Originally posted by The Erectile Banana
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I agree cycling has had a terrible problem and continues to have a bad one. The last Tour was very good though as the cheats got caught, thrown out and banned. It's just a pity that the discovery of drug cheats is used as a stick with which to beat the sport.
Here's the report with details of the French test. I think it's fair to say it doesn't prove anything about football or cycling (and I'm certainly not claiming cycling doesn't have an ongoing problem) but it does suggest it's possible football has a problem with illegal drugs that the authorities might be choosing to ignore.
Fifa's credibility goes missing when drugs policy is put to test
Fifa is burying its head in the sand over Wada's anti-doping code
In any wrestling match between the secretive, self-serving bureaucracy that runs global football (Fifa) and intractable bureaucracy that runs the global campaign against drug cheats (Wada) it is tempting to hope for simultaneous body slams, sending both protagonists to the canvas and leaving the rest of us to get on with our lives in peace.
Alas, such happy calamities happen only in cartoons, which more often than not leaves us facing a choice between the devil we know and, oh yes, the other devil we know. Fortunately, the argument between these two organisations over the "whereabouts" code and how it should apply to drug-testing in football is one of those rare occasions where taking sides is easy.
Wada, which believes football players should be available for testing 365 days a year, is right. Fifa, which believes football players should be available for testing only when they are within the confines of the football stadium or the training complex, is wrong.
However, Fifa being Fifa, it can't resist compounding this understandable human failing with the less forgivable sin of cant. "Both on a political and juridical level, the legality of the lack of respect of the private life of players, a fundamental element of individual liberty, can be questioned," it said in a statement issued with Uefa this week.
Suspending incredulity for a moment, let's imagine a body like Fifa cares about civil liberties. We might then ask — does it have a point? The answer is no, at least not if it has signed up to Wada's anti-drugs code, which is a full-service menu and not available à la carte. You are either in or you are out, and Fifa, for reasons of credibility and finance, decided years ago that it was in.
Now it seems Sepp Blatter and friends have decided they want to be both in and out, which is to say they want the benefits that flow from adherence to Wada's rules (membership of the Olympic movement and so forth) without the inconvenience of having to abide by those rules.
Blatter is many things, but he is not naive. He must know that Wada can no more allow football to be exempt from its "whereabouts" code than it could grant weightlifting immunity from the "testosterone" code — which leads us to another conundrum: why does Fifa persist with its quixotic campaign?
The answer, I believe, lies in the findings of a study carried by a French anti-doping agency, which tested hair samples from 138 professional athletes, including 32 footballers. (Unlike urine samples, where evidence of steroid use is "washed out" within days, hair samples can retain traces of drugs much longer.) The results — published in France last week but completely ignored in this country — revealed that seven players (21.8%) tested "positive" for some form of banned drug, a far greater proportion than that found in sports such as rugby and, ahem, cycling. It is a bad day indeed for football when it places higher in the league table of drug use than professional cycling, although, in fairness, there are reasons to be cautious about the French study.Most obviously, it took place only in France, which may or may not have a different culture of drug use than other European countries. Hair sample testing has no legal status in France, or anywhere else for that matter, and the identities of those who tested positive will never be revealed.
Yet for all such caveats, there is no mistaking the echoes of another study that took place in baseball in the early part of this decade. Then, as now, the sample was small, the purpose informational and the findings eye-popping: 104 players, almost one-third of those tested, turned out positive. Major League Baseball was aware of the results, but thinking they would never be made public, continued to insist there was no problem with steroids until it emerged there was a problem with steroids.
Fifa is not guilty of such deception, but in its attempts to circumvent the "whereabouts" codes it reveals the nature of its own suspicions; that if it does not know if there is widespread drug use in football, then it has absolutely no interest in finding out if there is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog...a-doping-drugs
Fifa is burying its head in the sand over Wada's anti-doping code
In any wrestling match between the secretive, self-serving bureaucracy that runs global football (Fifa) and intractable bureaucracy that runs the global campaign against drug cheats (Wada) it is tempting to hope for simultaneous body slams, sending both protagonists to the canvas and leaving the rest of us to get on with our lives in peace.
Alas, such happy calamities happen only in cartoons, which more often than not leaves us facing a choice between the devil we know and, oh yes, the other devil we know. Fortunately, the argument between these two organisations over the "whereabouts" code and how it should apply to drug-testing in football is one of those rare occasions where taking sides is easy.
Wada, which believes football players should be available for testing 365 days a year, is right. Fifa, which believes football players should be available for testing only when they are within the confines of the football stadium or the training complex, is wrong.
However, Fifa being Fifa, it can't resist compounding this understandable human failing with the less forgivable sin of cant. "Both on a political and juridical level, the legality of the lack of respect of the private life of players, a fundamental element of individual liberty, can be questioned," it said in a statement issued with Uefa this week.
Suspending incredulity for a moment, let's imagine a body like Fifa cares about civil liberties. We might then ask — does it have a point? The answer is no, at least not if it has signed up to Wada's anti-drugs code, which is a full-service menu and not available à la carte. You are either in or you are out, and Fifa, for reasons of credibility and finance, decided years ago that it was in.
Now it seems Sepp Blatter and friends have decided they want to be both in and out, which is to say they want the benefits that flow from adherence to Wada's rules (membership of the Olympic movement and so forth) without the inconvenience of having to abide by those rules.
Blatter is many things, but he is not naive. He must know that Wada can no more allow football to be exempt from its "whereabouts" code than it could grant weightlifting immunity from the "testosterone" code — which leads us to another conundrum: why does Fifa persist with its quixotic campaign?
The answer, I believe, lies in the findings of a study carried by a French anti-doping agency, which tested hair samples from 138 professional athletes, including 32 footballers. (Unlike urine samples, where evidence of steroid use is "washed out" within days, hair samples can retain traces of drugs much longer.) The results — published in France last week but completely ignored in this country — revealed that seven players (21.8%) tested "positive" for some form of banned drug, a far greater proportion than that found in sports such as rugby and, ahem, cycling. It is a bad day indeed for football when it places higher in the league table of drug use than professional cycling, although, in fairness, there are reasons to be cautious about the French study.Most obviously, it took place only in France, which may or may not have a different culture of drug use than other European countries. Hair sample testing has no legal status in France, or anywhere else for that matter, and the identities of those who tested positive will never be revealed.
Yet for all such caveats, there is no mistaking the echoes of another study that took place in baseball in the early part of this decade. Then, as now, the sample was small, the purpose informational and the findings eye-popping: 104 players, almost one-third of those tested, turned out positive. Major League Baseball was aware of the results, but thinking they would never be made public, continued to insist there was no problem with steroids until it emerged there was a problem with steroids.
Fifa is not guilty of such deception, but in its attempts to circumvent the "whereabouts" codes it reveals the nature of its own suspicions; that if it does not know if there is widespread drug use in football, then it has absolutely no interest in finding out if there is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog...a-doping-drugs
Nope. FatTony saying sensible if disputable would not have been a shock.
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