Antidoping Solutions for Ultrarunning Part 1 - USADA and Dr. Fedoruk | Koopcast Episode 81

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to a really special episode of the KoopCast the first in a series of special episodes of the KoopCast that is all about anti-doping measures that we can take in the sport of trail and ultra running this has been in the works for a really long time over a year in fact in fact this first conversation that i had with dr fedorik over at usada was scheduled in march of 2020 right before the pandemic hit in fact the day that their offices closed was the day that i was supposed to go in for this particular interview and it's been over a year in the making and i'm actually very fortunate that i took over a year because i was able to gather some of these other interviews that i always wanted to do and really compile them into a series and so i'm really excited over the course of the next five weeks i'll be releasing five different podcasts all from different people's perspectives who are influencers policymakers athletes people who have run it who have had encounters within the current anti-doping systems that exist around the world all to gather their individual perspectives and use those perspectives and use that knowledge and expertise for the solutions that we can potentially create in trail

and ultra running make no mistake you guys have heard me say this before i've been tooting this horn for over a year now trail and ultra running is on a parabolic rise we are going to continue to see more athletes come into the sport we're going to see better athletes come into the sport we're going to see more professionalism come into the sport we're going to see more money come into the sport and that is going to continue we keep looking at the rise of ultra runners over the last four years and there is no indication that that is stopping and i wholeheartedly believe that from a professionalism and from an anti-doping standpoint we are truly at an inflection point where there is not a culture of doping within the sport but that is not static and we can choose to do something now for the betterment of the athletes in the entire ecosystem in the future or we can sit on our hands and wait another decade and when that decade goes by we're going to look back and we're going to kick ourselves because the sport has kind of gone awry just like many of the other endurance sports that we've seen and even sports like weightlifting and other olympic sports where they got caught behind the eight ball in fact i have a podcast coming up in a couple of weeks talking about those exact scenarios so you will have to stay tuned so here's what is on tap for the next five weeks today i'm talking with dr fedorik who's the chief science officer at uh over at usada next week released on june 3rd i will be talking with paul

demio who is the uh author of the anti-doping crisis in sport causes consequences solutions which is a fantastic book you guys go ahead and check that out in advance of the podcast it'd actually be really insightful on june 10th i have a conversation with lisa roberts who's a former professional triathlete and got entangled in western states's anti-doping policy and we talk a lot about the consequences of that on june 17th i have one of the few people who have actually put some effort into this in the trail and ultra running community and that is charlie ware and we talk about what he has done to date and how we can move forward and then finally on june 24th i have a conversation with two of the people that i respect the most in the sport and that's my one of my athletes still in bowman and fellow coach mario fraioli and we discuss uh we basically have a brainstorming session on what anti-doping solutions can look like and how we can best serve the community what i want to have happen at the end of all of these podcasts is for them to serve as an initial educational galvanizing piece for the community to come together and ultimately create solutions and those solutions are not easy don't get me wrong we are not going to be able to copy and paste something from the ioc copy and paste something from wada we're not going to be able to easily come up with a contract boilerplate draft of something and have everybody sign it they are going to be hard

and these solutions are going to be full of compromises they are going to be imperfect but hopefully practical and pragmatic and it's going to take a lot of elbow grease which fortunately ultra runners are really renowned for their level of effort that they can put into things it's going to take a lot of elbow grease to put together so i hope after listening to all of these the community can come together as a whole to try to create some reasonable solutions the best way to get all these podcasts is just go and subscribe for the life of me whenever i throw something up on apple podcasts the subscribers get it immediately and the people who don't subscribe they get it like i don't know sometimes an hour later sometimes a day later so if you don't want to be caught out in the cold with the conversation go ahead and subscribe you'll get it immediately on any of your podcasting platforms starting with this one with doctor for dork before i get into that conversation though and before any of this can actually take off i do have to go over some efforts of full disclosure and that is because anytime i have ever remotely walked anywhere close to talking about doping or anti-doping solutions inevitably the twiddiots come out of the woodworks and start throwing stones and hurling arrows do you hurl an arrow or shoot it anyway i'm subject to i'm subject to a lot of criticism and that's fine i've gotten used to it

over the years it's been something that i've been dealing with for 20 some odd years and i'm okay with it i'm comfortable with where i'm at right now but if i'm being honest that criticism and that polarization has really kept me on the sidelines of this conversation and of this topic and i'm not afraid anymore i'm not afraid of the criticism i've got thick skin if people want to come after me with whatever i'm i'm cool with that but i want to go over these efforts of full disclosure kind of for the uninformed the people that are just getting into this and have no awareness of it because i don't want any of the nonsense that is inevitably going to ensue after i release these podcasts i don't want any of that nonsense to stand in the way of the information and to stand in the way of the effort because i'm not going out here on a limb for nothing i'm going out here on a limb because i want to leave the sport better than i found it and i do believe that we are well served as a community to come up with solutions now before the problems actually start to arise so this whole controversy has to do with my very non-relationship with lance armstrong and my very good relationship with his former coach and my boss and somebody who got me into coaching chris carmichael i'm going to take you through that whole storyline just like i have with my family members just like i have with my athletes just like

