Fighting an anti-doping finding | Hacker News Reader

Fighting an anti-doping finding

lizzybanks.co.uk

77 pointsbreathenow74 comments

I happen to be related to Miguel Ángel López (his grandparent is one of my father's uncles). If you happen to not know who he is, he was in the Astana Pro Team and had an infamous short stint at Movistar. A few days ago UCI informed he was suspended from professional cycling due to an AAF, and was involved into a doping scandal but allegedly his name got clear about that.

I haven't met him personally so I can't tell if he's actually done any wrongdoing intentionally or not, but I do know for a fact he has spoken several times about retiring due to the mental toll competition has had on him and several colleagues of his, as far as back as 2017.

And if you take a look at it, it's something that it's not talked enough on the sport circles. In cycling specially, if someone becomes suspect of doping every "fan" will immediately point their fingers at them - unless it's one of your favorite cyclists. It happens everywhere online, from Facebook to Twitter to the rampant tribalism of r/peloton - immediately you'll become public enemy #1 no matter what. Cycling has had a bad story with doping and if the pressure to give results is not big enough, the stress of being labelled as a doper is a new whole level. I still can recall people throwed urine to Froome at some stages in the Tour de France.

MAL's finding is not exactly surprising, and Astana has been suspect since they became a thing in the wake of the demise of Liberty Seguros after Operacion Puerto

Superman ain't Lizzie Banks

We're all miserable crabs in a bucket.

What's worse (and likely the reason this is being posted here today) is the announcement that the global organization, WADA, is appealing the country-level organization's (UKAD) decision in this case: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cycling/2024/06/07/lizzy-banks-w...

I really hope people comment on this. It's absolutely fascinating to me how a private organization can ruin someone's life or completely jerk them around like this. With no recourse.

I hate to think of other agencies that act this negligently. Not enough funds/competence to do their task properly but a ton of power to destroy people's lives, the problems too complex to tease out without real focus.

It's basically every large organisation in the world. I've worked in enough now to understand they're all the same.

This is too glib. Some organisations do a a lot better than others, have better culture, responsiveness to evidence, and management.

rarely is the real issue a lack of funds either - they somehow have no issue coming up with plenty when it comes time to punish whistleblowers or make someones life hell.

When they signed up to be professional riders with the UCI, they also signed up to be monitored by WADA. The rules are clear and can realistically not work any other way: the majority of violations are on strict liability, it is on the athlete to establish how the substance entered their body if they want to claim contaminant.

> The rules are clear and can realistically not work any other way

Here's one way it can work differently: if someone has to spend any amount of money to clear their name, WADA (or whomever) should have to reimburse them.

It's criminal that the author of this article drained her savings merely to prove that she did nothing wrong.

But she hasn't - WADA has appealed to CAS and will likely prevail. At which point she will get the 6 month or so backdated suspension she was always going to get in a case like this. The whole "spend all your money" part was entirely unnecessary.

Was it unnecessary? It’s her career and her reputation.

It’s also on a time schedule where she has a limited period during which she can have success.

There's very little voluntary about signing up to rules that you're required to sign up to in order to have a career in your field.

The policy position that detection of prohibited drugs at arbitrary low levels should result in a punitive finding, even though it is not consistent with an attempt to enhance performance or with industry standards on permissible cross-contamination, is untenable.

If the goal is to establish the "cleanliness" of sport, then subjecting people who have almost-certainly done no wrong to the same treatment as those who almost-certainly have in fact undermines the moral position.

The goal is never to establish cleanliness, but to establish the perception that you are establishing cleanliness. Also, a lot of people just enjoy seeing others get punished.

> There's very little voluntary about signing up to rules that you're required to sign up to in order to have a career in your field.

The rules are signed well before a career even becomes an option. Everyone who holds a race license, even if you buy a bike yesterday & start your first race today, signs the anti-doping agreement

This might surprise you but it’s totally possible to sign up to rules necessary to do your job while also criticising said rules and wanting them to be better.

> how a private organization can ruin someone's life

Believe it or not, the cyclists signed up for the possibility of ruin. Maybe there is an argument for some legal intervention to prevent people from agreeing to something so egregious?

That would be communism.

Here's a comment: we need doping leagues. There should be athletes doped up on 10 different steroids looking like Arnie in the '80s.

Why. That sounds lame as hell

Because science. Imagine the lack of morals required to build truly scientifically the limits of human ability. Pushed beyond all peaks and limitations of natural ability

It would be amazing. Willing test subjects and the competitions to actually tell if we are making improvements.

Yes. Let's have a league where athletes drop dead all the time.

Isn't that the regular league, in some sports?

If it's all happening above the table, I think you'd actually get better management of the drugs and far fewer adverse side effects.

And what if something is harmful yet enhances your performance? Do we ban and test for that?

It's their choice to take it, isn't it? Alcohol is extremely harmful but it's my choice.

Given the countless stories of child abuse and general abuse by coaches across pretty much every sport, I don’t think you can hide behind “but it was their choice!” when an athlete is forced to take performance enhancing drugs or be blackballed from the sport.

This is in the context of a doping-only league.

Where does what you said rebut my point?

If they don't want to take drugs... don't join the drug enhanced league. This isn't complicated.

So you’re saying we should legalise children taking PEDs because “it’s their choice.” What other things would you like to do to children under the auspices of “their choice?”

Alcohol causes abuse too. I think the hypothetical you're talking about would be a social problem, and not a substance one per se.

Abuse in sports is a terrible ill. I think you're right to highlight that this is a potential vector for it, but I feel like it's a "people problem" and not a "things problem".

So we should create an approved vector for child abuse? “Just fix humans” isn’t a good enough response.

