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Comment by OtherShrezzing | Hacker News Reader

Surely this just moves the incentive from the sportsperson/team to the sponsor - who have significantly deeper financial resources to undermine WADA's testing regimes.

WADA's budget is something like $50m. The likes of Ineos & Red Bull have sports marketing budgets well into the billions.

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Seems like they would have a lot more to lose as well. A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation. Much bigger deal than the athlete themselves getting caught.

They would just funnel it through some other company that they can blame.

In GP's proposed scheme, the sponsor gets punished whether or not it knew or assisted

The sponsor isn't punished when their reputation gets associated with a cheat? US Postal sued Armstrong for $100M (settled for $5M) after he got caught. Guilty by association with a PED athlete is the dominant economic risk of sports sponsoring. At least in sports that have dropped the "just pretend we did not notice" attitude that's still going strong in e.g. football (both of them, I suppose)

A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation.

Well, either that or it would triple sales overnight. "Hey, this stuff really DOES give you wings!"

I mean we are talking of an overrated "energy drink" that no one actually needs to consume but yet manages to sell billions of dollars worth of every year.

I don't think their target market is that susceptible to reason.

Energy drink is an arbitrary category. Caffeine + sugar + water is the root of a lot more than 1 billion in beverage sales because the combo works.

Energy drinks additionally contain taurine.

Several call themselves energy drinks and don’t like C4 Smart Energy.

At least as far as the Federal Trade Commission is concerned that’s not an issue.

It's good iff you mix it with Vodka.

I had to look up Ineos bc I’m only familiar with the Grenadier truck. Turns out to be a 20b English chem/energy chaebol.

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

It is important to separate the teams vs. the company itself. The Ineos cycling team has a total budget closer to $50M. That's the budget to support 20+ riders and all the support staff.

The biggest world tour team has a budget of $50 million

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