i have with my fellow coaching colleagues just like i've had with anybody in the community who bothers to ask and wants to sit down for 10 minutes and discuss it i'm going to take you through the whole thing if you're rolling if you're rolling your eyes right now and you've heard me say this or you just don't care feel free to fast forward 10 minutes i'm not going to i'm not going to hold that against you but i have to say something because it's weird if i don't i'm not going to ignore this and i'm not going to ignore that people are going to come out of the woodworks and say whatever because it would just be weird and ultimately it would stand in the way of us coming together to find a solution and as i mentioned earlier i'm off the sidelines with this i'm getting up off the bench and put me in coach and part of me doing that is kind of releasing to the world this non-issue as weird as that actually sounds and so here it is my coaching career began 2000 super humbly that's why i begin these podcasts with i am your humble host super humbly as a very lowly intern with a company called cts now how i found cts was very serendipitous i knew i wanted to be an endurance coach there are really only two avenues i had to go down the first avenue was within the collegiate coaching ranks and cross country and track and with all due respect to those fine individuals that's a coaching carousel and i did not want to play ball in that arena the second opportunity i had was an internship over at

the olympic training center and for a variety of reasons i just didn't want to take advantage of that opportunity so as i was trying to figure out how to get involved in coaching in the year 2000 i just happened to stumble upon an internship and stumble upon is very literal in every sense of the word an internship called cts whose founder its ceo and current ceo chris carmichael was lance's coach during his tour de france run and even when he was going back to a junior now me being an endurance aficionado and also a native texan that's absolutely a part of it and lance's prominence not only in sport but as an iconic world figure had an absolute impact in my attraction to come on board with cts in the year 2000 as a very lowly i can't remember if i was unpaid i might get paid like 500 bucks a month i wasn't paid much intern that was sweeping the floors and packaging together soft goods and maybe coaching a little bit on the side that aura of getting involved in elite sport on that level was absolutely attracted me so i took the internship kind of on that and that alone what became very clear to me within months a few very short months of joining that organization is that it was far bigger than the relationship between one coach and one athlete i literally had

at my disposal coaches that had worked with iron man world champions with olympic medalists world championship medalists athletes and coaches across all four of the major sports football baseball basketball and hockey coaches that worked with the motor sports athletes such as indycar drivers formula one drivers and nascar champions you name it we had a coaching staff in a coaching stable that at the time was unparalleled and here i was this 21 year old knucklehead that couldn't coach his way out of wet paper bag i got to take i got to take it all in and i was like a kid in a candy store and very quickly what started out as me starting with this company simply for the reason that lance armstrong was somehow involved in it to i really enjoy what i'm doing and this is the opportunity of a lifetime because all of these opportunities are directly in front of me to which i had no idea what i was stepping into that became very apparent from the get-go and so i stuck with it i became i went from an intern who couldn't coach to a coach that could coach a little bit better and then a coach that was okay and then the coach that was pretty good and then a coach that was better than pretty good and then all of a sudden to the coaching director which i had oversight and management

responsibilities over the entire coaching staff and then i started to get involved in the operations of the company as a whole and now i manage the the the suite of uh ultramarathon coaches that we have here at cts and that storyline is important because it it runs a similar path as lance's career where i came on board and he was he was winning or writing or whatever we're calling it right now his second or third tour de france and then he won his fourth and his fifth and his sixth and seventh and his comeback and then the entire fall from grace that we all publicly uh uh witnessed i got to ride alongside with that on the sidelines and during the course of that journey and even during lance's rise from first tour de france win to seventh tour de france win or whatever we're calling them people would ask me hey do you think lance is doping and those those whispers got louder and louder and louder and louder and every single time no matter who asked me what or what format it was asked of me in whether it's family member friend training partner coaching colleague whatever i said the exact same thing every single time because it's the truth and that's i don't know shit i have only met lance a small handful of times for very brief handshakes there is zero chance he would ever be able to pick me out

at a bar or a restaurant or at a social event i simply have had no relationship with him nor have i ever had any sort of relationship with him nor did i really even care if he was doping or if he wasn't and i know that that sounds weird i know that from the outside looking in for somebody who came into a company partially because of this relationship between chris and lance for me to say ah well it doesn't care i know that seems kind of a flipping attitude but that the the fact of the matter is it's the honest truth i was more involved in coaching athletes and growing coaches and taking advantage of all of the other opportunities where i did have great relationships with and a lot of those individuals i've brought on to this podcast which is jt kearney you guys should go and check that out who's singularly had probably the biggest impact in my entire coaching career but i was more i was i was more involved in those happenings with those athletes with those coaches with those individuals and i could care less about the lance armstrong storyline at the time we can all look back now and now that the curtain has been peeled back at all of the mistakes that cycling as a whole has made over the course of that time and really continues to make now for being honest and we're going to talk about that on a future podcast

as well and those mistakes are tragic and almost all of those individuals have owned up to those mistakes and we can learn we as the ultra running community can learn a lot from those mistakes but i simply wasn't involved in any way shape or form and not only was i not involved i wasn't even close i've never been a subject or a person of interest for any of these dealings having to do with lance armstrong or the reason decision or any of the aftermath of that from usada or wada or any of those interested parties the great thing about this though is that you don't have to take my word for it and we've all heard dopers and people that have been involved in doping deny deny deny over the years and it's it's very unfortunately become cliche that it's deny first and deny until the death and i know that this dialogue might actually sound like that but the great thing is you don't have to take my word for it one of the fantastic things that you saw to did with the reason decision which is kind of the whole demise of lance armstrong as we know it today is they've made all those records public they made all the testimony public they made all the affidavits public they made the rationale public and you can go and find it right now you can go right now search for it easily find it you can control f coop k-o-o-p on any or all of those documents and there's several hundred of them to