Welcome to Mr Olympia!

Bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman etc all have untested federations. A lot of the money in these sports comes from the athletes themselves, so the athletes have a lot more voice, and scope to find a federation that lets them compete the way they want. Compare this to the UCI where it's a meme that any innovation that comes along gets banned in order to preserve the "spirit of cycling"[1].

[1] maybe a bit less so recently, and I definitely approve of the safety-related bans such as the supertuck

For those like me that hadn’t heard of the supertuck.

https://biketips.com/supertuck-cycling/

that's not even a league of "who is the best athlete" it's a league of "who is the best athlete willing to destroy their body"

The goal becomes "dope the athlete the exact amount to win the final and drop dead immediately afterwards".

https://enhanced.org/

> Backed by the world’s top venture capitalists, the Enhanced Games are the Olympics of the future.

> When 44% of athletes already use performance enhancements, it is time to safely celebrate science.

> It’s time to pay athletes instead of bureaucrats, and demonstrate what the human body is truly capable of.

> Sport is safer without drug testing.

That seems improbable at best and requires extraordinary proof to accept as fact.

With strong guardrails maybe, without them contests devolve toward maximal enhanced performance just shy of that which kills or disables.

Much like horse racing when stewards turn a blind eye.

So we replace doping in one competition with doping in two?

UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) is the organisation responsible for protecting sport in the United Kingdom from doping. It is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and is structured as a company limited by guarantee.

Maybe I'm confused, but the issue here is with UKAD, which is a public body?

What a wild and heartbreaking story.

Who pays for all this anti-doping bureaucracy? It sounds very expensive for both the agency and the athletes.

A great deal of the money trickles down from the Olympics/IOC (WADA).

Individual sporting bodies are also under a great deal of pressure to comply with WADA standards, since there is a very real threat of being kicked out of the Olympics for insufficiently draconian enforcement (a perennial story with Weightlifting / IWF). So in many cases the athletes themselves pay for it via their dues to their sporting body.

On the one side, you have clean amateur athletes with the best intentions and legitimate medical exemptions who just want to compete. They're willing to tolerate a surprisingly large (but still limited) amount of hoops to jump through to certify that they're clean. On the other side, you have amoral nation-state level actors who just want at least a few of their athletes to win at any cost. In the middle, you have a testing and enforcement agency with limited resources tasked with discerning which group each athlete belongs to. I'm not convinced this is a problem that has a solution.

It's just like an overbearing IT department preventing senior engineers from having sudo access to their laptops or from using an SD card to transfer data to the new 3D printer. IT is tasked with asking "but what if our top engineer is actually a deep-cover agent for Mossad?" and that's going to lead to bad outcomes for their actual engineers most of the time. Or just like dealing with a payment processor who won't tell you why your account is suspended or transfer your funds - their opaque and non-deterministic fraud prevention algorithms are there to fight money laundering, and being fair and just and transparent with will compromise their ability to satisfy their primary objective.

Imagine someone with 1000x the resources and 0x the conscience of Lizzy wanted to cheat. They'd have a whole team of rulebook experts. They'd have agents inside WADA and their national sporting group exfiltrating data on what was being used and what was being investigated and pushing for policies that advanced their agenda and also interfering in the ability of the organization to do their job. They'd have their own lab testing athletes and supplements to find the exact threshold of detectable compounds that just squeaked under any published minimum reporting levels.

Can an amateur like Lizzy effectively compete in this environment without devoting an enormous amount of resources to avoiding anti-doping findings? Probably not. That sucks. But I don't see any way around the conclusion.

I suspect this is up here now cause WADA have now appealed against her, probably because of the article she wrote.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C76mRjGIaXC/

A pretty grim read. I recently watched Icarus, which comes at the problem from a very different angle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film)

Ugh. That really sucks.

She sounds like a very dedicated person, and I wish her the best. This is a world about which, I know very little.

But I do know that doping is a pretty big problem (who is “Lance Armstrong”?). Not sure how it can be handled better.

I enjoyed Marcus’ commentary.

I geniunely think "anti doping" as a policy practice stands against everything that makes human as a speicies progress as a physcially being. 'Doping' should proudly inducted biomedical research, regulated and commercialized. Because anti-doping is fundamentally a flawed concept, it does not surprise it's application is marred with corruption, negligence and incompetence.

While physical activity is good, high level competitive sports takes a toll on the body. Adding doping into the mix means that you willingly encourage athletes to take even more risks with their health and life. You also create a much bigger opportunity for countries with loose human rights track records to abuse individual athletes they have control over, as having Olympic medalists is used as a political tool for politicians to improve their standing on the global stage, and to improve their image within their country.

You should read up on the history of doping, it's not pretty. An example I have in mind is female swimmers from USSR who were forced to get pregnant (by their coach) and abort before the competition to rise their hormone levels, as it was thought to help their performance. Compare images of what female swimmers looked at the time vs what their look like now.

I don't think anyone who cares about human rights want to go back to that era. And

I don't think anyone who cares about human rights want to go back to that era.

I suppose you're getting downvoted because there's just no simple answer, except that it can't be that ?

If you push that to it's logical conclusion, the whole marketing angle around sport falls apart (you can sell aspiration and lifestyles, you can't for drugs), and if there's no money left, no professionals will be left as well, and we end up with Guinness book record types of chalenges.

It's the same reason all major sports have seemingly sily rules or performance limitations (cycling and the bike bans are my favorite ones), you need to care about the business side to keep a sport alive

Any kind of regulated doping has the same problems as the current anti-doping regimes. Whatever regulations you have, some people are going to try to get an advantage by breaking them. You need to catch some of those people or you don't really have regulations.

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