Daley Thompson: Cycling should be banned from the Olympics in the light of Armstrong doping scandal

I understand where you are coming but I do not agree on prolific testing. However, it would be hard to fault the system employed by London Olympic commitee whatever that may have been. If the great Senator of Wisconsin was to suggest any changes then might I suggest adopting protocols similar to immigration and sanction the host teams. To the team management, we would say, if a member tests positive, you will also bear the grunt of appropriate sanctions and we will check out your financials as to how much grunt you bear. We could implement these procedure through UCI (No Verbruggen or McQuaid thank you) allow them a 10 % commission and send on the money to WADA. It is a more balanced approach. The more they cheat ,the more money WADA gets and the less they cheat, the less we need such rigorous testing protocols. There has to be some sort of balance my friend. No one and I mean no one condones draconian action.

I appreciate and agree with you that some performance drugs have a short memory span. As long as they are prevalent on the day and we catch the outstanding performances, we will be fine. We can also test on and off the field of play.

I will accept that USADA had an uphill battle proving their case and lord knows, the Justice department were of no help. They have sufficient powers as a body. I think they have enough to do the job and obviously shown do it well. We do not need more legislation, we simply need to implement the existing one.

Words have come out of Mr Thompson's mouth before really thinking about what he wants to convey...conveniently forgetting about the doping that occurs in Athletics. UCI does need to examine itself and find out why they failed to discover the "doping ring" within the peloton. Maybe they r too focused on saddle tilt and skin suit material?

My first point is that much of this storm has been created by things that happened in the Armstrong era. That is not to contend that doping is and sadly will forever be an issue in cycling. However, I note that The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) would consider holding a doping amnesty across all sports and I assume that would be linked to a truth and reconciliation commission across all sports. The implication is two fold.

1. Doping is more serious an issue in other sports than perhaps we realise and that the cycling community with its particular blend of individual and team effort and ethics and a moral vigilante mentality (a good thing) is just more vulnerable to doping and exposure. Cycling looks harder for transgressors (both in the positive and omerta sense) and is harder on itself than say cross country skiing or football.

2.That WADA are looking for a way to implement new rules for monitoring or sanctions or management or any combination of these. Depending on the nature of these a clearing of the decks might be needed. Certainly there are new challenges (there always will be) for the anti doping agencies. The challenge that instantly springs to mind is Gene doping which has been on WADAs radar for some time. I would suggest their guidance on genetic testing for selection purposes of athletes as an example of their concern.

Daley Thompson makes some valid points, yet his solution has all the hallmarks of a knee jerk reaction. He might have chosen to contend that if no one is willing to dope then there would not be systems that support doping, a problem that first emerged in athletics if I remember. At the time I would imagine some were calling for the expulsion of curtain countries from the olympics , now we have some people calling for the expulsion of cycling. However, the issues of doping is more dynamic than that. Dopers create systems and systems create dopers and one sport influence another weather in or out of the olympic movement.

Faced with a cheat a simple solution is tempting and on occasions called for. But in dealing with the persistent canker of doping anti doping agencies have to be as more sophisticated in their techniques and more subtle in their management than the cheats. They also have to hold to all the moral principles that the cheats have given up or believe do not apply to them. This is even more the case now than it was in the past.

what a stupid thing to say, it isn't anything to do with the olympics.
Let's also ban the 100 metres cos of the Carl Lewis thing, grugs are in almost sport, thomson you fool.

Seoige: Re making the tests more effective: The only thing that can really be done is to test more often. You'd have to test athletes much more often, e.g. at least weekly, but ideally twice daily (because, e.g. r-EPO can metabolise within 12 hours). However, this has significant practical problems.

This USADA case has shown that analytical testing on its own is not sufficient to provide reasonably dope-free sport. Analytical testing alone catches only the most stupid and careless, allowing most of the dopers to claim "Never failed a test".