pour through and i'm not anywhere mentioned there i quite simply was never or have never have ever been involved in any of those in any way shape or form now there are going to be some people out there when these podcasts that come out that are going to insinuate that i was involved that somehow i knew something i must have known something because i worked for cts and i worked for chris and this whole thing is a huge scandal and everything dealing with lance or within a thousand miles of lance must be dirty just go look it up people i'll put all the links up to that on the website or on the show notes to this go look it up go find it go do your own research you don't have to take my word for it you can take other people's word for it there are going to be other people that just simply say bad things i have a character flaw i have bad judgment i should have done this i should have done that those opinions are fine i'm cool with that you guys want to have your own opinion about stuff great everybody's allowed to have an opinion but you're not allowed to your own facts and so if you come out with facts that are incorrect or you are somehow misstating my lack of involvement within this whole thing make no mistake that i will correct the record and that i will correct the record with the actual facts you want to come out you want to come at me with

your opinions you don't like my hair you don't like the way i run you think i'm stupid whatever i don't care you can say it great that's your opinion you're entitled to it but you're not entitled to your own facts and that will happen when this comes out and that will be unfortunate but i hope that we can see through all of that for the nonsense that it actually is and i really hope that none of that clutters the information that is to come for this podcast and the next several podcasts the final thing that i will say is that i have never turned down any interview any conversation any form of dialogue ever about any of this i have always been transparent and i've always been an open book to the obnoxious nature of this 20 now 20 minute intro and that is going to remain the same if anybody wants to contact me at any point about anything about any form in any format i am game all of my information is public you guys know how to get a hold of me i've never shied away from any of that because i quite frankly have absolutely zero to hide my record is beyond reproach when it has to do with this so with that as an intro i hope everybody can buckle down for the next five podcasts and in advance i thank

all the guests for coming on because some of these topics are not the easiest to talk about and we'll get into that in a few weeks in this podcast but also over the course of the next few weeks so thank you to dr fedorick thank you to paul demio thank you to lisa roberts thank you to charlie ware and thank you to dylan and mario for recording these uh with me i realize that these that some of these conversations are just hard you know but they're necessary so we're going to get right into it with the first podcast of five and this is with dr matt fedorick who's the chief science officer over at usada let's get right into it i want to know first off before we get into anything because this is a super interesting curiosity point for me having a biochemistry background is how have the dried blood spot tests been going i know that's been a really big a really big project and covid kind of like accelerated it to a thousand two thousand miles an hour so i'm kind of curious as to how that's going yeah i mean it's going fantastic we started in 2017 yeah and um you know we are culminating now actually in just about rolling out um a official technical document which allows us to start officially under water code compliant rules collecting and analyzing dried blood spots so where it's been a pilot project up to date it's really

we've tried to advance the science and advance our experience so that um globally this is hopefully going to be a brand new matrix that can be used you know in every country um if they have the resources and and they want to they want to do the blood testing we're going to back up just a little bit because the listeners aren't even going to be familiar with it but it's a test you literally literally take a pinprick of blood yeah you put it on what looks like a piece of paper yeah and that gets tested yeah so um this concept of rather than doing blood draws through a venipuncture so sticking a needle in an athlete's arm obviously very invasive and athletes don't love it so in 2017 we started investigating you know what are some alternatives to this and and one of the things that came about was you know they've been doing finger sticks and heel sticks um on babies and and in other instances applications for decades but um there's a couple companies in the us that have actually developed new uh collection devices that basically just you put them on your arm and you stick them down similar to like a sticky a 3m post-it note and then you press a button and it draws blood out of the top layer of your your skin out of your capillaries so we started working on this and you know ultimately it's it's culminated in um there's two main ways to do it so you can do finger sticks and you can do cards or you can use these devices which are essentially a biomedical device that it's all integrated into one so

you press the button the blood gets drawn into a cartridge and that cartridge has the spots in it and then you send it off to the laboratory fascinating did the athletes like that you're initially piloting that out on just go come on this can't work like did you get a lot of skepticism from um i think we got actually a lot of excitement because they just they don't want to get poked anymore and and um you know there's obviously a lot of scientific validation work to do and and the blood that we collect now because of the volumes it gives you the most flexibility to do the analyses that we're looking to do with a smaller volume of blood then you're essentially limited by that so really you know a lot of the work has been one coming up with new collection procedures and instructing our sample collection personnel and this is something great because you don't actually need a a trained phlebotomist out in the field anymore you can just have a doping control officer instruct the athlete on how to operate the device and then of course the transportation costs around blood are huge for us and so if it's dried it's very stable you can just throw it in the courier of the mail and it gets sent to the lab and then you know you've got some limitations on the analysis side that you need to make sure that you work through and and you're limited in the number of things you can actually test for in a single spot but um i think it's gonna you know continue to evolve and we're actually looking at other complementary techniques like rather than a dried blood spot cartridge you can actually get like a micro volume a tube of whole

blood and then doing things like the athlete biological passport analysis or some of the other analyses that we can just instead of having to ship a huge tube to the lab we can ship a micro tube is really advantageous yeah we used to do like samples like that way back exactly same type of concept yeah okay thank you for satiating yeah that's not what we're going to talk about today we're going to get down to brass tacks i love talking about science no that's cool like i said when i when i initially saw it i was like wow that is going to be that's going to revolutionize things if the if the testing side of it can come around right if you can get a high a high high enough quality test precise enough test absolutely test for the right things it's going to be revolutionary yeah um you're the chief science officer that's your official title right yes okay we're going to back up a little bit and we're going to go into the science a little bit later but i first want to go over all of the different like anti-doping tools that usada uses at their disposal because a lot of times we get geeked out on the stuffs like oh we're going to you know do a urine test we're going to do a blood test and in in many unfortunate ways you saw that kind of gets put put into this box and other anti-doping efforts kind of get put into this box of well we're just making people piss in a cup and if the piss turns hot which is the colloquial way that everybody describes it right if the piss turns hot then you know the athlete's been been doing something wrong but in reality there's this like whole whole portfolio of things that you guys do without taking up the whole hour can we just kind of like run through that just to set the table before we go into the science side yeah absolutely and and

