python wrote:BullsFan22 wrote:I hate to disagree with you, Irondan, because we seem to agree on other topics here on the forum, but I respectfully disagree. I know I'll get slammed for this, but the IOC made a mistake. They are bending over for their overlords. If I were the Russians, I'd boycott the games, completely. I follow XC skiing a lot, and have been for many years, and there are XC athletes that competed in Sochi and are part of a new generation of athletes that have not been implicated in anything, are tested REGULARLY by WADA, FIS, IOC, exclusively outside of Russia that aren't allowed to go to Korea, simply because of 'guilt by association.' That, INMHO is completely unnecessary and it punishes MANY innocent athletes. I don't think I'll comment on the whole Rodchenkov/McLaren saga, because I commented on it many times over the past year or so, and we'll just keep going in circles, but as far as the decision is concerned, it's wrong and completely irrational. But I knew it was coming. The current political climate was just ripe for it.
i do understand the Bulls position and, mostly, agree with the sentiment except the rigid connection to 'bending over to the overlords'. but about that later ...
my position on the entire 'russia state doping' saga is influenced by the fact that i PERSONALLY corresponded with the main - and only - direct source of all the anti-russia evidence. we corresponded on some scientific doping matters. it goes back a decade, well before the current explosion. we exchanged dozens emails and both fully knew each others real names and credentials.. i had firmly arrived
a decade ago at the opinion the guy i was in touch with as a scientist was grossly overdoing (by volunteering a lot of dirt i never cared about nor asked for)...i cant say more...
to get back to earth, the entire matter is much less anti-doping than it is political. no, i'm not white washing the the notorious russian doping culture, but i'm lucid about the ioc -and the entire international sports - deeply and inherently political core. it is propagated by mostly old, sometimes very old men, occupying the comfortable well-paid 'olympic' positions for decades and being sharp to 'hearing' the current political trends. that's were bullsfan is 100% correct. where i may disagree is that these olympic politicians are total tools. they aren't, b/c of the relative independence of the ioc and its huge international swing.
my preliminary read of their decision today is - they tried to be balanced. no russian federation-specific team was restricted, nor the russians were disallowed to call their athletes as representing russia (not withstanding the national symbolical restrictions). also, the 40 page decision (yet to be published in full) allegedly set a path for a
total reset if the russians dont get mired in any new doping scandals in korea...
my guess is they will take the humiliating conditions which to a large extent offered a practical way to compete.
Well said Python. You most definitely know more about the particulars in the Rodchenkov case and I'll steer away from that whenever I can, because it simply boggles my mind the things he's saying or said. Nobody with a clean conscious can say what he's been saying.
One of the things I really wrote here, since the first rumblings started appearing, was the fact that a lot of these athletes are tested regularly by independent, valid (ok'd under WADA supervision) labs in continental Europe. That was one of the main issues two years ago-athletes being tested by valid labs outside of Russia. Many of these athletes trained outside of Russia, in places like Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Austria....and you know that they are tested often because they are Russian and all eyes are on them. Just look at these latest figures from FIS:
http://www.fis-ski.com/news-multimedia/news/article=pre-games-anti-doping-taskforce-and-monthly-testing-figures.htmlhttp://www.fis-ski.com/mm/Document/documentlibrary/Medical/10/92/69/FISAnti-DopingTestingFiguresSeptOct2017_Neutral.pdfThey are CLEARLY tested. 136 tests in Sept/Oct. The next nation is at 63, so obviously more than double less. The US is at 10, granted the US doesn't have as many competitors, but that's still very, very low for two full months of testing. Likewise Canada, France, Finland, etc.
The guy that won the 50km in Sochi, Legkov, was tested prior to the olympics, after the olympics....nothing was found on him. He won plenty of races before winning in Sochi. He only had two wins in Russia, in 2007 and 2011. Long before Rodchenkov's allegations. So Legkov could win without Rodchenkov's 'cocktails' before, but he needed them in Sochi?? That is absurd. His 2013/2014 season results show that he was a man on form and was competitive in the races he took part in before and after the Olympics. And his longtime training partner, Chernousov, was not implicated by Rodchenkov, at all. Both of them trained outside of the national team since 2014 and both did the same races, or almost all the same races. He later went to Switzerland and married a Swiss biathlete. Maybe that's why he isn't implicated.
Not to get into all the specific cases, but I second pretty much everything Python said.