IOC bans Russia from 2018 winter olympics

[bigwavedave]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/sports/olympics/ioc-russia-winter-olympics.html

[Dan]

I just came here to post that, but you beat me to it! Wonder if Vic Wild will petition to become a US citizen again ;-)

[SunSurfer]

Reports of a new database contains details of thousands of Russian athletes in WADAs hands. Vic Wild, like any Russian athlete at Sochi, would have to be under a cloud of suspicion. 

[SkoonyMcGroomer]

Just heard a report that individual athletes will first need to test positive, renounce their Russian National Team status, and apply to  compete under the OAR Team (Olympic Athletes from Russia) sporting the Olympic Flag.

[terekhov]

_modern_ olympics is a one great scam, so banning someone from it is a nice present from heaven ;) and all of professional sports is medically-powered, so decision on russia is all about politics - coz big sport is a big money and nothing more than big industry

 

so - why bother? let it ride.

[SunSurfer]

1 hour ago, terekhov said:

_modern_ olympics is a one great scam, so banning someone from it is a nice present from heaven ;) and all of professional sports is medically-powered, so decision on russia is all about politics - coz big sport is a big money and nothing more than big industry

 

so - why bother? let it ride.

Not all of the world is corrupt, nor cynical. There will be many different points of view about the meaning and value of Olympic competition.

I don't have a .ru website address, and hold an entirely different view of the ban of Russian athletes. 

Terekhov,  best wishes and enjoy your riding.

Edited December 6, 2017 by SunSurfer

[terekhov]

1 hour ago, SunSurfer said:

Not all of the world is corrupt

if one sportsman earns $5M and other of almost same class $10000 - there IS corruption. when olympics gave on "amateurs only" status back in 80ies - there's nothing other than corruption then

let's praise haakon for ultimately snowboardish position in 1998.

[inkaholic]

Vic posted on IG

https://meduza.io/feature/2017/12/06/sportsmeny-eto-i-est-malenkie-lyudi

 

Ink

[Dan]

Pretty interesting article - Google Translate does a surprisingly good job on it. Doesn't sound like Vic will be petitioning to regain his citizenship any time soon. 

21 hours ago, inkaholic said:

Vic posted on IG

https://meduza.io/feature/2017/12/06/sportsmeny-eto-i-est-malenkie-lyudi

 

Ink

 

[Neil Gendzwill]

Russian grammar must be fairly close to English to get such a good translation.  I'm sure Vic has been instructed to not rock the boat.

[ursle]

On 12/5/2017 at 11:16 PM, terekhov said:

_modern_ olympics is a one great scam, so banning someone from it is a nice present from heaven ;) and all of professional sports is medically-powered, so decision on russia is all about politics - coz big sport is a big money and nothing more than big industry

 

so - why bother? let it ride.

I agree, some still think that Texas bicycle guy was framed, as they go day to day looking through pink sunglasses, Lance just used technology ongoing and ever changing that makes the sports world go round, nice post by the way. 

[kipstar]

I presume Vic Wild will compete under the neutral flag, he's an amazing racer....not sure how much drug abuse happens in our sport.....I am sure it would help but not sure the correlation is as strong as with sports like cycling, weightlifting or athletics....

For me the bigger story at the moment is the whole Froome situation, where the English media and most of the cycling press are presenting it as merely an asthmatic taking some medication and accidentally going over the limit....while a few are looking at it as a clear case of the benefits of a known pharmacuetical  whose treatment of asthma (if Froome really is asthmatic which isn't known yet) is not performance enhancing...but the drug itself helps strip off weight and preserve muscle, meaning it opens up abuse by yet another cyclist to get an edge in a sport where weight loss while maintaining strength is the holy grail of performance.  This guy has been caught red handed, but because he's winning and part of the whole team sky clean clean clean story, it's hard to know if he will get an easy ride, or a rough one.

[SunSurfer]

 

Chris Froome has been found to have high levels of salbutamol in his urine testing as I understand it. 

The drug is cleared (got rid of from the body)  both by liver metabolism,  and unchanged in the urine. Potentially, being dehydrated could raise the concentration in the urine, producing a positive test while taking the allowed amount. 