you know we uh in in the year 2000 when we were founded i think lots of people thought you know we're just glorified pea collectors we've come a long way in 20 years not only on the science but the the reputation and what the organization's known for so i think it's you can break it down into kind of four main areas the first is education so any successful program we are looking to make sure we properly educate all of our stakeholders on what the rules are how we go about the program and that plays into deterrence as well right because we're not all about just catching athletes out it's really important that an effective anti-doping program the number one goal should be to deter athletes from doping in the first place so we have a lot of tools in our toolbox to try to achieve as high a level of deterrence as possible so education is one component you know investigation and intelligence gathering is another testing is another component of that new sample collection matrices is another so that that's always in the back of our minds is that we're not just out to you know get a positive test we are out to deter athletes from doping in the first place and that should be the goal of any program and and i think it's also important to realize that whereas many people think of doping as a positive test that's only one definition of doping there's actually 12 different anti-doping rule violations that we're responsible for under our set of rules so everything from sample manipulation to tampering to refusal of a test to

aiding and abetting and doping if you're an athlete support personnel so it gets very complicated very quickly and people i think they tend to like have this lens of okay we're just trying to collect urine here and get and detect some kind of a steroid in it that's actually a really small part of what we do yeah thank you for that background because i i i do think and i've talked to people in the community especially the ones that haven't they haven't either had to participate in an athlete whereabouts program or anything like that they just have this like really really narrow lens and i think broadening it out is super important yeah um so when we describe what usada does for our purposes we're primarily going to use framework that you use for usa track and field usa cycling and usa usa triathlon which are kind of the equivalent endurance applications and before we go too far i just want the listeners to understand that nobody's proposing that that is the structure that gets implemented into ultra running there's no governing body and that's pro that's part of the issue that that that we're working with if an athlete that you know qualifies for the national championships in track and field or whatever they have they have this rule system incorporated into their lives by default they have no they have no choice in the matter yeah but we're going to use that as framework because it's the current because it's the current framework that exists yeah so let's get into your wheelhouse yeah we're going to go back to the prototype now right to explain it to listeners an athlete is underneath some umbrella usa

triathlon's umbrella usa track and field's umbrella usa cycling's umbrella and they have to submit a test yeah whether it's a race day test or somebody knocks on their door at 6 a.m or whatever what happens once that happens okay so um do you want to talk about first kind of like the context of the rules or do you want to get down to just like the testing part of it start start the context of the rules okay okay okay so i mean just from the context of the rules that usada and the united states in particular is a signatory to an a doping uh against sport convention a united nations convention and that makes us uh what's called a world anti-doping code signatory so the united states is a signatory to the convention and then the world anti-doping agency is the regulatory body that actually creates the set of rules in partnership with all their stakeholders so right now globally there's over 700 code signatories and that could be national anti-doping organizations like usada it could be national sport federations it could be international sport federations could be the ioc so all those people agree that we needed a harmonized anti-doping system globally because an athlete in italy or the uk or the us should be subject to the same set of rules and before that existed you had this totally chaotic system where

essentially countries were responsible for administering their own anti-doping and actually sports were responsible individually so what did that encourage a system that covered up tests that was not independent and that's you know by and large the last two decades have been spent putting in this very extensive framework that protects athletes but it also protects the independence of the anti-doping system and encourages harmonization we're not there yet you've got agencies like usada in the world and then you've got you know countries that maybe don't have the funding to fund anti-doping like they should so there's still a lot of work to be done but that's essentially the the framework that's created that we operate under and we could talk about professional sport as being like slightly different than that but essentially professional sport has um in a lot of instances collectively bargained agreement so they use the world anti-doping system as kind of a guide but then they modify it based on their sport right right it's really it's i'm glad that i'm glad we went down that part because before all of this existed it was a really weird time where you know the brazilian tennis team would the brazilian national tennis team would say okay well we're going to test for these things in this way and on this frequency yeah and then you had like u.s tennis saying okay we're going to do something completely different right and i remember when you would look at those different policies it was like one was on mars and one was on venus right and the incentivization structure the incentive structure

was completely asked backwards yeah and and you need you need really the core of the global framework is specific documents that govern and and make standards around certain things so we've got a standardized prohibitive list everybody's agreed to the substances and the methods that are banned you've got a standard for laboratories so there's 30 accredited labs around the world that no matter where your sample goes it should be analyzed in the same way you've got an international standard for therapeutic use exemptions so an athlete in the u.s that has a medical condition can get a prescription and get it analyzed get it evaluated in the same way as an athlete in another country you've got a results management standard so when there is a positive test or a violation it's managed similarly in in all countries and so all these things they just help to make sure that there's not inequity in the system and um yeah i think you know when you're looking at a sport like um ultra running i think you need to look at it like that lens and do you need to reinvent a system or do you use the system that's in place and can we improve the system absolutely and and we advocate for that every day but we've got now a very robust system to to in order to operate under which is really valuable for athletes i promise the listeners we're going to come back to talking about tues because that's a really hot topic as well

