Brits don't dope?

[Libertine Seguros]

I, for one, am not convinced by Ohorugu. I would rather Chambers had retired after his ban and have no time for Christie.

It was very interesting to look back at some of the fan reactions when Darren Campbell refused to shake hands with Chambers after Britain won 4x100m medals a few years ago. Although Campbell was training with Linford Christie at the time, so I guess he was a hypocrite.

 

[JetSet]

another gold to Chris Farah. Its nice to see that athletics is now clean.

Yeah, stunning 13:26 this time compared to his 13:40 at the Olympics, real world class running that


Pete

 

[darwin553]

UK Athletics very much is clean. That's not to say that there isn't the odd chancer. The prevailing culture is clean and you won't find many involved who have any sympathy with dopers. It is certainly not like cycling in that respect.

I agree. Brits, out of any nationality, are most likely to be clean. Columbians on the other hand...

 

[keeponrollin]

Isn't it great the way the Brits have gone from being an average T&F nation, barring a few exceptions, & loosing to all those dopers; to now being a top level T&F nation, & now beating all those dopers .... all the while being clean.

Someone should make a movie.

 

[Bernie's eyesore]

Isn't it great the way the Brits have gone from being an average T&F nation, barring a few exceptions, & loosing to all those dopers; to now being a top level T&F nation, & now beating all those dopers .... all the while being clean.

Someone should make a movie.

I don't know which athletics meeting you have been watching, only two British athletes have managed to win a medal. I have been watching athletics for 30 years and I can't remember a worse British team.

 

[darwin553]

Isn't it great the way the Brits have gone from being an average T&F nation, barring a few exceptions, & loosing to all those dopers; to now being a top level T&F nation, & now beating all those dopers .... all the while being clean.

Someone should make a movie.

You do realise that the Brits have one of the best funded sports programs in the world, not only due from their tax dollars but also lottery proceeds

 

[Bernie's eyesore]

You do realise that the Brits have one of the best funded sports programs in the world, not only due from their tax dollars but also lottery proceeds

Once again, two medalists. You couldn't make this rubbish up.

 

[leon7766]

Once again, two medalists. You couldn't make this rubbish up.

Well they do! .They ought to rename this part of the forum Fantasy rubbish ( a place for people with agendas)

The British team has been pretty poor as usual and we hardly seem to have any athletes at the meet because they couldn't get the right standard yet some people have a narrative that cant be changed .

 

[Freddythefrog]

Once again, two medalists. You couldn't make this rubbish up.

I am close to you Bernie. I do think the vast quantity of money poured into British sport has created the opportunity for a far larger pool of talent to sustain itself in training and preparation.

The gaggle of runners around Christie's Nuff Respect operation smelt every bit as much as the Judy Garland of 100m running. I had occasion to be with them at a formal meeting and then afterwards, as it became social. I could only imagine that any athlete would find it very hard to either be accepted or stay in their presence, unless they took the same attitude to PEDs as Christie. The legacy in the sprinters group lingers on.

After Coe, Cram and Ovett, the middle and long distance runners tended to be the "Corinthian" spirit types. Which can explain the twins of running clean and winning nothing, since then.

I do think this GB team is, in the main coming up with the results in line with a clean operation, excluding the sprinters. The odd ones are Christine O, who as I posted, having beaten Kathy Smallwood's epic record, bought her ticket to "highly suspiscious" and American based Mo.

Given how the BBC don't even whisper PEDs unless it is on a truck parked in the middle of the studio, blocking the camera from filming the host, I have thought a couple of the people they have asked for comment have gone as far as ever the BBC are likely to go. Steve Cram, saying how Farah has moved from long distance and in a part season just made the entire cream of British middle distance runners look ordinary, and then only this morning Seb Coe saying Mo is the greatest British Athlete ever with the best ever British results from 1500 upwards and will achieve them at the Marathon as well, before he is out. Neither Coe nor Cram seemed to be lavishing this praise with an ounce of sincerity.

In both cases I interpreted those as "If you cannot see that through the history of the sport, if it seems to good to be true, it is too good to be true, then you are a chump."

I think GB T & F is now in at difficult point. It can bimble along and not address any of its past issues or it can properly get itself to a point where it clearly does not support or condone attitudes that linger in the sprinting group and in pockets elsewhere and thus the clean losers will out the doped "winners". Sadly there seems to be no journalist or rather newspaper supporting such journalism, that will take a more realistic look at the sport in the country. The "Super Saturday" euphoria has left a bubble that no editor wants to burst, very much matched with that of the Sky/BC program.

