Lifetime bans

Bro Deal said:

Science of Sport's take on lifetime bans.

scienceofsport.blogspot.comlifetime bans for drug cheats.htmlOpen ↗

The idea of criminalizing doping, resulting in jail time in addition to a 2 or 4 year ban sounds quite attractive to me. I do think that athletes/riders should be given a second chance, and not banned for life immediately...

TheDarkLord said:

The idea of criminalizing doping, resulting in jail time in addition to a 2 or 4 year ban sounds quite attractive to me. I do think that athletes/riders should be given a second chance, and not banned for life immediately...

Sanction should be linked with the gravity of the fault:
a testosterone case like Moreni is not equal to a Vino's or a Fuentes'customer' s case.

poulidor said:

Sanction should be linked with the gravity of the fault:
a testosterone case like Moreni is not equal to a Vino's or a Fuentes'customer' s case.

I agree with that. It does not make sense that some substances that may not even be effective are punished the same as blood doping.

What are the odds of a false positive in these tests? We are never told this.

Part of the problem is that if you dope properly, you should never be caught. Those that get caught are usually caught for errors or stupidity in their doping. So you have this drug that heps you and should be undetectable if you follow its prescription. 299 times out of 300 it helps you survive as a pro, or win races. But occasionally you are stupid and get caught. Then you get your life handed to you.

I'm not apologizing for dopers. Just explaining the system that makes it so easy to decide to dope, then traps them in rare circumstances. But what is the chance of a false positive? The authorities would like us to believe it is zero. But it can't be zero.

principal of natural justice is universality.

How can you punish one for the sins of many?

re:lifetime bans.

A hypothetical analogy to doping in cycling for me is if they made it law on the highways that the speed limit was 35mph or 60kph. Even though the speed environment obviously is a lot faster (60mph 0r 100kph at least). But everyone is allowed, or has, radar detectors. So everyone speeds and nobody gets caught, usually. Except occasionlly your radar detector fails, or very occasionally the police use a helicopter and no radar. So occasionally someone gets caught, doing what everyone is doing practically, in a system that encourages it... And they get banned from ever driving a car again, while most everyone on the roads continues speeding.

I'm not saying that speeding and doping are on a parallel as a health risk. But that doping is very easily adopted given that the rewards are great, and the risks of detection are low.

Crankyfeet said:

What are the odds of a false positive in these tests? We are never told this.

Part of the problem is that if you dope properly, you should never be caught. Those that get caught are usually caught for errors or stupidity in their doping. So you have this drug that heps you and should be undetectable if you follow its prescription. 299 times out of 300 it helps you survive as a pro, or win races. But occasionally you are stupid and get caught. Then you get your life handed to you.

I'm not apologizing for dopers. Just explaining the system that makes it so easy to decide to dope, then traps them in rare circumstances. But what is the chance of a false positive? The authorities would like us to believe it is zero. But it can't be zero.

It's statiscal... more positives goes with more false positives.
Currently the system catches few people to avoid too many false positives.
Improving testing is to improve the test to catch more positive and/or a better testing decreasing the rate of false positive.

Crankyfeet said:

What are the odds of a false positive in these tests?

You could look at the number of positives vs. number of tests to at least get an idea of what the maximum false positive rate could be.

Whatever it is, it's got to be miniscule compared to the false negative rate.

For many of the tests there should be additional physiologic evidence or other tests. For example, even if Floyd's T/E test was a false positive, it's hard to believe that the multiple positive isotope tests were ALL false postives as well. For EPO, there should be HCT data to examine.