as results management or adverse findings management and how that whole process works but for the uninformed let's go back to the original question right i'm sitting at my home 6 a.m dco knocks on my door you know mr cooper you hear i don't know why they'd be looking for me that's the last person they'd be looking for but somebody knocks on my door we're here to drug test you yeah what have athlete submits a sample yeah what happens from there how take us through the scientific process of what gets done to that sample with that sample sure so um when an athlete is notified at home that's what's called an out of no notice out of competition test so they don't know the tester is going to show up and that's a really important part of the work we do if you gave advance notice there would be ways that an athlete could maybe circumvent the test or not answer their door or those kinds of things so my doorbell doesn't work we've all heard that one so so so once the the athlete is notified then the dco instructs the athlete to go through this process and the process involves sample collection equipment that allows the athlete to essentially provide a sample and that sample gets split into an a and a b bottle and that's really important because through the analysis process and if there is a positive test then that b bottle becomes really important to validate the finding in the a sample and that's the athlete's right to have their b sample analyzed as part of the process so they go through this process it typically takes athletes you know 15 minutes to 30 minutes to provide a sample

if they're ready to provide a sample they're responsible for securing their own equipment they can see the equipment is is secured they package it up and then the dco sends it directly to the laboratory and that equipment doesn't have any markings of the athlete's name on it all that's on the bottle is a sample code number and that's very important because the laboratories operate independently from usada so when they see the sample they don't know whose sample it is they know that it's a male or a female sample they may know the sport that it comes from but in order to have independence and make sure that a laboratory can't manipulate or you know lose a sample then that's code number protects the athlete so once it arrives at the laboratory then that's when all the kind of magic starts happening okay how does the lab know what they are testing for yeah because you can test for anything and everything and the cost goes up depending upon what you're actually testing for in in the situation where we're looking at usa cycling usa triathlon endurance applications right is there a standard set of things that initially get run or does the lab know we're matching up xyz test with athlete number one two three four five yeah no so it gets a little complicated but basically there's three areas of the prohibited list there's substances that are prohibited at all times there's substances that are prohibited only in competition and then there's substances that are prohibited only in particular sports so when the

when the lab gets the sample they get the sample and it says in competition test or out of competition test if it says out of competition they're analyzing that sample for the menu of substances everything that is prohibited at all times everything yeah so you've got anabolic steroids you've got peptide hormones you've got hormone and metabolic modulators you've got diuretics and so those substances are the core of what they analyze for as an out of competition test where it gets a little more complicated is that that core menu can't analyze for some of the more sophisticated substances so this is where when you mentioned you know the cost goes up we have other ways to determine when we need to conduct what are known as special analyses so there's a different menus that we can use so analyzing for growth hormone releasing factors analyzing for epo analyzing for testosterone those are extra tests but we have other tools in our toolbox to be able to look at that sample and say well should it real should it be analyzed for those things what are the characteristics of that sample that may suggest an athlete is using those substances and that's where the passport comes into play because that informs us of when we need to spend extra money to order those tests so is it fair to say that with when you're deploying one of the more advanced

tests after you've done the first menu it's a human looking at the whole situation they're looking at do we need to test for these things they're looking at like the i guess the i guess what i'm trying to say is is how how does that how does that decision making process actually run like you've got the sample in it's all it's all it's not hot what's the opposite of just turning hot is there something negative we'll use the scientific words scientists tests are all negative who then looks at it and says okay you know what something's got to be going on here yeah let's do run a b and c how does that work yeah so it's it's it's uh let's just use an example like epo so epo is a substance obviously used by athletes as a blood booster it's uh it's a hormone that appears in our bodies naturally produced by our kidneys and so we need to be able to figure out whether the epo that we see in the sample is supposed to be there or if it's synthetic epo so the way we do that is a number of different ways the highest level way is that we're required to do a sport specific risk assessment on a substance by substance basis so if you're an endurance athlete you would naturally have a higher risk because there's a history of epo doping in your sport so we we assign a higher percentage of epo tests to endurance based sports samples than we would to say badminton samples so that's the first level the second level is using the athlete

biological passport so we collect blood samples on endurance athletes we follow those indirect markers over time and by looking at those indirect markers in conjunction at of at specific points in time we can determine whether we need to assign epo testing to specific samples based on the variability that we see in individuals so that's a an easy way for us to use our resources as effectively as possible because we can say okay that athlete has an abnormal hemoglobin increase or abnormal immature red blood cell increase let's look a little more closely at that urine sample to see if the cause of that was epo use and that's still blinded right absolutely it's it's somebody looking at athlete number one two three four five not i'm looking at jason coops it's blinded by the lab it's blinded to the laboratory it's not blinded to us so we know we collected the sample we know what the results are and we as a as usada have our athletes in our registered testing pool that we can see their passport data and find out okay that sample is maybe a little abnormalist let's look at that a little more but we don't tell the athlete who that is we just say lab analyze this sample for epo okay so the the lab has independence in terms of they don't know who they're testing correct usada can pull these these more stringent tools yeah knowing who the

