Getting Away With It OR Fair Enough?

skavanagh.bikeradar

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/7112577.stm

I know we've talked about this on here before, but it does seem to me that the attitudes from all concerned would be totally the opposite if this was ooooohhh, a Russian/Kazakh/Spanish/Italian cyclist? The fact that she is just about the only Gold medal hope for the BOA in Track and Field is what is behind this isn't it?

iainf72

Imagine she tests positive for something in the Olympics.

Imagine how that would reflect on the BOA.

skavanagh.bikeradar

It gets better: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/7114788.stm

Katherine Merry says:

"She wasn't a drugs cheat, she actually missed three drugs tests - that doesn't make her a cheat," she told BBC 1xtra.

In fact why have rules at all? Or perhaps introduce a new one - Brits can miss tests 'cos they wouldn't cheat. Not ever, never, ever.

ContrelaMontre

I have mixed feelings on this.

Missing three tests should not go unpunished and the comments from the likes of Merry above and Colin Jackson elsewhere are ridiculous.

However, I disagree with the BOA's life ban in principal - except perhaps for unrepentant and/or persistent cheats. The ban for cheating is x years and why the BOA has decided unilaterally that this can be extended to life for the Olympics I fail to understand or agree with.

timoid.

She's aware of the rules and the consequences and should pay the price.

If I had missed two tests and was a genuinely clean athlete, I'd tag a GPS to myself just to ensure that the testers couldn't miss me a third time.

Then again she could be a good old fashioned moron.

pb21

Can Millar race then?

I hope so.

moray_gub

skavanagh.bikeradar wrote:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/7112577.stm

I know we've talked about this on here before, but it does seem to me that the attitudes from all concerned would be totally the opposite if this was ooooohhh, a Russian/Kazakh/Spanish/Italian cyclist? The fact that she is just about the only Gold medal hope for the BOA in Track and Field is what is behind this isn't it?

I agree with you on this if this, if it had been say David Millar appealing then he would have been chased out of town. But given how low we are for track and field Olympic medal prospects then this was a decision based on that imo.That being said i think the lifetime ban is a bit OTT but it if its gonna being applicable to one it should be for all.

cheers
MG

skavanagh.bikeradar

I suppose that the BOA have boxed themselves in by implementing life bans from Olympics. However if they mean it, they should stick to it. Lord Coe wants life bans from WADA so I wonder what he thinks of CO appearing in London in 2012 winning a medal. If she remembers to turn up, or doesn't forget a test or two in the future. Quite rightly if she was a cyclist she'd be hung out for this. And all her apologists should keep their traps shut on any future doping infringements by anyone, anywhere in the world no matter which Brit they finish in front of.

Pro sport is an increasing turn off all round.

vermooten

When the foxes guard the henhouse you have to expect this kind of thing.

It's the same kind of thinking whereCONI were thought to be protecting Italian cyclists, and the Spanish authorities protecting their guys.

afx237vi

What galls me most are the comments from Radcliffe and Sotherton - two athletes who have been very vocal about other athletes from Eastern Europe. The level of hypocrisy is quite astonishing.

Plus the usual sycophants like Jackson, Cram and Foster. It's just too predictable.

LangerDan

afx237vi wrote:

What galls me most are the comments from Radcliffe and Sotherton - two athletes who have been very vocal about other athletes from Eastern Europe. The level of hypocrisy is quite astonishing.

Plus the usual sycophants like Jackson, Cram and Foster. It's just too predictable.

One thing to be said for the practice of omerta - when the likes of Rasmussen got dumped, you didn't get the rest of the peleton producing these mouth-open, brain-off soundbites.

Anonymous

Getting Away With It OR Fair Enough?

Dark enough?

JonnyCash

The BOA are a disgrace!

If you are a British athlete with any hope of winning medals and you are "AT IT" all you need to do is make sure you "tactically" miss a few out of competition drug tests!!

They've made it so easy for others to cheat now.... the precedent has now been set!


I'll be an interested observer at the olympics now :x :x

GroupOfOne MkII

Just as an aside did anyone read the interview with her in the OSM this Sunday? Interesting the explanations she gave for missing two of the tests were very plausible and the sort of thing you could easily imagine yourself doing (ok I know that we all say if we were a professional athlete we'd make sure we didn't miss any tests but these things happen!).

I can't remember the explanation for the other missed test, but the others were missed because:

- One was because she decided to train later than usual as she was trying to meet a deadline for a magazine article she was writing. Club rang up and said 'Testers are here, you've got to get here within an hour' to which she replied it takes an hour and a half by public transport to get there! Bit of s*ds law involved there, but I can't help feeling she should have perhaps tried to get there, at least arriving an hour & 15 mins later sweaty and out of breath would make it look liked you had made a mistake. Besides she is a runner, surely she could have run there?

