Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.
The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/
But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there’s no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn’t a system to encourage it).
Flagrant violation of the rules knowing that the US national agencies won’t give a fuck. The rules themselves might be questionable (but really, cannabinoids are still illegal in most of the world…), but it demonstrates that US athletes feel like they can basically ignore the rules because nobody will enforce them.
well when half or more of the people who admitted to using PEDs were using cannabinoids it certainly cuts into your argument that there’s a wide ranging conspiracy across dozens of disciplines to encourage doping.
You’re barking up the wrong tree with this one. The real story is the number of US Olympians that have TUEs that coincidentally are performance enhancers and the relative lack of TUEs for other countries’ Olympians (e.g., China).
The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans.
It quite literally is though I think the best example of this is currently Wesley Kitts who was popped with methylhexaneamine, basically amphetimes, and got caught. Now they say ‘Well he didn’t want to compete and did those drugs recreationally so we will only allow a suspension for one month’ which went from July 3 to August 3, weightlifting competition starts on the 10th which is really really really opportune timing. Now before you bring anything up let me again say this:
He got popped for a competition that was mandatory for qualification for the olympics. He weighed in. He really wanted to compete and got popped. And even if he didn’t attempt to stimulants like this provide more blood to skeletal muscle which in turn helps build muscle mass and this drug can and has been used to mask other performance-enhancing drugs.
The USA is getting special treatment but they are not getting enough special treatment it seems. Like they pulled this shit for a weightlifter that the last time around came 8th in his weightclass. Absolutely embarrassing show at the very least by the US weightlifting team but watching commentary on swimming, tennis and the newest ‘boxing scandal’ the USA should be heavily penalized but they won’t.
While China’s WADA positive test rate is indeed low, it’s higher than the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) positive test rate, by quite a significant amount, which may suggest that the national agency aren’t policing doping as closely as WADA. The USA’s national anti-doping agency (USADA) has a higher positive test rate than WADA’s, again, by quite a significant amount. Additionally, WADA has significantly higher sample rate in the US compared to the sample rate in China - despite the fact that CHINADA has a much higher sample rate than USADA.
My point isn’t that the US is better or more honest at handling doping than China, just that the analysis of doping test rates has quite a lot of variance, and it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from them.
Either way, as another guy pointed out US athletes have a really quite absurdly high rate of TUEs. Maybe that’s just because the average American is unhealthy, maybe that’s just because the US healthcare system catches more of those things, but it’s still odd that those athletes coincidentally take performance-enhancing drugs as medication for their medical condition. It’s also odd how low the TUE rate is in other countries in comparison - WADA seems more willing to approve requests from the US, which maybe explains part of the discrepancy.
Global positive test rate is 0.67%. 25% of those are “legal” (~250). Of the illegal ones, 25 Chinese, 57 Americans, 135 Russians.
The Beijing lab reported 25 AAFs, for a 0.23% positive test rate over 10326 tests. The LA and SLC labs together reported 153 AAFs, for a 1.54% positive test rate over 9904 tests. So… Eh? Isn’t this the opposite result being claimed? The US is able to run interference for a good proportion of their AAFs by claiming “medical reasons” and other bullshit.
I feel that that it’s very difficult to formulate any real statistically significant findings from this data because you’d need way more information than we have available to us from the WADA report, personally. Your point that China has a very low rate is completely fair, and I agree with you on that, but there are just so many variables in the mix and the sample sizes are so low, I’d be uncomfortable in making a real conclusion with the data available - all you can really do is point to correlations.
I’m not arguing with you or saying you’re wrong or anything, just to be clear - just saying it’s really messy and complex. And I agree that the US is broadly pushing sinophobic propaganda as per usual.
This is a great question! I’d say that the reason is to actually protect the athletes, rather than protect the “purity” of the olympics. If they changed the rules so that people could do all the drugs they wanted to, then it would basically mean that you’re required to do drugs to effectively compete - those without the drugs would have a big disadvantage against those who use them.
We know that many performance enhancing drugs can have very harmful side-effects, so that would ultimately lead to athletes harming themselves to be able to compete.
That would not be a good outcome for anyone, I don’t think.