individual is yes i think that that's an important distinction once again not to say that this is what we deploy in ultra running because that's probably solution like 5.0 like 10 years from now maybe 20 years from now we get to things like that but i've always found that an interesting concept that there's a human element looking at the abp and the and i'll also i'll just say the landscape because i know there's a lot of other things that go into it and say okay we need to do this with that particular athlete not just with the sample absolutely and so the other the other thing that adds another level of independence is when the hematology expert is looking at that abp or that passport pattern that person is not identified so i may as a chief science officer be able to identify that athlete but our expert looking at that particular result in the context of that passport that passport's identified by basically an id number that's anonymous so they don't know who they're looking at and that adds like another level of okay i can't bias my scientific opinion because i just happen to know who that is so we act on their recommendation and then notify the laboratory based on that so yeah okay good i i appreciate that context okay hot water to you ease yeah i know you deal with this a lot sure and you deal with it from both sides and there's definitely both sides of this in ultra running where we've got the camp that if you need a tui you shouldn't be able to compete in the sport or you shouldn't need to use that tui in the sport that's just inherent if you're trying to be an elite athlete you know

sorry it causes too many problems yeah and then you have what i would consider the more reasonable solution we need to we need to allow for tuis in certain cases i know you understand the criticism that it's an abused system yeah um but to start out with why do we need tuis in the first place why does sport need a place why do we need to carve out these things and say athletes should be able to take these under certain circumstances yeah so yeah great question so i mean i think the most basic answer is that the prohibited list is a very diverse set of substances and some of those categories of substances are used in medicine to treat common medical conditions that athletes may have give an example they may be chronic conditions or they may be like acute conditions like musculoskeletal conditions but an athlete may need you know for example um a good one is like an adhd medication okay so they've been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder they're using a stimulant in order to operate their normal lives so they can operate day to day we don't want to put their health in jeopardy by saying you need to wean yourself off that medication before you compete so let's have a process in place that we have independent doctors that don't know the identity of that athlete looking at their medical records and evaluating it against the international standard of criteria that are specific to each substance and

diagnosis saying was this condition diagnosed properly does it meet the is tue and if so we're going to grant this athlete a tue to use this substance to protect their health but more importantly it has to return the athlete to a normal state of health it can't return them to a super physiological state of health so all those checks and balances are part of that process and we have a tue committee of 21 physicians that are medical specialists in each category that they may be looking at saying listen we've looked at this diagnosis more than one of us has looked at this diagnosis and we agree that a tue is necessary in this situation so why how does the criticism get formed that it's so rife with abuse i'm not sure to be honest i know this is kind of an unfair question to the science officer but you see i think it's a little bit you know i'm responsible for the drug reference department and and we get um um we get about 800 tue applications per year and we evaluate all those in the same fashion they all get evaluated independently they go to physicians that are you know specialists in those fields and they're they're evaluated according to the istue so there isn't some special you know criteria for one set of athletes

athletes versus another they're all treated in the same fashion so i think a little bit around the abuse maybe not necessarily understanding the robustness of the process and just seeing that an athlete you know has a tue this one has a tue this one doesn't and you know because they have a tue they must have got it just because they submitted a prescription and that's all they need that couldn't be further from the truth well this is part of the issue with races races that have drug drug testing policies that have this vague uh line or rule about tues where they're going to figure it out after the fact right and look at that and there's there are races in ultra running that have this but there are races outside of ultra running that i've seen that have this as well i look at that and i'm like you don't have the expertise to figure that out right it's hard to figure it out with all of the experts in the room just as you're alluding to so you're going to tell me like your non-expert board of directors of this 5013c is going to figure out if this tue that somebody just got flagged for is actually really necessary like i just look at that as right bizarro town yeah yeah it's it's it's really i think it's important to have the right people looking at it doing it in an independent fashion and then rendering a decision that is consistent across race to race athlete to athlete sport to sport and at the end of the day that that takes the responsibility and the reaction out of the hands of race directors or individuals that don't have that expertise and you literally you don't want that liability either to

be honest yeah i trust yeah trust me that's uh i anyway we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna move on from there because otherwise i'll go down a rabbit hole and i'll take up all your time okay the next thing that i that i promised we would talk about is what happens after an adverse finding yeah so somebody comes and knocks on we're going to use me as an example because i'll throw myself under the bus sure somebody comes and knocks out on my door i provide a sample and something shows up in it that the lab determined was not right some sort of out of competition in competition whatever it is what happens at that point in time yeah so um after an adverse finding we get the result from the laboratory that result is then matched up with an athlete's name and so lab still doesn't know who it is that doesn't know it just showed up they they'd say athlete one two three four five has this they shoot the result to us yeah exactly and so the science department first reviews the laboratory testing data to make sure that you know everything has been done properly and that we agree that there's a positive and then at that point we would um sometimes we actually do a little bit of an internal investigation first of all and what that means is we may collect another sample from the athlete before notifying them in order to see if the same pattern appears or you know just to get a bit more information because a single sample is just a snapshot in time and with many of these substances we want to make absolutely sure that you know maybe there's another explanation or we don't want to tip

necessarily tip the athlete off first before we maybe gather some more information scientifically so we may the most common thing is to conduct a follow-up test but once that process has been completed essentially the athlete is notified of their adverse analytical finding or positive test and they have the option of having their b sample analyzed so that at that point the athlete says okay you i know what it is it's my right to have usada ask the laboratory and and the athlete can actually go to the laboratory and confirm the b sample is still closed and intact confirm the sample code number matches and they can actually themselves or a representative watch the analysis of that b sample to confirm the a sample result how many athletes actually do that uh not very i i because i've always seen a lot of athletes have their b sample analyzed but very few it's more common to either appoint a representative or just have the laboratory appoint a representative themselves okay yeah up until that point yeah everything's internal yeah lab is blinded to who the athlete is notifies usada yeah you guys unmask who the athlete is you do a little bit of internal investigation you then inform the athlete of the adverse finding yes is all the communication up until that point still in the room like it hasn't been leaked out to the public the only people that would know would be usada and the athlete yeah and we never throughout the whole