They need to wind the clock back to the David Jenkins era and start getting the skeletons out of the cupboard. If that means the BBC has to get a whole new set of commentators to support its T&F coverage so what. We have seen that a knighthood does not confer decency, in fact, some in the know trying to make the subject and the failure of those around to expose, "too big to fall" would seem a common pattern across many walks of life, closer to the mark.

 

[thrawn]

Missing the opening ceremony of your home olympics to be at an altitude training camp in Portugal (from memory) is a clear sign of cleanliness.

 

[armchairclimber]

The current crop isn't great, but they are pretty much where you'd expect a nation the size of the UK to be.

There's young talent coming through though....the likes of Judd, Gemili and some very good juniors (the best of whom are competing in fell/mountain running though).

Financially, the rug is being pulled now that the Olympics are behind us. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with UK/England Athletics at club level.

If there was a prevailing culture of doping, there's be a lot more success. For better or for worse, as a nation, we appreciate plucky losers.

 

[Freddythefrog]

Missing the opening ceremony of your home olympics to be at an altitude training camp in Portugal (from memory) is a clear sign of cleanliness.

That is not right. You need to have been close to athletes before the games to get an idea of what they think like. The "pack fill" want to put on their outfits and stand for hours as the cortege assembles, before it goes into the stadium, "soaking up the atmosphere". Winners don't. Most hate the idea of the opening ceremony, they are focused on getting every tiny advantage for their body out of each remaining day. They don't just know how many days it is until their event, they know it in hours.

 

[mikeoneill]

cram doesn't believe in mo farah

not a chance but he can't say it

he knows all about morcelli and el guerrouj and farah

 

[martinvickers]

cram doesn't believe in mo farah

not a chance but he can't say it

he knows all about morcelli and el guerrouj and farah

Hard to know what to make of Cram's views on Mo. Historically, he's loved the guy, and believed in him. And Cram has a solid if unspectacular record in his public views on anti-doping.

However, he VERY clearly did a double take at the 1500m Brit/Euro record. Before that, Mo's times in his own events were modest; he was a 'kicker'. But 6th all time in the 1500 on a lark? a 50 point sec kick lap a few weeks prior? Cram's voice did seem to go into...how would i put it...North African mode?

But then, was that just really incredulity per se, or more about the fact it was HIS record broken?

So many record holders SAY they are delighted when 'phenoms' break their record - only Johnson seems to be honest enough in his ego to say he's happy Bolt doesn't run his event, for example. Maybe it's an affectation of 'manners' to be seen to be magnanimous, even if you don't feel it.

Can't say I'm a great fan of Salazar, so I really, really wouldn't be shocked. But the evidence is not really there on 5k, 10k times alone - only the 1500 time really raised my eyebrows.

Meanwhile Adam Gemili, at 19, becomes only the second brit to beat 20sec for 200m and only the second teenager, i think. And does an unprompted 'do athletics clean' rant in his interview...gentlemen, start your engines.

 

[Briant_Gumble]

I agree. Brits, out of any nationality, are most likely to be clean. Columbians on the other hand...

Because we know the FDA in the UK make their parallels in the US, France and Italy look like lightweights, so many notorious international dopers get busted when they come to the UK a country where steroid possession is legal.

 

[Froomes_Cousin]

I don't have any data to back up what I'm about to say but... If we let results be the judge of PEDs (ab)use, we can honestly say that road cycling in the UK did not have a doping "problem" until UK Postal burst into the scene. And I'm not even a Brit (I'm Spanish actually).

I mean... there have been sporadic positives here and there but nothing even remotely close to the well-structured and funded doping cells/rings (even institutions) in the USA, Germany, Spain, Italy or France.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

But the question is, how would we ever know? It took many years for the various rings in the USA, Germany, Spain and Italy to become known, and even more for them to be publicised and acted upon. How are we meant to know that there hasn't been doping going on in domestic circles, no differently to how it is in other fairly self-contained scenes such as Portugal or Colombia? It's just that the lack of money in the calendar meant everything was much more primitive and less effective? We just don't know.

What we do know, of course, is that the British now have piled a lot of money into cycling (and have done so, openly admitting as much, because there are a lot of Olympic medals in the sport against - on the track at least - a pretty limited field of competition, so it was a 'targeted area' along with swimming, which has yielded less success) and they have a very strong and tight-knit unit which could be conducive to a well-structured doping ring. I am very wary of the conflicts of interest inherent in the British cycling system. The lines of where "British Cycling" the institution and "Team Sky" the professional cycling team are separated are blurry, and the licence-holding entity behind Team Sky is kind of blurred in its role as well. We know that Brian Cookson is somehow involved in that entity, and that he is now running for the head of the UCI.