What USADA has shown is that anti-doping efforts will need to consist of broad investigations. Investigations that make use of a wide-range of sources of evidence, from analytical, to testimony, to financial and communication records. Further, these investigations really need state-level powers of coercion behind them. Both to compel people to testify under oath, with the risk of perjury and gaol if the person lies, as well as to force the disclosure of evidence. E.g. much of the testimony came about because riders were forced to testify under oath, due to a criminal investigation. Much of the other evidence, the emails and payment records, came from criminal investigations, e.g. in Italy.

Without these powers, the ADAs are pretty toothless. Limited to testimony and evidence which co-operative people in the sport are willing to provide. Pretty much only Italy and France are at all serious at a state-level about really tackling sports doping. The UK, USA and other countries (NL? AU?) don't really do this, unfortunately. Perhaps we need these countries to enforce health legislation more strictly - or bring in laws if needed.

Also, how do the medical doctors get away with giving prescription drugs to athletes for non-medical reasons? Why are they never struck off by their professional bodies?

tl;dr: Write to your political representative (MP, TD, MEP, MLA, etc) and ask that something is done about investigating doping in sport and enforcing health and prescription drug use/trafficking laws. Write to your medical licensing authority to ask them to enforce rules when it comes to dodgy doping doctors (ethics, prescription abuse, etc) - (e.g. the GMC in the UK).

So is the 100m sprint also banned?

If Daley Thompson thinks the UCI are unfit for purpose (agree there), what about the IOC? They're quite happy to have Pat McQuaid as their representative on the board of WADA. And as for clean Track and Field not wishing to have its good name sullied, well please...

I wouldn't be throwing stones from the Athletics glass house if I were Thompson. I suppose it's got him his first few column inches in decades, which must be nice for him. I can't be mad at him though because there'll always be a special place in my heart for Daley Thompson's Decathlon on the C64...

WADA have a document on notable side-effects of various substances they have banned.

Always like a knee jerk reaction,true the UCI may not be fit for purpose, but do you penalise the vast majority?

nbrus: Those who want doping to be legal can go set up their own "Doped-Cycling Federation" and setup races. There's nothing stopping them, at least in countries like the UK and USA. E.g. Armstrong can still and has competed in bike races and tri-athlons that don't sign up to anti-doping.

However, many athletes would prefer not to dope. It can have serious health risks. Both high-consequence risks, such as death (too much EPO; bad blood transfusions; aggressive, accelerated cancers from abusing hormones such as EPO, testosterone, etc), as well as more insidious and higher-probability health problems that can arise from continuous abuse of steroids and hormones, such as calcium-depletion in bones leading to premature osteoporosis, suppressed adrenal and immune system function leading to a wide variety of possible problems (e.g. otherwise fit people being completely floored for months by viruses that we nearly all carry and usually don't bother us; auto-immune disorders; etc).

The list goes on and on, it's literally as long as the side-effects lists in the advice sheets that come with the substances being abused.

Many people feel that we shouldn't be forcing our young sports-people into having to dope in order to pursue their dreams and make use of their talent. Many people feel athletes should have the option to compete clean. That means you need to provide sports with incentives and measures to discourage unhealthy, unnecessary, risky medical intervention - so that those who want to compete clean have a venue where they can have a decent chance. This is why many sports bodies, including ALL that are affiliated with the IOC (directly or indirectly) are signed up to the WADA Code.

Maybe those measures are imperfect. Maybe it needs to be improved. However, there are very good reasons as to why we should try to provide doping-free venues for sports.

The dopers can setup their own sports. And they do, body-building has doping tolerant and intolerant factions apparently; baseball in the US seems to tolerate doping; there are cycling races without doping controls; there are credible allegations that some major sports like football and tennis are ignoring their own PED doping problems.

Yeah, and athletics - totally clean...

Why not just make doping legal and level the playing field?

You won't ever stop doping while there's an incentive to dope ... people will find new drugs and better ways to cover it up.

A lifetime ban for dopers and a reward for anyone that reports someone who is suspected and later found to be doping might act as a strong deterrent ... but there will always be some that will take the risk.