process it's important to know that usada the process is confidential so at no point do we like announce that an athlete is tested positive until we actually announce the sanction at the very end of the process and that's really important because the athlete has rights during the process and they have the right to challenge the result as well and that challenge in fact is confidential as well so they have the right to an arbitration hearing they have the right for to representation they can argue their case and we don't we don't publicize that or that is all confidential until the point at which there is a conclusion and that conclusion may be that that athlete is not charged so then there's no announcement or they're charged with an anti-doping rule violation and a sanction and then there's a sanction announcement and those are the things you see you know every so often the press releases okay how many times is there an actual false positive i don't like the word false false positive because it it you know in our in our business false positives and are very serious and the international standard for laboratories actually has as part of its core framework a internal quality assessment scheme that basically ensures that the laboratories operate under this standard and they're

they're um sent samples in order to show that they're proficient at detecting these substances so if an if a if either a proficiency testing sample is reported in the wrong way the laboratory actually gets penalized for that and you can have a laboratory you've seen labs around the world either get suspended or they can get their laboratory accreditation revoked and and that's a that's a serious thing for a laboratory you never want to be reporting a false positive right well the reason i the reason i posed it that way is that in the scientific community everybody realizes what a false positive is is you run a sample through whatever however you're running it and it shows something is being read and it really is green you're detecting you're literally detecting something that's not there that's the scientific version or that's a scientific way to describe a false positive but when a lot of people say that what they really mean is something showed up that they didn't intend to show up they took a contaminated supplement they didn't know that whatever xyz was banned and things like that i know that everybody in the anti-doping community is pulling their hair out over supplements yeah can you paint the picture of how big an issue that is yeah so it's it's a great topic and and one that has been at our forefront for a number of years and it's the issue of contamination right and it's not just supplement contamination it's pharmaceutical

contamination it's environmental contamination it's contamination due to intimate contact with somebody that may be using a prohibited substance so as we as we get better scientifically at detecting these substances what what the challenge is is that you want to increase the detection window of these substances to get better at detecting the compounds but what that also does is it leaves open the opportunity for detection of the presence of these compounds due to things that aren't intentional doping and i think that's where the evolution in the thinking around anti-doping really is changing quite rapidly in the last couple of years and you saw it has been advocating for rule changes that make sure that this process remains fair around those things so you don't want an athlete testing positive because they're using a permitted medication that just happens to contain a low-level diuretic that is there because of the manufacturing process but the athlete did nothing wrong we've had 10 of those cases we've had cases around meat contamination athletes testing positive because they had a dinner somewhere and there's residues of legal growth promoters in the meat that show up in their sample so scientifically we've actually been developing new solutions in order to solve some of these problems and basically what the solutions are is minimum reporting limits for the laboratory for certain substances so for example for diuretic

diuretics even though it's prohibited at all times and the labs have methods that are extremely sensitive they're not going to report when the concentration of those diuretics is at such a low level that there's a question that it could have come from contamination i promise that i won't ask you to define a picogram because i know some of the cases that you're that you're referring to but i mean is that a case where the technology and the scientific technique to detect these substances are moving faster than the policy i think in some instances like we want to make sure that yeah the science and the policy is connected and informing each other right and and it's no fault of the laboratories they're trying to do their best right at detecting substances the challenge then becomes we don't want to be sanctioning athletes for unintentional doping and ruining their careers because we know the impact it has when we see an announcement of a positive test so that's where we want to continually evaluate all the characteristics of these cases and we've gone so far as to you know when we see a low level diuretic we ask the athlete to provide their medication we go to the same pharmacy and get another prescription of that same medication send it off to the laboratory and have it analyzed and we found those diuretics in that prescription medication so it's scientifically it's a process to do that but as you see more cases you realize that there's a prevalence of this that you weren't aware of

before and so you need to adjust policy based on that to keep confidence in the system because the detection levels are going down so quickly yeah so what happens when athlete knocks on my door i provide a sample you get a really low level diuretic i say ah it's because you know i'm taking this heart medication you guys go to the pharmacy you get this heart i'm not on heart medication i'm just trying to come up with an example you go and you get the heart medication and oh voila like it's it's in this it's in there what like what happens at that point does anybody know about that does that just stay in the room what what is basically it's between the athlete and and usada athletes a lot of athletes at that point get assistance from some legal counsel to help them through the process there's also also an athlete ombudsman at the us opc that can independently offer advice to athletes and if they're underneath one of the ngbs exactly okay yeah yeah yeah so that that's um that's a really um useful resource for athletes that okay you saw it is telling me this but can you kind of you know help me verify it and figure it out so um so yeah i mean at that point we we work together with the athlete and you know it's our it's it's the athlete's burden to demonstrate how the substance got into their bodies but based on the science and what we've seen it's you know part of my job to say listen does this make sense like what's going on here let's try to like work with the athlete to find the source of their positive test right so it's

