created a huge rift with the USSR and the Eastern block countries where doping was obvious, even to anyone who new little of it (the eastern block women’s swimmers with popeye muscles and growing beards, anyone?).
These days there also is the international anti doping agency, so it is a lot harder for federations to overlook this stuff. There is a horsepower war out there, one side is creating doping agents that current tests cannot test for, and the other side is developing new tests, but that takes time. The only deterrent is unlike the past, the international anti doping agency keeps the samples of winners taken after they win and keeps them for years, and they constantly re-test old samples, it is how many cheaters are now getting caught.
If you read Frank Shorter’s account of how he was cheated (really the word starting with “scr…”) in the 1976 Olympics when an East German beat him who eventually was implicated in a widespread doping scheme, you will understand the outrage many of us have towards the guilty athletes. I know a lot about this because Frank is a friend of mine and we’ve talked about this and I’ve read his testimony at hearings and his books.
Really, Lily King was in the holding room and probably had no idea the cameras were on her when she shook her finger. She got busted, and I’m sure had a “so what” moment and chose to speak out.
Carl Lewis had apparent problems beyond the failed tests for stimulants in 1988. Later in his career, in the 90s, he and many of his Santa Monica Track Club teammates all suddenly got braces on their teeth. Suddenly needing braces in your late 20s or 30s when you previously had straight teeth is often taken as a sign of growth hormone (HGH) abuse, The hormone causes some of the bones in the jaw and face to resume growing, causing the teeth to start spreading. They never tested positive, but there was no test for HGH available in those days, which is what made it the “go to” drug for many sports dopers. I was heartbroken when Gwen Torrence, Olympic gold medal sprinter, also got braces at about that same time and at the same stage in her career. Up to that point I had been a big fan.
So since the games in Seoul '88 I had always been on Carl’s side as he played the role of the man in the white hat vs. big, bad, dope-drenched Ben Johnson from Canada. But was he really any cleaner? We’ll probably never know.
For decades the mighty Kenyan distance runners were held out by their supporters as being completely clean. That dope was “white mans’ business” that they didn’t need to use due to their enormous natural talent. Never needed dope and never will - so the story went. So the Kenyans are certainly talented, but sadly the list of Kenyan big-timers testing positive now grows longer every year.
So that’s been a recurrent theme in my time as a track fan. I admire some American athletes and root for them against the Evil Empire of foreign dopers only to be disappointed later then they turn out to be doping too. It’s happened over and over. Right now I’m clinging to Usain Bolt as perhaps the last great track hero left standing. I pray that he is clean - that it’s all not one more big fraud.
And please forgive me if I don’t cheer very loudly for Lily King in her anti-doping campaign. I’ve learned through sad experience to hold something back when it comes to admiring great athletes who so vigorously condemn the doping of others.
And were the Russians “worse” than the Americans or Europeans? What we can really say is that the Russian government was a lot worse than the US government when it came to doping. Whether the athletes were worse (dope-wise) is a debatable point.
This likely has been already posted:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/olympic-runners-helped-other-falling-170106205.html
@scipio: Doping all boils down to what is the payoff involved, and in turn that always comes down to prestige athletics. The Soviets (and the Chinese today) put a lot of stock on the Olympics as showing how great their society is, how perfect their system is and so forth, it was/is a major propoganda tool for them. So when it came to doping, it was a no brainer because the mentality is “win at any cost, we are going to show the world we are superior”.
With athletes outside the state programs, it comes down, as always, to $$$$. You see doping in swimming and track because those are prestige sports, I doubt very much that doping is as prevalent (if it all) in things like European handball, table tennis and badminton (though who knows, might not make prime time olympic fare or big endorsements, but in some places those are big)…swimmers and track people who win the big medals go on to lucrative endorsement deals and the like, so it is big money…and if others are doping, it is like in baseball, Barry Bonds started doping because in the roid fueled homerun derby that was baseball in the 1990s, no one cared that he was one the best to play the game, so he doped (not forgiving him, just saying), it becomes a culture and despite what some claim, the edge steroids give don’t have to be that big, when what seperates a winner from a loser is .01 seconds, you get the idea.