It's a circling of the wagons, for sure, and it does feel more than a little corrupt, with all these conflicts of interest everywhere. At least the guys at Cycling Australia resigned their positions before starting up GreenEdge; Brailsford is still in charge of British Cycling, and with his inability to keep his story straight from one sentence to the next this has to be an alarming thing for both fans and critics alike, because while the web of misdirection has been beautifully constructed, the fact that everything is connected means one false step (or false positive) and the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. It just feels very insidious.

 

[Froomes_Cousin]

Put it this way, you can't tell because you are not allowed to test the cyclists but... the before and after is eloquent enough. I always use bodybuilding as a good example of how extreme athlete's behavior can be, and how much of an effect drugs have on performance. The following is Tom Prince, a bodybuilder who, outside of circle of trust, would never acknowledge he was taking PEDs:

Do you really need to read forums, newspapers or watch TV to be able to make that assessment yourself (that the guy is doped to the gills)?

Most SKY riders are doping. What Porte did this year is extremely suspicious. What Froome did is so far off the charts it's laughable.

SKY are following US Postal's modus operandi to the teeth, so much so that the only thing they've bothered to change is the riders. Everything else, the way they charge up climbs, the way they control the race, et cetera, just like the doped (we now know) US Postal did, is a dead give away.

 

[The Hitch]

watching today's triple jump made me think of Jonathan Edwards. The guy today became only the third in history to.jump over 18 metres with 18.04 and yet Edwards is well out there at 18.26 is it?

Both him and the sweedish fella did their out of this world performances in what even the most delusional defender of sport being clean would begrudgingly admit was the era of 0 testing and superdoping.

Is Edwards another example of this British uber race theory, or like everyone else who broke records in the 90s was he a doper? If so it's important because he is a made guy on the bbc.

 

[mikeoneill]

womens/mens long jump and triple jump have declined since the early 90s

it seems likely most of these performances were enhanced

all the bbc panel are suspect

michael johnson is the most obvious doper...

 

[Zam_Olyas]

watching today's triple jump made me think of Jonathan Edwards. The guy today became only the third in history to.jump over 18 metres with 18.04 and yet Edwards is well out there at 18.26 is it?

Both him and the sweedish fella did their out of this world performances in what even the most delusional defender of sport being clean would begrudgingly admit was the era of 0 testing and superdoping.

Is Edwards another example of this British uber race theory, or like everyone else who broke records in the 90s was he a doper? If so it's important because he is a made guy on the bbc.

Was it between the french guy and the cuban fellow? how good was it?

 

[martinvickers]

Was it between the french guy and the cuban fellow? how good was it?

Excellent - One 'No jump' by Tamgho was clearly past the Edward's mark, and into a headwind at that.

As for Hitch's false dichotomy...well, people see what they want to, I suppose.

I note you lump in Olssen's 'out of this world performances' as suspicious -this presumably must be his unbelievable PB of 17.83. Which Carlos De O was beating as far back as 1975.

Banks should have beat 18m - Banks hit 17.97 WR while not concentrating, and jumped well over 18 with wind.

Harrsion did 18 odd into a headwind; don't think Edwards ever did that.

But sure he's a Brit, right? So, by the rules, either he's sh!t or he's cheating, right?

 

[Bernie's eyesore]

Johnathan Edwards was a Christian when he broke the triple jump world record so it is therefore very unlikely that he was doping (unless God told him to dope of course). He has now realised that it's all a load of nonsense but that's irrelevant to what he was doing in the 90s.

 

[the sceptic]

Good point. No religious person would ever cheat at anything in life.

 

[martinvickers]

womens/mens long jump and triple jump have declined since the early 90s

it seems likely most of these performances were enhanced

all the bbc panel are suspect

michael johnson is the most obvious doper...

Not sure it's fair to compare men's and women's

The women's are completely stagnant in many events. history seems to prove that the gains possible through systematic doping for women are of a different quality for women; probably linked with masculisation. No-one, in our life time is touching the 100, 400 or 800 records.

None of the men's records have shown so resistant, and the doping regimes of communist eastern europe did not seem to provide the domination in male athletics (or swimming for that matter) it did in female. Bolt's 100 record might - I'm not convinced his 200 record will. So it's a lot harder to draw comparisons quite do broadly.

AS for the BBC panel, some did, some didn't. I doubt anyone here knows as much as they'd like to pretend. (And for the record, i think there were two that doped, two that didn't, and one i can't pin down.)