They're all on drugs.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

A couple of darts players have been banned for cocaine use (most famously, former BDO World Champion, Richie Burnett a couple of years back), but not for performance enhancing that I can imagine.

I think there have been more than enough snooker players who couldn't possibly have got through a WADA test. And wasn't there a thing about beta-blockers a while back?

[Walter Knight]

I think there have been more than enough snooker players who couldn't possibly have got through a WADA test. And wasn't there a thing about beta-blockers a while back?

Beta-blockers were banned in snooker in line with IOC rules in the 80s. Bill Werbeniuk and Neal Foulds were both known to have used them and their careers suffered after the ban - although in Werbeniuk's case his vast alcohol consumption didn't help either.

[longeared]

Yeah. In the current era there is an anti doping policy which forms part of player contracts and players are tested although I'm not sure how regularly this occurs. There have been historic players who have admitted to cocaine use - Kirk Stevens and Jimmy White most obviously - and any positive tests these days are for recreational drugs, there aren't issues with the sort of stuff that bedevils endurance sports. Taking a bucketload of amphetamines would if anything be counterproductive.

[Janik]

But beta-blockers would make sense for a sport of concentration and fine motor control.

Halep? F*ck. Didn't see that one coming. There have been plenty at the top of the game over the last 20-30 years who I'm rather sceptical about... but she was never one of them.

[diggedy derek]

I might have dreamt it, but wasn’t there a drugs scandal in the sedate world of bowls not too long ago?

[Various Artist]

I'm not sure cod liver oil supplements count.

[Levin]

https://twitter.com/jgault13/status/1604832741517922306?s=20&t=sgDEnQ5QYqvL6h_PnwkJdA

That's a lot of athletes to be banned in a single year.

[Janik]

Going back to Halep, it seems she might be able to argue her way out of a ban - there were reports she has demonstrated (probably not personally) that a legal supplement she was taking had been contaminated with the banned substance in her positive samples.

In other news, the ITF’s record keeping, which is, you know, rather crucial in proving doping cases, seems very suspect - Halep is male, as are any number of people one would assume from their names are female (Silvia Ambrosio - M), whilst R.Nadal and M.Berrettini show up as female.

Edit - note about number of Out-Of-Competition tests withdrawn. On further scanning, 13 is around par for a top 50 player.

[ursus arctos]

Kim Clijsters also male.

One would have thought that such data would be subject to spot checks before being released.

[Janik]

Indeed.

It looks like an Excel autofill f*ck up. The first 16 names on the list are:
female, male, female, male, male, male, male, then;
female, male, female, male, male, male, male again. And then:
female, male...
at this point in looks like the AI has gone "ooh, ooh, I see a repeating pattern - every seven entries goes F, M, F, M, M, M, M. Lets just drop that down the entire list!"

But it does wonders for ones confidence in the competency of the organisation to publish this, which came out at least two weeks ago, having neither proof-read it nor spotted the error in the meantime.

[caja-dglh]

They just don't understand Serie A culture

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1707399564389388761

[diggedy derek]

Well at least they weren’t all on drugs

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Well whoever it was, it didn't do them much good, the men's team only won one bronze in Tokyo, Josh Kerr in the 1,500m, and I'm sure it wasn't him.

[Discordant Resonance]

Is a certain coach who shares his name with a Portuguese dictator still involved with Team GB?

[Janik]

No. Nor anyone else - he was banned for four years after the ProPublica revelations, and quit the sport as a consequence.

[Snake Plissken]

More dodginess around Team GB in London 2012. The article is clear that no actual doping rules were broken, but that there was some deliberate exploitation of grey areas.

User Beware: the bottle behind the NDAs signed by 91 UK athletes before London 2012 (substack.com)

[ursus arctos]

Marginal gains, innit?

[MrLeam]

Thanks for posting, Snake - really interesting. I like the bit where:

Similarly, Chris Froome, in 2015, said he had never heard of ketones and that Team Sky “100%” did not use them.

A very good denial, based not on whether Froome took the substance but whether he knew the technical name, and whether you could technically say they were being officially used by all of Team Sky. Another reminder that, unfortunately, you can't take athletes denials of taking substances at face value

[Sits]

By coincidence Geraint Thomas began spruiking ketones on his podcast a couple of weeks ago. There's a line something like "a lot of people said we were taking them years ago but the team did loads of research first to make sure they're OK." Not verbatim. Later in the ad he says they used to taste terrible but now they're much better.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/b_nishanov/status/1752732914108834215?t=W6TlOsyyehLwdBrzdb6X0g&s=09

[diggedy derek]

Valieva's now completely banned, isn't she. She was head and shoulders above the competition at the Japan Olympics.

[Janik]

Thanks for posting, Snake - really interesting. I like the bit where:

Similarly, Chris Froome, in 2015, said he had never heard of ketones and that Team Sky “100%” did not use them.

A very good denial, based not on whether Froome took the substance but whether he knew the technical name, and whether you could technically say they were being officially used by all of Team Sky. Another reminder that, unfortunately, you can't take athletes denials of taking substances at face value

If you don't know what they are, how can you be 100% sure you don't use them? Froome is most likely 100% wrong on that anyway, as about the only way not to use ketones is to be dead - they are basically endemic in our diets. Because ketones are such a broad class of chemicals, with such a vast range of activity, that a ketone-free diet would take incredibly careful management (and would be purposeless anyway given how varied in action ketones are). I suspect this is true of basically no athlete in the world given most of them will be substituting fructose for sucrose. And fructose is a ketone (not all ketones taste bad!).

Not knowing what ketones are means he must have stopped doing chemistry at the earliest possible opportunity. Ketones have a carboxyl group (a carbon double-bonded to an oxygen (C=O)) located somewhere in the middle of a carbon chain - that is all it takes to make a molecule a ketone. The simplest possible ketone is acetone - the carboxyl in this uses the middle carbon of a chain of three: CH3COCH3. As anyone who has used it as a solvent, which it is extremely effective at being, knows acetone doesn't smell very nice. It probably doesn't taste very nice either. And is toxic in high enough doses. But it won't make an athlete bigger or stronger in any way - it's only a poison, nothing else. There are many, many other chemicals in the ketone group (being a long chain organic this is effectively an infinitely large class) and most are not going to be performance enhancing, and those that are are highly likely in that gray zone of boosting performance with dietary supplements (not necessarily immoral anyway, that is what diet and fuelling is all about for athletes) which are not on the banned list.

It's one of those false conversions issues. Just because some performance enhancing drugs are ketones, not all ketones are performance enhancing drugs. I'm going with hardly any are, in fact. The structural elements that make a compound a performance enhancing are highly unlikely to be anything to do with it being a ketone, given how basic and widespread that is.

[Capybara]

Not knowing what ketones are means he must have stopped doing chemistry at the earliest possible opportunity. Ketones have a carboxyl group (a carbon double-bonded to an oxygen (C=O)) located somewhere in the middle of a carbon chain - that is all it takes to make a molecule a ketone.

Indeed. Third year secondary iirc.

[Sits]

Chemistry was by far my worst subject. I didn't know the above, but I'm not an athlete.

Just in case there was any doubt.