Many athletes develop asthmatic symptoms. Exercise induced asthma is a well recognised condition even in non-athletes. The smooth muscle controlling the size of the airways can react to the very large volumes of air moved in and out of the lungs at peak exertion. 

Overdosing with salbutamol frequently causes a degree of lactic acidosis, not a helpful state for athletes, as well as low potassium levels. 

I wouldn't rush to judgement on this one, but wait for the process to run it's course. Plenty of authoritative information on the pharmacology of salbutamol/albuterol on the Net if you're not medically trained. 

A search for "Medsafe Salbutamol" on Google will turn up the official drug data sheet for salbutamol in New Zealand.

 

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibited-list/prohibited-at-all-times/beta-2-agonists

Scroll down the right hand side section of the WADA page to see the detail of the acceptable levels of salbutamol. Pharmacokinetics is the science of how drugs move through the body.

-------------

On the issue of drug enhanced performance in Olympic alpine snowboarding a couple of things come to mind.

To win the GS (or the slalom at Sochi) an athlete has to make 10 runs in the space of a few hours. Each run is short in duration, around 40 seconds (equivalent in time to a 400 metre sprint event) but requires explosive strength and effort. So building muscle bulk in training in training is crucial, both upper and lower body. 
The runs are often decided by fractions of a second, unless a rider makes a mistake or is disturbed by a rut/ice in the course.

The pull at the top of the course is a place where a crucial advantage can be gained. I remember seeing a video of a champion Australian boardercross rider training, and specifically working on strength and technique for the pull.

Vic Wild seemed to have a particularly effective "pull" during the Sochi games,  with very good early speed in the course. As far as I know he has not been named at any time as having a positive test. Whether he will have enough in competition tests outside of Russia to meet WADA & IOC criteria and chooses/is allowed to ride we'll have to wait and see.

Muscle bulking and recovery after effort are both areas aided by steroids. At some stage we'll probably see someone in this sport banned for taking something a little more performance enhancing than the Rebagliati affair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Rebagliati

 

 

Edited December 25, 2017 by SunSurfer
add reference material

[kipstar]

Many cyclists and other athletes take pharma at odds with the official fact sheets, in cycling at least, many cyclists do believe that the asthma medication helps shed weight while maintaining muscle, the general method is athletes will inject or take orally, and have a 'cover' of being asthmatic and using an inhaler with a TUE... if he is doping, then this is quite likely the way Froome has got caught, he will now attempt to prove that he could achieve a 2X reading with the inhaler alone.....if he can't then he's going to join the other cyclists busted for similar doping in the past - there are a few caught in the same way as well as Alberto Contador who was taking Clenbuterol, within the same class of drugs, (apparently he ate something with Clen, something that virtually every athlete doubted, once they stopped laughing).  To be severely dehydrated on stage 18, then bounce back the next two days in hill stages....it's possible, he had by far the best domestiques, but........ 

You can jump to the med journals here in the bibliography at the bottom, but this is what most cyclists (and a few triathletes) believe about the meds anyhow - inhaler doesn't do much, oral/injection helps shed weight and keep muscle:
http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2014/09/albuterol-salbutamol-doping-works.html

Cycling is well known as a pharma assisted sport in the past, and the biographies of both Wiggins and Froome with missing information then the whole fancy bears stuff suggests the team 'flies close to the wind' in terms of TUEs.  Still doesn't take away from the fact that Wiggins, Froome, Armstrong, Contador, et al....are all incredible riders.

 For snowboarding, I don't doubt doping would help, almost every sport from baseball to tennis to even chess pharma can help.... if nothing else if you wake up fresher everyday able to train harder, then you get in more quality hours of ride time.  The power you need to race in snowboarding (especially you see Vic Wild airbourne then able to lock into his line on his next turn which is leg power) would definitely help....there is a finesse and line aspect in snowboarding makes it more like boxing or sailing (both sports I do), where brain and experience can still trump pure power/athleticism...400m running, cycling and triathlon (my other sport) that brain part is maybe less important and athleticism is key, not surprisingly these sports plus sports without proper controls (like some boxing matches) are where doping is rife.  

 

Edited December 27, 2017 by kipstar

[SunSurfer]

Thanks for the references.  

I'm an anaesthetist/anesthesiologist with a background in critical care medicine, so I have a professional interest in applied pharmacology and physiology. 

