To the people who believe Olympic athletes are doping, how can the athletes pass/avoid the anti-doping tests that they do? Wouldn’t it just result as positive and they be disqualified? Unless perhaps these tests fail on occasion?
Because there are ways to beat the tests - e.g. microdosing, using masking agents.
There isn’t any one test that can check for every single drug. Most tests can return a negative result if there is less than a certain amount of a drug in someone’s system, so the athlete can take a PED in a small enough quantity that it gives them a boost but still isn’t enough to show up as a positive test result. And that’s not even mentioning the countries like Russia where the government is actively involved in helping athletes cheat and not get caught.
Not all drugs are going to be on a laboratory‘s testing panels, especially if they are novel drugs.
NB : I don’t know.
Some drugs are allowed outside of competition, whether these have long lasting effects is unknown to me but possible.
Some molecule-related drugs are not illegal per se and are on a dosage based threshold. If you are naturally under this threshold you’d benefit from taking it “legally” up to that threshold.
And of course the literal million dollar question being, how do you test for X molecule if you don’t know to look for it ? It’s a cat and mouse game between pharmaceutical companies and WADA. As long as you’re ahead, you’re safe.
A quick example is Tramadol, a popular drug that i’ve been personally prescribed for back pain (don’t take that shit, it’s bad). It wasn’t banned until recently, now it is. Does that mean previous athletes who used Tramadol were doping ?
The TL:DR is that it doesn’t matter anyway. Talent still exists. I strongly believe that most athletes stay in the legal realm, but that doesn’t mean they’re not doping, they might just not be doping “yet” officially.
Apply for a Therapeutic Usage Exemption
“I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one”
Lance Armstrong
Hence archery is nice to watch.
Nope. Random testing is huge. 6 am and 11 pm. And notifications as to where you are all the time; it’s hard nowadays.
If everyone knew there would be no positives that occur years after competition. It’s a constant arms race of knowledge between dopers and doctors and chemists and biologists working on both sides.
Masking agents. Metabolic tests. Out of competition testing. It’s a constant race.