Shot Put Gold Medallist Revoked for Doping

First topic message reminder :

This was not a surprise to many of us the observers, revealed today that Nadzeya Ostapchuk, winner of the Gold Medal in London has been found to have failed a doping test for the substance Metenolone. This means New Zealands Valerie Adams has been promoted to the Gold Medal. Good job by the anti-doping team I just hope the big names are treated equally should they be caught!

http://www.11alive.com/news/article/251975/40/Shot-put-champs-gold-medal-revoked

djlovesyou wrote:

Jennifer1984 wrote:Wow... citing Marion Jones as an example of drugs testing inefficiency in 2012, when she was caught at the Sydney Games some 12 years ago is stretching things a bit.

Yes... she was caught. Eventually. She tested positive for tetrahydrogestinrone, so I guess test number 161 got her in the end.

Nope. Never tested positive. She admitted eventually admitted taking THG (amongst other things) after she had denied doing so in the BALCO case. This is what she was sent to prison for in 2007.

She was stripped of her results from the 2000 Olympics and 2001 World Champs but passed every single test in-competition and out of competition during this period and every further test until her retirement in 2006. There is little indication to suggest that Jones was competing clean between 2001 and 2006 either, especially as her boyfriend, Tim Montgomery, was pretty much taking everything under the sun during a large portion of this period.

What bugs me about the whole Marion Jones saga was that had she not have admitted to PED use she may have got away with it forever more. All she needed to do was deny deny deny. The other butt clenchingly annoying thing about the fiasco is the fact that her dirty criminal boyfriend and PED guzzler Tim Montgomery will go down in history as an Olympic Champion by virtue of his likely to be dirty gold with the 4x100m relay team in Sydney. The other thing that bugs is the American 4x400m relay team that Jones was a part of in Sydney. They all won a case in 2010 to keep their golds despite the fact that Jones herself was stripped for cheating. So it's not okay to be a cheat but it is okay for you to profit from a cheat? Just how any court of law allowed her compatriots to keep their gold medals is beyond me!

Now that the time has come and gone for Belarus/ostapchuk to file an appeal against the finding and disqualification, and nothings been filed.

Nor has the gold medal been returned.

The presentation next week of the Gold medal will be the first time ever an Olympic gold medal presentation ceremony has been held in New Zealand.

Ostapchuk's coach has confessed to "dusting" her food with steroids without her knowledge (yeah right http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/7658248/Scepticism-of-Ostapchuks-coachs-mea-culpa) and been banned for 4 years (and has promised to change his surname to "Idiot"). She has been banned for 1 year.

a 1 year ban is an absolute joke, but unfortunately nothing new there. Glad Adams will get the Gold, tremendous athlete and comes across a very pleasant person. You can tell from recent interviews that this episode hurt her though (particularly not receiving the Gold medal in the stadium).

Hopefully receiving it in NZ (esp if they give her a proper ceremony) will be special enough to help compensate her for that.

Whadda ya mean? a proper ceremony...There'll be a Haka and everything, better than the olympics.

Attempts are being made to fly in the silver and bronze medalists as well.

I don't know, she just seemed really downbeat in her recent post DL interviews, not her usual, bubbly self. The whole situation played a part (Belarus denying any wrong doing, not giving the medal back etc.), but the odd comment she made suggested to me she was really sad not to have had the proper medal ceremony where she received the gold medal.

Hopefully as you say the ceremony being in her home country will make up for it, even better if the other medallists are there.

The medal ceremony was the best ever, not only was it the first time an olympic medal ceremony has been held in little old New Zealand, the fire works display was the biggest weve evr held in New Zealand as well.

Having a guard of honour made up of all our other 2012 medalists finally saw completion for our entire team.

All up this has been a very bitter incident, and the incompetence of the IOC will mean that for us New Zealanders (and for the athlete who was deprived of competing in the Womens shot put finals, because at the end of the elimination round was placed 13th) the actions of a cheat will be the lasting memory of the 2012 Olympics.

Brilliant (last para aside).

Whats wrong with the last paragraph??

That this one incident has managed to sour the whole Olympic experience for NZ. And that that one episode will apparently be the lasting memory which seems a little absurd given all the other amazing stuff that happenend.

Plus the awards ceremony, whilst tinged with bitterness, was 100x more special and spectacular than what she'd have got in the main stadium.