- The other situation she explained was she arrived at Mile End to train only to find it was a school sports day. So she had to drive down to Crystal Palace instead and in all the faffing around forgot to ring the testers to say she'd be at CP instead of her usual training location.

I feel sorry for her because she obviously didn't receive any help or guidance in what information to give testers. Most of her peers apparently say 'I'll be at home between 7am and 8am every morning' but CB didn't want to because she still lived at home with family & didn't want to disrupt or intrude upon them, so instead she gave the times she trained instead, which would appear to just be a naive mistake.

Still rules are rules and regardless or whether she's a medal hope or not, once she was banned she should stay banned, mainly because of the message it sends out to others and the potential legal loophole it opens in the future for other banned athletes.

skavanagh.bikeradar

Yeah, but it's all a bit 'dog ate my homework' isn't it?

schlepcycling

Also she's a professional athlete and should know the rules under which she competes. If shes competes then she's agreed to abide by the rules, if she doesn't accept the rules of the BOA (on any subject not just doping) then she shouldn't compete under those rules. What she's done is fall foul of the rules, that by competing she's defacto agreed to abide by and then decided when things have gone wrong for her that she should be let off, because somehow it's not fair.

I have a contract of work with my employer which lays down my obligations to them and their obligations to me if I break that contract by specifically contravening one of the clauses of my contract then I would expect to suffer the consequences i.e. the sack or worse. In the same way my employer cannot just break the terms of my contract and expect to get let off.

It seems to me the she wants the benefit of being a professional athlete without any discipline of being a professional athlete. She knew that missing 3 tests is considered a fail and leads to a 12 month ban, consequently the BOA life ban then applies automatically.

drenkrom

Governing bodies will keep doing this kind of thing until they get burned. Their mandate is to bring in as many medals as possible, after all. For example, this would never happen here in Canada. A medal prospect would not be cut some slack. There is only one reason for that though, and it's not the goodwill of all those involved. We had a rather high-profile Olympics problem with a certain Ben J. Until the UK gets the equivalent, you can bet this kind of thing will keep happening.

phil s

The UK did have an equivalent - Dwayne Chambers, albeit not as high profile as the Olympic 100m final but still...
cycling cops an unfair amount of anti-doping vitriol and it's currently in a sick state

mandie

phil s wrote:

The UK did have an equivalent - Dwayne Chambers, albeit not as high profile as the Olympic 100m final but still...
cycling cops an unfair amount of anti-doping vitriol and it's currently in a sick state

The BOA would not have allowed an appeal by Dwayne Chambers (and are extremly unlikely to allow one by David Millar) because he was actually convicted of using performance enhancing drugs.

My sympathies are with Ohorugu. Having read the OSM article her explantions are to me plausible. She accepts that it was her fault and has served the time. I personally don't see why she should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics. She has never failed a drugs test.

I think the reason she ha had so much backing from high profile athelete is that most of them are thinking, there but for the grace of god goes me.

skavanagh.bikeradar

I've got a quiz for you mandie, how many athletes and cyclists have never failed a drugs test but since admitted to cheating with drugs? Were any of them high profile? Not failing a dope control is a guarantee of very little. It is a question of trust, and a matter of honesty.

And she hasn't served her time as the BOA overturned its own rules on Olympic participation so that she could avoid that penalty.

Her excuses are irrelevant. Either she missed the tests or she didn't. If she was German and she beat a Brit to Gold by a fraction of a second do you think everyone would be saying 'she's a bit daft but she's no cheat'? No the wouldn't. Look at the furore about the Greek sprinters who missed controls in 2004.

The point is that I don't know what she was up to, but then nor do you or anyone else. Only she does. If the everyone is prepared to accept the same standards of 'proof' for all doping infringements in future then fair enough. This wasn't a 'one off' or 'special case' though was it? The rules were broken, the rules weren't applied to their full extent as clearly laid out and understood by everyone concerned. It sends the wrong message about the seriousness with which athletes themselves, the BOA and influential people in the media treat the controls. Perhaps more tellingly, it says a lot about how all concerned treat the viewing public - like idiots.

DaveyL

Even better, she's now on the shortlist of 10 for BBC sports personality of the year. Fkin magic. No Vicky P or Nicole, surprise surprise.

ContrelaMontre

"I do not understand why they are singling us out as British athletes. We are not the biggest cheats in the world."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/7130257.stm

Bloody racist!!

OffTheBackAdam

ContrelaMontre wrote:

Bloody racist!!

