'Are they onto us yet?'
'Just stay cool. They're blaming the Russians for us.'
Daily training, physical stress, constant injuries, strict diet and special regimes inevitably lead to permanent diseases. For example, biathletes, skiers and swimmers often have problems with the respiratory system. Figure-skaters, gymnasts and cyclists have their own weak spot: the spine. Runners, football and tennis players suffer from knee and elbow injuries.
The career of a professional athlete is not long. By the age of thirty many of them have to stop competing for medical reasons. It is also worth mentioning that athletes receive numerous injuries during the training process and at competitions. After that a long recovery period is required in order to prepare the body again for new achievements. Thus, today, elite sport is difficult to imagine without strong drugs that help athletes to cope with their diseases and injuries. Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) have appeared under this pretext.
However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so many athletes have been using this loophole extensively for their own mercenary purposes.
If you have difficulty breathing, you may get permission for banned salbutamol. Do you have inflammation or a ligament sprain? Here is the TUE for corticosteroids like dexamethasone or betamethasone.
On the one hand, everything seems quite logical: the athlete needs treatment if he is sick. However, it seems odd when a number of athletes from one particular country are diagnosed with the same illness as if these exact health problems are required to join the national team.
Skiers from Norway are a striking example. Surprisingly, the vast majority of them suffer from asthma. 'Wheezy Vikings' legally take prohibited salbutamol, which opens airways to and from the lungs and helps them to cope with their disease, whether it is real or fictitious. In addition, salbutamol significantly increases endurance and speed, side effects which do not seem to disturb the Norwegians.
In the summer 2016, the Norwegian skier Martin Sundby was found guilty of exceeding the permissible level of salbutamol. According to arbitral ward of the CAS, "the athlete may have erred by taking a dose of salbutamol close to 10 times higher than the one allowed." However, even such a tremendous overdose resulted only in two months of suspension.
Anyway, in order not to be caught doping you just need to justify the use of doping. For this reason the number of 'cheating' athletes is less important than the number of athletes who receive prohibited aid on a legal basis.
In August 2016, Business Insider published a piece on the correlation between the number of clean athletes in various countries and those who violate anti-doping rules. The top 5 cheaters included Greece, Canada, South Korea, Sweden and Poland.
Does it mean that the problem of doping is most acute in these countries? It may, but knowing the realities, I find this unlikely. It is more reasonable to assume that national teams of these countries don't include athletes with 'convenient' chronic diseases.
For example, these teams don't include an American multiple champion gymnast named Simone Biles, who has been 'forced' to take drugs since childhood due to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which has the side effect of improving her dexterity and coordination, vitally important factors in her sport.
Those 'cheating' teams also don't include Serena Williams. Her muscle mass, a pipe dream for many male tennis players, is an 'unfortunate' side effect of taking 'legal' hormonal steroids to help her 'condition'.
It is also worth noting that, despite the scandal, as well as the huge number of sanctions against Russian athletes, Russia is just sixth in this list. This indicates that anti-doping rules violation indeed take place in that country but the scale is far from what is reported by the mass media.
Today, it can't be denied that WADA and IOC are doing their work and even achieving certain results, but at the same time one cannot help but notice that these organizations are prejudiced to some extent. In the face of increased attention to the upcoming Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, sports officials seem to be blind to such obvious things as manipulation of anti-doping rules and the excessive number of approved TUEs. There is only one possible explanation of such a criminal failure to act: the sports officials simply have no wish to stir up a hornets' nest.
World sports officials don't want to recognize the fact that prominent athletes and multiple Olympic champions who have become heroes and role models for millions of fans are cheaters who have been deluding the whole world. Therefore, today the respected gentlemen from Montreal and Lausanne have no other choice but to keep on with their alleged anti-doping campaign and observe the outrageous lawlessness with eyes wide shut.
About the author
Roy Harper is a former employee of WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is supposed to impartially monitor sports for the use of performance-enhancing drugs...