PubMed is the place health professionals go to search for this kind of stuff. Provided free by the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health.

Search PubMed for research on the reproducibility of exercise performance before believing a non-significant trend towards improved performance with a dose of salbutamol 5 times that allowed by WADA.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

Edited December 27, 2017 by SunSurfer
additional detail

[kipstar]

Yes, I remember you are an anesthesiologist :-) so that's why I pointed out the links, since a med professional probably wants to see the actual journals rather than a layperson's summary....

I am repeating/sharing what some high performance athletes believe, rather than what is shown in specific studies....although having said that from the source you have listed here is an article specifically mentioning the exact performance gain with a sig P value on an admittedly extremely small sample size, exactly as cyclists anecdotally believe:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25077918

The other (main) reason for clenbuterol and also Salbutamol/albuterol is weight loss while controlling muscle loss, numerous studies on the site outline for triathlon, cycling, mountain biking that VO2 max, ability to hold high power for long periods and watts/kg are key predictors of cycling success.  Most dopers e.g. Hamilton specifically state if they could lose body weight or could increase power/haematocrit via EPO or similar, they would go for weight loss every time, which is why top cyclist GC and climbers are usually so unhealthily skinny.  So even without performance increase, if it allows weight loss then it's working...Froome specifically claims his breakout performance came from dropping his bodyweight -often cited at 20lb....he's a beast already with an unreal VO2 max, he's already got a massive watt/kg of 6++....no matter he is doping or not there is no question he's an incredible athlete in my mind.

Back to the drugs though....Cyclists who dope believe inhaled isn't the way to administer the drug (to cheat)....they inject or take orally...then have the 'cover story' of the inhaler with a TUE.  It's not the first time Team Sky have used a TUE in a 'grey area' as David Walsh describes it.  And caught out by accident both times (fancy bears and now an adverse test)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18091010

Based on this study....IF Froome was using the inhaler only, then sure, he probably didn't perform with more power as a result, maybe he is an exception who does get a benefit in performance, maybe the benefit is weight loss, maybe nothing at all, maybe he does worse but has no choice as an asthmatic.  In any case, in a dirty sport, following in the footsteps of others banned for the same thing, unless he can replicate the result somehow (and I am guessing team Sky prepared for this if he really is doping) then he's the next Contador, destined to finish his career both as an incredible cyclist...and a doper.  

With the internet these days, the amount of info on doping online and its effects is no longer in the shadows like before, and even though med journals often cite no specific advantages from this or that, the athletes often believe otherwise....and off they go.  As Trump would say..... #sad.

 

Edited December 27, 2017 by kipstar

[SunSurfer]

Dave Brailsford and the marginal gains. A mental edge because of what the athlete believes is still an edge. 

And the absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence of salbutamol effect. 

Thanks, and like you I'd love to see competition unaided by drugs at sports highest levels. Modern medicine can be used for good, or bad.

[kipstar]

many triathletes and cyclists put the whole 'marginal gains' in the same camp as Lance Armstrong and his 'innovations' (Lance Armstrong's War is very good at explaining the thought process of a slightly narrower bottom bracket which Lance tried, then the eventual discarding of the idea as testing showed early benefits but a long term issue from memory in some stages) - tech helps, processes and planning helps, but then again so do PEDs, and many think Team Sky are doing the full list, even if legally through TUEs.

if we want to see extraordinary performances, and we don't care about clean, then modern medicine is incredible for that.  As an aside, asthma sufferers are lucky, they can take meds to compete on a level playing field.  People born with low testosterone or lousy Haematocrit, bad phsyiolology etc, they often can't do anything about it.  Its a fascinating world to see from the sidelines.  In some way, we Kiwis are a funny bunch, the idea of coming up with a legal workaround in sailing and mechanical sports is hugely admired (yachting is full of these sorts of things from the fibreglass KZ 12ms to the J class DOG challenge, to the skiff in San Diego, to the Hula, to the foiling, to the cyclors & control systems)....yet there is an inherent sense of foul play when legal doping via TUEs occurs such as with Wiggins and now possibly Froome.  I always wondered how much doping occurs in NZ rugby, knowing it is absolutely rife in league/rugby in almost every other country.

[SunSurfer]

IOC has cleared Vic Wild and Alena Zavarzina to compete at 2018 Olympics.