In Russia, steroids take you
- Thread starter El-Jefe
- Start date
Winning a gold medal in wrestling at the the Olympics would be meaningless without the Russians there. They should be tested twice as often as the rest of the world but if they pass the tests then let them compete. Also make sure they test that Yazdani guy from Iran a couple extra times. My God he blew up.
I agree completely. I want them to compete but only if everything is 100% cleared threw testing. I mean dear lord some of them look like Greek gods. Pretty tough to beat a guy that is already a damn good wrestle but also scientically built above his own capacity.
Understand what you're saying Turk, but this isn't about wrestling. In 2012, Russia sent 436 athletes to the Olympics, so multiply what you're saying by a factor of 25 or so. It's prohibitive, imo, but one never knows. Rather, test them all now, on Russia's dime, and let the clean athlete's compete...just don't think there's time for that. Heaven only knows how this will play out
It may be meaningless to you, but I'm sure it won't be to the athletes that win them. Just ask the 1984 Olympians.
Someone posted it before somewhere else, forget where, but essentially it was that Russian athletes have been cheating other athletes out of for what most of them is their life's work with this system. Russia earned 82 medals in the London Olympics. How many of these athletes benefitted from the system that Russia allegedly had in place. How many other athletes didn't medal because of this? Athletes that spent years sacrificing for their limited shot at a life's goal.
Russia needs to be out for a little while.
This X1000000
Cheating should never be tolerated in any sport at any level, and especially in wrestling, where Gold is the ultimate achievement.
Much worse situation to let them in, knowing this situation, and then their medalists get disqualified afterward for flunked tests.
For Chrissakes, they're cheating in significant numbers at the Paralympics.
For Chrissakes, they're cheating in significant numbers at the Paralympics.
Medals mean money post games. So I cant agree with you on this one. I hate to boil it down to that but it is what it is.
Let everyone juice, then and only then is it fair. Otherwise ban them.
The IOC is sorely in need of a face-saving opportunity and they won't have a better chance to flip their own shady image around than dropping the hammer on the Russians. I generally agree that it'd be ideal if our guys won having gone through the Russians, but now, with the benefit of an in-depth understanding of Russia's program, having Russia sit in the penalty box for a few years is not just better but necessary for the sport as a whole. That fish was rotten head to tail, and if there really need be consequences to deceit that elaborate and bold, or else why should anyone take the sport seriously? Hell, two UFC guys here tested positive and that's practically professional wrestling. It's embarrassing that we're the only country taking this somewhat seriously.
Agree -- on the individual athlete level.
This is so widespread, it's way beyond that. This is nationalism gone berserk. Nothing like some international superiority to make folks forget how bad things are at home. And things are bad in Mother Russia.
My view is that band-aids won't work to cure systemic, institution-wide problems. Even if everyone signed on to a band-aid approach of individual testing now in the name of fairness, you can't necessarily know that athlete x was clean when he/she qualified. And if under the band-aid approach the Russian athletes needed to show that they were clean at all necessary times, I'm not sure how they'd even do that when the parties in custody of the past samples are tainted and corrupt.
Read somewhere that the IOC Head is friends with Putin. Everything contains at least a little politics...a complete ban seems in play, but heaven only knows where this will go.
Who exactly would they be? The chart above is approx. 600 positive tests that "disappeared." That doesn't include Russian athletes whose tests were tampered with so they didn't appear positive, or who cheated the testing in some other ways.
Husker Du = Willie, and here's what he said:
I am confused. When exactly did international sports authorities gain any credibility to lose?
They do have the best YouTube driving fail vids. I can watch them for hours. You never know when a car's going to ram a donkey cart and the donkey owner proceeds to use 7th degree black belt stuff on the driver
I really dislike the sentiment that any Olympic Wrestling medals earned would be somehow minimized by the public on account of would-be competitors who didn't compete, for whatever reason. Wrestlers talk all the time that they 'can only wrestle whoever's in front of me.' That said, I get it. And since I'm also a big proponent of Message Board Rights and don't want to appear hypocritical, let's give 'for whatever reason' some contextual scale.
Reasons A Would-Be Competitor's Absence Can or Should Mitigate the Actual Competitors' Accomplishments in Public Discussion, in Increasing Order of Validity:
1. Personal Choice. Would-be competitor chose not to attend. LOL not valid. If absolutely nothing else is blocking you, man up & get there, or stfu.
