Posted on 01/19/2018 7:59:12 AM PST by GoldenState_Rose
More than 30 Russian athletes withdrew from a tournament in Siberia over the weekend after the unannounced arrival of anti-doping officials.
Russia has a checkered history with the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs by its athletes, a legacy of the Soviet Union backed by historical evidence and testing records. The country’s team was banned last month from participating in the 2018 Winter Olympics over allegations of a state-run doping scheme at the 2014 Games in Sochi.
A total of 36 Russian athletes suddenly dropped out from a regional athletics competition in the Siberian city of Irkutsk after Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) officials arrived for an inspection, the Championat.com sports website reported Wednesday.
Dmitry Shlyakhtin, the President of Russia’s Athletics Federation, said he was “not surprised” by the disappearance of so many athletes.
“We requested for doping-control officers to appear as often as possible at regional athletics competitions,” he was cited as saying by the state-run TASS news agency on Wednesday.
“We took this step because we know that there are many problems at the lower level.”
The Championat website listed 11 adults and 25 youth athletes under the age of 23 as either declining to participate or appearing with sick notes during the Jan. 13-14 contest.
“The list of athletes who failed to participate will be passed to RUSADA, which has the right to strengthen inspections of these athletes,” Shlyakhtin said.
“Our suspicion that the doping situation is not spot-free in all regions has increased even more.”
*ping*
Shocked i am..
They vacated faster than black dudes getting paternity tests on the Maury Povich show.
Some things never change.
I wonder how many Nork athletes will disappear, both in South Korea and after they return home.
Somehow I just can’t get excited about this.... I’ll let others do that. I remember watching some of the Olympics when they where in Montreal and it was clear even then that doping was deciding who the winners would be. Then there was the grotesque bodies of the East German athletes who removed all doubt about how deep the issue of doping was. About the time of the LA Olympics, there was a survey that basically asked a question something like this (I don’t recall the exact question). “If you could take a drug that was guaranteed to be unnoticed and it was guaranteed to give you a gold medal BUT it had a 50% probability of killing you within 5 years.... would you take the drug?” Some incredible number (like 2/3 or something like) said yes they would. I could be wrong but I believe it was U.S. athletes that were being surveyed but it might have been broader than that....I only recall that it was not a small survey and it had a large sample size. Regardless, I haven’t watched an Olympic event since.
The filmmakers of the Netflix documentary “Icarus” initially set out to do a movie about Lance Armstrong and doping *in general.*
Then they met Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, and Russia’s State-run doping web was so massive and groundbreaking, it dwarfed the other narratives they were investigating. So the film ended up being about that.
Dr. Rodchenkov is the whistleblower and former head of Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency. He is now living in exile in an undisclosed location in the U.S. And a few *athlete* whistleblowers who came forward in a German-language documentary earlier are in the same predicament in Canada and elsewhere.
Two of Rodchenkov’s middle-aged colleages died within a few weeks of each other in Feb 2016 shortly after word came out they were planning to come clean and write a book about the Sochi saga and state-sponsored doping under Putin’s watch to the world.
It is no secret that Putin and the German head of the IOC are quite friendly with each other and the Olympics organization itself is woefully corrupt: accepting of Russian bribes and backroom deals — which is why the country is facing a rather mild penalty despite headlines suggesting otherwise. Dozens of Sochi medals have been revoked, but the team is not actually banned from the games in Korea.
Armstrong was one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever seen.
He lied for years. I defended the guy because he had passed so many tests.
But there had to be many people involved. You can’t change all your blood that often without help.
SOMEONE should have turned him in decades earlier.
Wow, what an amazing coincidence.
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