On the other hand, think about this one: The Russians had their entire Paraolympic team banned from the Para games because of doping…who the hell would ever think of doping in those games? I am not denigrating para athletes, a friend of mine at work has a son who has won several gold medals as part of the para olympics hockey team, and those athletes are working just as hard as the other Olympians, but you would also figure that para olympians are mostly doing it for the love of it, there aren’t the big endorsement deals and to be blunt (and sadly), there isn’t the hoopla when a para olympian wins gold, they don’t end up on the Today show or in prime time, the games are barely covered…so what is the incentive to dope?
The Russians are probably using the para team as guinea pigs for testing the latest and greatest dope - its effect on performance and ease of detectability.
@musicprnt What you say makes logical sense, but unfortunately there have been too many doping scandals in minor, no-money sports too. Take the example of Masters Track and Field - guys in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, out there competing in track events. With a few rare exceptions they are not formerly famous athletes who are now Has Beens. These guys are the ones who Never Was. You can’t get much more obscure than that. It’s not a minor Olympic sport, much less a big money sport. There is essentially zero money or public fame to be won there, but that doesn’t stop them from having drug scandals.
http://jumping-the-gun.com/?p=2641
IMO there is essentially no athletic competition so minor or obscure that people won’t try doping if they think it will give them an edge.
@musicprnt There was extensive doping by the Soviets at Sochi, discovered afterwards. Urine samples from 23 different athletes was proven to come from one individual, and that individual was not a competing athlete.
I have no idea what the incentive is to dope.
@scipio: On that, i don’t doubt it. Still, when the incentive is millions of dollars or state prestige, it tends to be a lot more of an inducement to dope. I guess human competitiveness makes people cheat, too. I still think the Chinese or Russian/USSR situation is worse in that when the state is doing this, a lot more of the athletes are likely to be using, if not all of them, and there is no check and balance, and the state has resources that for example a Balco or the like does not, you put large money into funding doping that can’t be seen, and there is literally no check and balance, where doping is the province of athletes relying on fly by night labs, at least there is more of a chance they will be caught.
The thing with doping is I am a lot less concerned about cheating or medals than on the health effects on the athletes. One of the things with steroid culture in the US, especially with basketball and baseball, is that it got pushed down, with high school football players, especially at the ‘football factory’ high schools (there are several prep schools in my state like that), kids were doping and sadly many of the coaches either looked the other way, or actively helped them, because the winning culture was so present. The same thing was happening with baseball, high school baseball players during the juice era were doing it to, and again coaches may have been complicit in it or pretending it didn’t exist,and that really scares me, if kids think the only way to win is dope, god help us, steroids on an adult are a disaster area, steroids in a teenager are the grim reaper.
An insight from our exchange student who came to the US to train in part to escape doping - the athletes are being forced into it. It is not like the US where one can easily say no and change the club.The ones who are concerned about their health and who can afford to train elsewhere escape, but most do not have the funds to travel and live abroad (an O category visa to train in the US is apparently not that hard to obtain). However, they have to give a good reason for choosing to train abroad to their club to be allowed to leave temporarily; in our athlete’s case, it was easy - the US coach has trained several world-ranked athletes in her evens. Our athlete was very concerned that the club would not let her participate in the Olympic trials because there was some requirement of mandatory pre-trial training with the club or something like that. She stayed in the US for as long as she could.
Sure, some will dope and be happy with the fact that the government provides the means. But some, like our athlete, are very concerned about their long-term health.
I would think many para-athletes have a need for drugs that are banned, and thus take other drugs to hide some. My daughter needed steroids when she was born and we all joked ‘there goes her Olympic eligibility.’ I still remember Amy Van Dyken having an asthma attack on the pool deck and refusing the drugs that could have ended the attack.