2. Loss. Would-be competitor lost earlier in the tournament: Yeah, not valid. I'm glad Nico got Gilman in the finals, but I'm not about to minimize his championship because Tomasello failed to meet him there.
3. Poverty / Lack of Opportunity. Would-be competitor literally cannot afford to attend. This succcs, bad. One might suggest that a Champion fully vested in his championship's purity could fund his competitor's way, but come on. Unlikelihood's a contributor here too: if the would-be competitor is that broke, how does it ever become known he might have been one of the best 'out there?'
4. Injury. Would-be competitor got injured. Tough break, sure, but what can the Champ do about it? Everybody knows it's part of the sport. Cael even once said something like 'staying healthy is part of the challenge of the sport.'
5. Personal Cheating. Would-be competitor, reasonably indisputably, fails a drug test. My problem here with validity is how do we know he was a worthy competitor to begin with? How can we tell how much of his prior performances we should distinguish between 'natural' and 'enhanced?' It's too inexact. Is it valid to mention it? Sure, a couple times. But 5 years from now, is the actual winner's title still being spoken about with an asterisk? I haven't kept up, but there hasn't been any growing narrative that Jon Jones got jobbed, has there? Maybe that's a bad example as fat as Cormier looked and as dominant as Jones had been in the past...
6. Systemic Cheating. Would-be competitor competes for a country about which it just became known that hundreds of positive tests 'went missing.' Here we are. What can J'Den Cox or Frank Molinaro do about this? Not a dang thing. If they come home from Rio with medals around their necks, are you gonna put an asterisk sticker on them? Or caption a photo of their glory celebrations with 'here lies pseudo-champion Yankee Wrestler?' Do we ignore the beast-azz fields of Iranians, Georgians, Indians, Azerbaijanis that our bros just mowed through, to insist on the meaninglessness of dominating a Russian-less field?
7. Politics. Would-be competitor, through undeniably no fault of his own, competes for a country whose leaders abstained for geopolitical reasons. Probably the most valid. Carter & Chernenko boycott decisions affected thousands. And still. If Randy Lewis invites you into his man cave to see his medal hanging on the wall, are you gonna tell him 'well, listen Randy, come on. Would that really be hanging there if the Russians had come to LA?' Who even does that on a message board either? Asterisks have pretty short shelf-lives for this kind of thing. In some long-form pieces, it'll probably still merit mention, but never with any derision or nasty labels like 'meaningless'
Bonus#. Cheating Judges. This one's kinda outside my point, b/c it's in reverse and doesn't involve an absent would-be competitor, but an actual competitor who was egregiously gifted a fallacy of a victory. Roy Jones in Seoul is an example. Errrrybody knows he got jobbed, so, yeah, it's probably pretty valid to stare at the Silver in his basement and, over a brew with him, say to his face 'sucks man, that shoulda been Gold.'
Reasons A Would-Be Competitor's Absence Can or Should Mitigate the Actual Competitors' Accomplishments in Public Discussion, in Increasing Order of Validity:
1. Personal Choice. Would-be competitor chose not to attend. LOL not valid. If absolutely nothing else is blocking you, man up & get there, or stfu.
2. Loss. Would-be competitor lost earlier in the tournament: Yeah, not valid. I'm glad Nico got Gilman in the finals, but I'm not about to minimize his championship because Tomasello failed to meet him there.
3. Poverty / Lack of Opportunity. Would-be competitor literally cannot afford to attend. This succcs, bad. One might suggest that a Champion fully vested in his championship's purity could fund his competitor's way, but come on. Unlikelihood's a contributor here too: if the would-be competitor is that broke, how does it ever become known he might have been one of the best 'out there?'
4. Injury. Would-be competitor got injured. Tough break, sure, but what can the Champ do about it? Everybody knows it's part of the sport. Cael even once said something like 'staying healthy is part of the challenge of the sport.'
5. Personal Cheating. Would-be competitor, reasonably indisputably, fails a drug test. My problem here with validity is how do we know he was a worthy competitor to begin with? How can we tell how much of his prior performances we should distinguish between 'natural' and 'enhanced?' It's too inexact. Is it valid to mention it? Sure, a couple times. But 5 years from now, is the actual winner's title still being spoken about with an asterisk? I haven't kept up, but there hasn't been any growing narrative that Jon Jones got jobbed, has there? Maybe that's a bad example as fat as Cormier looked and as dominant as Jones had been in the past...
