[Leica] Fakes

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

Speaking from intense experience as a national championship USA
Swimming official I take offense at Didier's claim that all or even
most swimmers are "juiced" (use performance enhancing drugs.)

While it may be impossible to prove they do not, US athletes, and
elite athletes from other nations, are tested during their training at
unannounced intervals to look for performance enhancing drugs.

It's possible there are some with better chemists than others and that
some slip through the screening process. But FINA (the world governing
body for swimming) and USA Swimming (the USA national governing body
for swimming) take protection of its athletes very seriously.

You will note that one swimmer was removed from the US swimming team
when one of three urine samples was found to contain metabolites for a
performance enhancing drug. We do look and we look really hard.

Unfortunately for the athletes we don't know how accurate the drug
testing really is. There is no science being done to determine the
number of false positives and false negatives for these tests. The
science isn't being done because the testing agencies won't release
the details of their procedures -- details they say would make it
easier for dopers to hide their use.

It's a sad situation and one that is murky. But to declare that the
swimmers at the Olympics are juiced is offensive and, I suspect,
wrong.

The records are falling for many reasons: (1) it's a fabulous
facility. Pool designers have known for years that depth is important
so China made a pool 33% deeper than normal. (2) the athletes are
training longer into adulthood because they can actually make some
money doing swimming through product endorsements. Older more mature
swimmers can carry more muscle tissue and can get beyond adolesence
and train harder and longer and maintain the discipline required to
make good use of it. (3) suit technology is better.

While this meet is very fast  you only have to look at the USA
Swimming Olympic Trials and the number of world records established
there, that the athletes were ready to swim fast. That their training
ends a quadrennium of effort (since everyone points toward the Olympic
Games) and results in amazingly fast swims, even when not fully
tapered as they are this week, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone
familiar with the sport.

Yes, people will cheat when they can and when the stakes are so very
high. But we're doing our very best to make that impossible.

One last important issue: male swimmers are difficult to dope. The
traditional methods: steroids of one form or another, reduce the
flexibility of male swimmers' bodies. Flexibility is very important as
you can see from watching the underwater shots. Even in the bad ol'
days the men escaped doping because it was counter-productive. Every
swimming coach knows this. It's the women who are under the most
pressure to dope because if you can make a woman 10% male in terms of
her ability to carry muscle tissue then she's going to have an
enormous advantage. Plus women are already much more flexible than men
so a small loss is acceptable because the power increase outweighs it.

Adam Bridge

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Didier Ludwig <leica@screengang.com> wrote:
> Sending underaged athletes to gymnast competitions is nothing new. I 
> believe the former romanian athlete Nadja Comaneci was declared 16, too, 
> when she won in Montreal '76, but her birthdate is still rumoured 
> somewhere between 1961 and 1964, depending on different sources. The GDR 
> was also famous in that, as well as sending regiments of fully "loaded" 
> athletes.
>
> But I wouldn't bash China too much. Ok, they cheat, but all others do it, 
> too. I believe most, if not all, track athletes are doped, as well as 
> swimmers, for instance, and both categories are partially dominated by 
> us-americans.
>
> And no one there thinks about boycotting the next super bowl final because 
> of Guantanamo, isn't it?
>
> Didier
>
>
>
>
>
>>How about the "passports" of the underage female gymnastics competitors?  
>>Using 14 year olds when the rules say 16 is no less cheating than doping 
>>is.  Nothing against those kids, they did a beautiful performance and 
>>deserved to win, however I find it very wrong that fake documents were 
>>created to show the girls as older just so they can win in the event.
>>
>>The full story is at:
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sports/olympics/27gymnasts.html
>>
>>And another story is here:
>>http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?section=gymnastics&id=3507735
>
>
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