zephyreks
Meanwhile, 3 countries in the top 5 of the medal table are also… coincidentally, the 3 countries that receive 63% of all exemptions for the use of performance-enhancing (or masking agent) drugs to treat medical conditions. Nothing off about that at all.
Noah Lyles is literally bragging that he has (and is presumably medicated for) allergies, asthma, ADHD, …
Katie Ledecky has POTS, which under WADA’s TUE policy is basically a blank cheque for cardiovascular medication.
Simone Biles is diagnosed with ADHD, for which medications improve focus, reaction time, and muscle recovery.
All top athletes, all well-documented as having conditions that coincidentally can be treated using performance-enhancing drugs. It’s an absurd level of “coincidence” that you simply don’t see in Canada, nevermind elsewhere in the world… all the money we’re dumping into WADA just for the US to skip around the rules like they don’t matter. Mind you, my claim isn’t that they’re lying about their conditions… my worry is moreso that the loose rules around TUEs in the US make it so that a medical condition (that happens to require performance-enhancing drugs to medicate) is a key pathway to reaching Olympic-level competition because their conditions enable them to dope like no one else can.
Nevermind that USADA is on the record letting doped athletes continue to compete as a matter of policy, and it’s also a matter of policy that USADA does not enforce WADA Code-compliance for most athletes. It’s fucking absurd the level of hypocrisy on display from USADA… coming from Canada, where WADA is headquartered and where we’ve dumped countless millions into the institution, it feels like a slap on the face. The US, who is supposed to be our closest ally, is questioning the work of officials working in Canada, questioning the integrity of an institution based in Canada, and questioning the ability of Canadians to make decisions. Kindly fuck off please.
Technically the US (the country) gets +2 bronzes (Puerto Rico) and China (the country) gets +2 golds and +2 bronzes (Hong Kong)… but this whole comparison is stupid.
The funniest part about this is that the people complaining are saying that Pan Zhanle couldn’t possibly swim that fast.
Except he did, beating his own world record, and then he swam even faster in the 4x100m medley… And he himself has never tested positive for doping, not even in the contamination case.
I don’t question why the countries that disproportionately fund WADA get a disproportionate amount of the TUEs for legal performance-enhancing drugs, nor do I question why those countries also coincidentally are top performers in athletics.
We’re going to see this more and more as our misconceptions surrounding Chinese athletic performance start being superceded by the rise in nutrition in China. Chinese teens are taller than they’ve ever been before as diets approach that of developed countries. Plus, don’t forget that China has had thousands of years of geographically-selective copulation (the high plains in Inner Mongolia, the mountains in Tibet, the dry desert in Xinjiang, the humid coastal South)… And it’s only recently that we’re seeing the results of real genetic mixing amongst that population.
There’s two environmental factors to pay attention to as well: China’s history of famines (which only ended in the 60s and had happened basically every few decades prior) may have selected for efficient processing of specific foods and China’s notoriously factory-oriented meat industry may lead to excess growth hormones in children.
How? WADA receives more money from the US and Canada than they do from China. France is far closer to the US than it is to China. Chinese consumer spending for foreign imports is in systemic decline. Meanwhile, China has basically failed to get TUEs (WADA-approved doping) for performance-enhancing drugs to treat “medical conditions” like asthma and ADHD. If WADA was in China’s pocket, we’d see China get approved for TUEs at will… Instead, we see TUEs granted disproportionately to the countries which fund WADA with the most money.
Food contamination is a real issue. It helps that everyone tested positive for the exact same substance in basically the exact same concentration, because usually it’s better to design your doping protocols tailored to each athlete’s body and training. Just intuitively, it’s not exactly standard practice to have your entire Olympic-level team shoot up on steroids at the same exact time.
Nevertheless, the pool isn’t slow: the US set the 1500m free and 4x100 medley women’s records. Meanwhile, WADA has been testing Chinese athletes far more than everyone else.
Edit: just to be clear, I don’t think his spread is even unreasonable in context. Phelps swam a 22.93 50m and a 47.51 100m (1.65s pace difference). Pan swam a 21.92 50m and a 46.40 100m (2.56s pace difference). For reference, Dressel did 50m in 21.04 and 100m in 46.96… but while Dressel is basically specialized at training for short stints, Pan also trains for 400m events so his back half is expected to not fall off as hard anyway (not to the level of Michael “my lactic acid doesn’t build up” Phelps, though).