6. Systemic Cheating. Would-be competitor competes for a country about which it just became known that hundreds of positive tests 'went missing.' Here we are. What can J'Den Cox or Frank Molinaro do about this? Not a dang thing. If they come home from Rio with medals around their necks, are you gonna put an asterisk sticker on them? Or caption a photo of their glory celebrations with 'here lies pseudo-champion Yankee Wrestler?' Do we ignore the beast-azz fields of Iranians, Georgians, Indians, Azerbaijanis that our bros just mowed through, to insist on the meaninglessness of dominating a Russian-less field?
7. Politics. Would-be competitor, through undeniably no fault of his own, competes for a country whose leaders abstained for geopolitical reasons. Probably the most valid. Carter & Chernenko boycott decisions affected thousands. And still. If Randy Lewis invites you into his man cave to see his medal hanging on the wall, are you gonna tell him 'well, listen Randy, come on. Would that really be hanging there if the Russians had come to LA?' Who even does that on a message board either? Asterisks have pretty short shelf-lives for this kind of thing. In some long-form pieces, it'll probably still merit mention, but never with any derision or nasty labels like 'meaningless'
Bonus#. Cheating Judges. This one's kinda outside my point, b/c it's in reverse and doesn't involve an absent would-be competitor, but an actual competitor who was egregiously gifted a fallacy of a victory. Roy Jones in Seoul is an example. Errrrybody knows he got jobbed, so, yeah, it's probably pretty valid to stare at the Silver in his basement and, over a brew with him, say to his face 'sucks man, that shoulda been Gold.'
^^ This is why Ivan needs to stay out of Rio. Once this skunk sprays, no getting the stink off.
Examples in both directions:
Quick, without googling: Who won the gold when Roy Jones got jobbed in the semis by judges on the take? And who got the gold in track when Canuckistan's Ben Johnson flunked the pee test?
Those champs are unfortunately historical footnotes.
Examples in both directions:
Quick, without googling: Who won the gold when Roy Jones got jobbed in the semis by judges on the take? And who got the gold in track when Canuckistan's Ben Johnson flunked the pee test?
Those champs are unfortunately historical footnotes.
Who is or is not there, for whatever reason, does not diminish the accomplishment of winning a metal, in my mind, in the least. A wrestler can only control his side of the ledger, all else is out of his control and should not be given a second thought, by him or anyone else.
Disagree 100%. Read the articles on Russian doping. They not only have sophisticated masking programs, they outright cheat the tests themselves, even using secret service agents to destroy or hide results. They should be banned for life, every one of them. It's the only way Russia gets the message.
The Russkies did it all the way back to the 60's with the Press sisters (or men). The East Germans were also guilty, then came the Chinese swim team with the E. German coach. I think it was Donna DeVerona who criticized the Chinese flat-chested women with mustaches and V-shaped backs. When didn't the Russians cheat?
world anti-doping agency for the first part. Your guess is as good as mine for the second
TOM on why Russia needs to be banned, and why re-testing their athletes prior to Rio is a fallacy:
http://news.theopenmat.com/wrestling-news-wire/russia-must-local-labs-matter/58563
http://news.theopenmat.com/wrestling-news-wire/russia-must-local-labs-matter/58563
To me it seems like a double edged sword: You ban Russia, and instantly the arguments come out about how much the medals are worth without them in it. On the other hand, you allow them to compete, and you look amateurish and rogue, and in addition, you have no idea if their medals will even stand, since they are so prone to doping.
Does anyone else recall how disturbing and frightening those chinese gymnasts were last olympics? They looked, literally, like children in grade school. It was disturbing.
What was Sadulaev doing eating lunch at the Corner Room with Cael and Casey? I wonder if he's planning to attend PSU given what's happened? Interesting needless to say
I see what you did there
Lawyers involved now, no surprise. Will have a decision as early as Thursday...
http://abcnews.go.com/International...ns-russia-olympic-ban-calls/story?id=40702722
http://abcnews.go.com/International...ns-russia-olympic-ban-calls/story?id=40702722
