Gary Hall Jr., Olympic swimmer and outspoken anti-steroid crusader for the sport of swimming, has retired from competition. Hall has been quick to point fingers at his fellow competitors for suspected steroid use and has not hesitated to share his suspicions with the media.
“Do I think it (doping) is getting worse? Yes, I do. It’s here, it’s in the United States. I train with an international group of swimmers and all of them have stories and a few of them have had offers and I’m not at liberty to say (any more).
“To think that it doesn’t exist is foolish,” Hall said. “All doping scandals are not a direct result of positive tests. They’re usually somebody getting caught by some other means. I don’t think that we can rely on a doping agency to really catch the people that are so far ahead of where the testing is.”
Gary Hall suggests that the massive number of world records in swimming during 2008 were most likely the results of steroids and not necessarily the revolutionary swimsuit technology used by so many elite swimmers.
“Clearly we know now it wasn’t the suit that was causing all these world records to be broken, it was copious amounts of steroids,” Hall told the assembled reporters. “Can the suit technology distract from another issue? I think it’s pretty convenient for those that are indulging the other issue.”
The greatest shot putter in the history of Canadian sports recently died at the age of 55. Zbigniew ”Bishop” Dolegiewicz was a three-time Olympian for Canada. He recently died in Utah where he was a successful coach for Southern Utah University. He admitted to using anabolic steroids for a decade during his testimony at the Dubin Inquiry after which his shot put records were removed.
International Olympic Committee President Dr. Jacques Rogge is running for re-election on an anti-steroid and anti-fat people campaign. Rogge has been the president of the IOC since 2001 when he succeeded Juan Antonio Samaranch (”Rogge targets doping and obesity,” October 31).
“My top priority will be the fight against doping. I will fight against doping as hard as I have ever done and you know my resolve in this matter which is the number one priority in the world of sport,” Rogge told Reuters in an interview.
“The second priority is to bring young people back into sport and I would like to launch an initiative with all the Olympic committees and international federations…to combat inactivity that is leading to a rise in obesity. We must combat obesity,” he said.
On Wednesday the International Olympic Committee said the new Cera blood test would be used to analyse almost 1,000 blood samples collected during the Beijing Games, and an IOC spokeswoman added last night that these samples could also be tested for autologous transfusions “if a method is fully validated by the scientific community [and] Wada.”
Speculation over a possible new test for autologous transfusions, which duplicate the effect of EPO in increasing the flow of oxygen-carrying red blood cells and so helping endurance, followed claims made by [Pierre] Bordry [of French Anti-Doping Agency] to German television. Bordry said his agency had “serious evidence about cases of autologous transfusions [during the Tour]“. “Soon,” added Bordry, “we will be able to prove autologous transfusions and we will then test [for] it.”
Big Nation Radio hosts Special Ed and Blockhead discuss drug testing at the Olympics with Ali Amini. They explore the methods in which athletes using banned performance enhancing drugs and still avoid detection. The guests feel that doping is widespread at the Beijing Olympics in spite of the 4,500 tests that officials plan on administering to athletes. The podcast episode can be downloaded here. (”How Athletes Beat Olympic Drug Testing,” August 19).
The anabolic-androgenic steroid “testosterone” and human growth hormone (hGH) will not be the only performance enhancing drugs that go undetected in Olympic sports involving strength, speed and power. These athletes will also engage in a variety of banned blood doping and blood boosting techniques as well at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Michael Ashenden, an anti-doping researcher at the Science and Industry Against Blood Doping research consortium, explains that endurance athletes like long-distance runners, Nordic cross country skiers and cyclists will not be the only athletes who benefit significantly from drugs like erythropoietin (EPO) … Read the rest of this entry »
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