Possibly some unitended humour here, seeing as Ms O has got a bit of a suntanned complexion!

skavanagh.bikeradar

It really grates with me that he can say 'I missed them 'cos I'm lazy' but then tell us his crap excuses anyway and then announce that he thinks the systems is 'rubbish'. That and the 'we don't cheat that much in Britain' sentiment (i.e. we do cheat a bit but not like those foreigners, they really go for it....) makes my blood boil. Maybe I'm being over sensitive but the whole thing i that article comes across as very complacent. It is encouraging the idea among the public that drug tests are somehow unfair. Especially with CO getting the sports personality of the year award nomination. That is ridiculous.

andyp

skavanagh.bikeradar wrote:

It really grates with me that he can say 'I missed them 'cos I'm lazy' but then tell us his crap excuses anyway and then announce that he thinks the systems is 'rubbish'. That and the 'we don't cheat that much in Britain' sentiment (i.e. we do cheat a bit but not like those foreigners, they really go for it....) makes my blood boil. Maybe I'm being over sensitive but the whole thing i that article comes across as very complacent. It is encouraging the idea among the public that drug tests are somehow unfair. Especially with CO getting the sports personality of the year award nomination. That is ridiculous.

I agree. I imagine cycling fans, who've heard all this many times before, just rolled their eyes at Lewis-Francis' pathetic whining comments.

Matchstick Man

ContrelaMontre wrote:

"I do not understand why they are singling us out as British athletes. We are not the biggest cheats in the world."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/7130257.stm

Bloody racist!!

One good thing to come out of the CO case is that the people on two missed tests do actually realise that even though they *think* they're untouchable, they're not. MLF may be the biggest hope we currently have in British male sprinting but hopefully he can now see that ignorance of the rules and a cavalier attitude to testing WILL get you banned for a year.
Now that he is less than a year to go to Beijing I bet he is making a LOT more effort to make sure his whereabouts are known as if he misses the next test then bang goes his Olympic dreams....

ricadus

Sounds like BOA need to get her a personal manager who can help organize her life.

There's a conflict of interest for the BOA if future funding is always dependent on winning gold medals.

skavanagh.bikeradar

Quite. And I wouldn't put it past the BOA to engineer some cover up or workaround or rule reversal if MLF did miss a third test given his potential to get some kind of medal from somewhere (relay probably). The BBC are stuck so far up the bum of athletics it is truly worrying.

skavanagh.bikeradar

I'm on a personal vendetta against the BBC over this. They gave CO an easy ride last night, but despite shoe-horning her into the shortlist and giving her airtime on the show look at this:

1. Joe Calzaghe 177,748 (28.19%)
2. Lewis Hamilton 122,649 (19.45%)
3. Ricky Hatton 85,280 (13.53%)
4. James Toseland 84,570 (13.41%)
5. Jason Robinson 67,061 (10.64%)
6. Paula Radcliffe 34,895 (5.53%)
7. Jonny Wilkinson 30,302 (4.81%)
8. Andy Murray 13,242 (2.1%)
9. Justin Rose 10,227 (1.62%)
10. Christine Ohuruogu 4,481 (0.71%)

Nobody likes her except some athletics die hards and Sue Barker.

Hodger

skavanagh.bikeradar wrote:

I'm on a personal vendetta against the BBC over this. They gave CO an easy ride last night, but despite shoe-horning her into the shortlist and giving her airtime on the show look at this:

1. Joe Calzaghe 177,748 (28.19%)
2. Lewis Hamilton 122,649 (19.45%)
3. Ricky Hatton 85,280 (13.53%)
4. James Toseland 84,570 (13.41%)
5. Jason Robinson 67,061 (10.64%)
6. Paula Radcliffe 34,895 (5.53%)
7. Jonny Wilkinson 30,302 (4.81%)
8. Andy Murray 13,242 (2.1%)
9. Justin Rose 10,227 (1.62%)
10. Christine Ohuruogu 4,481 (0.71%)

Nobody likes her except some athletics die hards and Sue Barker.

yep - statistically the lowest ever amount of votes ever received for last place in the history of the competition. Ricky Hatton came last in 2006 and got just over 1% of the vote. In these days of interactive TV, text, phone vote and t'interweb it's gratifying that people STILL chose to virtually ignore her. She got less than 50% of Justin Rose's votes... If that's not a wake-up call to UKAthletics about how she's perceived by the general public I don't know what is.

OffTheBackAdam

Nobody, prior to her come back win had ever heard of her, so there's no great surprise she pitched up dead last. I'd go as far as suggesting that she's on the list in the first place, because some BBC jobsworth noticed with horror, that there were no black females on there and had to scrabble around to find one!