Also (I appreciate I may have missed/forgotten something), what did the IOC do so incompetently? The woman cheated but did a runner with the medal before the test results came in, not sure what else they could have done?

TopHat24/7 wrote:...
Also (I appreciate I may have missed/forgotten something), what did the IOC do so incompetently? The woman cheated but did a runner with the medal before the test results came in, not sure what else they could have done?

One of the tests she failed was taken the week before the Games - AL (from memory, apologies if I'm misquoting you Laurie) feels that the results should have come back in time for her to be excluded from competition.

Ahh, well if that's the case then that indeed is/was poor.

But, from memory, and we could really do with no-it-all Jen1984 back for this one, I thought A AND B samples had to be tested and found positive before action taken. An A sample may have been taken a week earlier but the B sample wouldn't have been which may explain the delay.

TopHat

A and B 'samples' are not taken seperately, but are two aliquots taken from the same bulk sample. The A sub-sample is tested while the B portion is retained so that there can be a second test to confirm any positive findings from the initial test. You can't do this on samples taken at different times, because the body metabolises a lot of the things that are tested for, and so something in the system one day may not be detectable the next.

If the A sample returns a non-negative result, the athlete is informed and asked whether they want the B sample testing - the positive test is then only announced when the B sample verifies the positive or if the athlete accepts the findings without requesting the B sample be tested.

My understanding is that most of the urine-based tests need a few hours of lab time, while any blood tests need 2 or 3 days. Obviously, the Olympic testing lab would have been a very busy place in the run-up to and during the games (as an aside, the UK-based lab tested all samples taken from Olympic athletes regardless of location from the time the Olympic village opened about 10 days before the Games themselves started, so were probably doing a lot of targetted testing in this run-up period).

Only someone with inside knowledge of the lab could tell you whether Ostapchuk's first positive test was actually recorded before her competition started, and/or whether there were any delays in the testing. After the fact it does look bad that the positive test didn't lead to Ostapchuk's exclusion before the competition, but that's being wise after the event.

Dummy Half

I'm not sure if we are speaking at cross purposes here, But my understanding is that there were two samples, one taken on 5 August and the other after the completion of competition on 6 August, both were urine, but it took until after the games were for over before the results were announced, that Ostapchuk had tested positive to her steroid of choice metenolone.

The 3,800 urine tests were being processed not just during the time of the Olympics but also for a period before and after, however would it not have occured to the IOC to process medal winners (in a throwing field event) a little sooner????

The IOC are always quick to proclaim how effective and efficient they are in the war against drug cheats, but when one looks at their performance they have a number of areas that could focus on for improvements.

AL
My response wasn't aimed at your comment but at an apparent mis-understanding from TopHat regarding what A and B samples were.

Having just checked the schedules, the women's shot medals were awarded on the 6th, with the Games closing on the 12th and the positive test being announced on the 13th - my recollection is that the results of both the pre-competition and after competition test were announced simultaneously.

Taking pretty much 1 week for the testing does seem a little slow (even if each test requires a day to process, so maybe 48 hours for both the A and B samples), especially for an event where there is a relatively high likelihood of at least one of the medal winners failing a drug test, so yes I think your comment about prioritisation is meritted (common sense suggests you fast-track samples from athletics and cycling relative to say sailing or shooting, both because of the profile of the sport and because of the probability of a positive test).

The IOC claims about the efficiency and effectiveness of their drug testing is so much media spin and PR. Plenty of doping athletes are never caught (particularly those who take their doping seriously and who get help from 3rd party doctors in planning their drug-taking programme), and those that are caught in competition have usually done something fairly stupid - there are really two purposes in drug testing:
1 - to be seen to be doing something and
2 - to at least put sufficient risk of being caught in the system to offer a credible deterent so most athletes choose not to dope.

dummy_half wrote:
1 - to be seen to be doing something and
2 - to at least put sufficient risk of being caught in the system to offer a credible deterent so most athletes choose not to dope.

That's exactly it. Anti-doping is essentially talking a big game in the hope some people are scared into not doing it.

With any sort of decent professional support, it's almost impossible for the testers to catch the cheats.

dummy_half wrote:AL
My response wasn't aimed at your comment but at an apparent mis-understanding from TopHat regarding what A and B samples were.

And I thank-you for that. As I noted, the exact details of anti-doping procedures are something I am somewhat ignorant of.

Would still like Jennifer1984's input into this tho.....