not piss turns hot let's go sanction the athlete absolutely not whatever the scientific version we have an adverse finding let's figure out what's going on during the part of figuring out what's going on there's all these different pathways that you can take the athlete can have their b sample tape uh tested they can be present when it's tested they you ask them for a list of all these other things that they've been taking you can go to the pharmacies and piece the story together before determining what to do i mean it's a it's sound from what you're describing it's a very methodical planned process and at the end of it it's either yeah you ran afoul of the rules or no you didn't this was unintentional yeah absolutely so you know through that process we we um there's a point at which if you know we don't hear from the athlete or it's an egregious substance and the athlete you know doesn't provide any kind of explanation you know we'll charge the athlete with an anti-doping rule violation at that point they're not being compliant yeah essentially you know they've got a violation they've got a positive test and at that point we will offer a sanction to the athlete so they can either agree to that sanction or they can challenge that sanction so you know they're they can challenge it they can go to arbitration they can offer an alternative explanation and that is all done with a panel of independent arbitrators from the american arbitration association and then if they don't like the result of that that arbitration so those arbitrators will render a decision like yes you're

you know this violation is valid we're gonna sanction you for x amount of time they have an appeal right as well and at that point you can take your case to the court of arbitration for sport and that is the international sport body that hears appeal cases for anti-doping so they're based in switzerland and you know that's the that's this the final body that can make a ruling and many cases are re-adjudicated at that level so you have to start from scratch again and present your case and usada princess presents its case and then the arbitrators make a decision so it's a multi-stage process depending on you know what the situation is and under the umbrella of the three ngbs that we're kind of using as a model yeah who pays for the legal bills um so yeah it's that's a little complicated so many times the athlete pays for their legal bills and usada pays for its legal bills there is certain circumstances where legal aid might be available to the athlete depending on their situation um so yeah and then at the end of the day um the arbitrators can decide you know maybe uh depending on the outcome of the case the athlete is responsible for a portion of usada's legal bill or usada's responsible for a portion of the athlete's legal bill so depending on the circumstances i mean it it it is different in every case somebody's got to pay the legal bill though i mean i think that's a realistic ramification of having this

type of rule structure when you elevate the case to the court of arbitration for sport there's you got to be able to figure that out that might be getting too far ahead for our group so let's kind of go back to something a little bit more fundamental that you already touched on and this is this area of sanctions right there are levels of sanctions and they range from really benign yeah like what we would call a slap on the wrist colloquially right to a lifetime ban for sport you cannot go back to the sport for forever yeah why fundamentally is there this big range like let's start with that and then we can kind of take it into the buckets that we typically see in the media play out yeah so um a little bit of history when the world anti-doping code the first version of it came out the default sanction was two years doesn't matter everybody gets two well no so there's two years as a default sanction and then based on mitigating circumstances and degree of fault you can go from two years and that sanction can either go up or down depending on the circumstances of the case so so so for example on the prohibited list there's substances that are specified substances and non-specified substances non-specified substances are like anabolic steroids so if you test positive for an anabolic steroid your default sanction is four

years if if you can show that if there's some reason to reduce your degree of fault that four years can go down to as low as one year but for specified substances like stimulants for example they're less egregious you could get a public warning depending on the circumstances of your case so the rules the sanctions are scalable depending on you know various mitigating factors that come to play in the case itself but the fundamental i don't want to put words in your mouth so i'm going to kind of ask the question again the fundamental reason why there are different level what i guess i won't put words in your mouth what is the fundamental reason why there are different levels of sanction sanctions is it because of the egregiousness of the offense or this one calibration point because i want people to understand that the like the just like in any other sporting event you have degrees of penalty you go watch a football game you have a five yard penalty a 10 yard penalty a personal foul people get ejected from the game you don't eject everybody from the game for a holding penalty yeah what what is the philosophical umbrella that the different rules fit under is it the egregiousness of the offense is it the potential to enhance performance is it the harm to the sport like how does that all get worked out i mean it's it's um it gets a little complicated but essentially you've got um you've got athletes demanding that um

um that four years for an egregious offense takes an athlete out of sport for long enough that it acts as an effective deterrent for doping right so if you only slap somebody on the wrist and say they can't compete for 30 days that's not very effective at deterring somebody from using a doping substance so the reason the four years exists for egregious doping is that that removes those athletes from competing and participating in sport for an amount of time that's been agreed to by the 700 signatories that are out there so that's changed over the years it used to be two now it's four so it's part deterrent i guess is what i'm trying to get absolutely the philosophy behind this four-year benchmark it has a lot to do on the deterrent side of it but as we discussed there's lots of reasons why a substance may be in an athlete sample so you want to be able to adjust the sanction based on that so that you're not giving somebody who ingested a substance because they didn't intend to four years that seems very very unfair right so it's not just apples to apples to apples every case is different and therefore the legal system allows for this adjustment process based on the situation and you've got case law informing that so usada when we propose a sanction we may look at past cases for that substance or similar circumstances and say well in this sub in this situation one year seems appropriate but in this

situation you know we can't go below two years and who is at the table figuring that out uh the the legal team you're like yeah me i'm out of that decision i could just tell you green or red well and and and it's important like it's not just usada making that decision we make it in the context of um cases that are adjudicated worldwide so the sport itself has an appeal right and water also has an appeal right so if they don't agree with our sanction length they can appeal that to the court of arbitration for sports so it prevents usada from saying okay we're going to give all us athletes a really lenient sanction when all these other countries are are penalizing their athletes more heavily like there's checks and balances in the system to prevent countries and anti-doping organizations from being why wildly different with sanctioning of of athletes under the rules so i'm going to represent the people that are listening right now that are giving us a hard eye roll and the hard eye rollers are the people that are going well these people that get popped for epo in the endurance world right that's a heavy hitting drug yeah they need to be sanctioned for more than four years because that drug has an effect on their performance outside of that four years and i would actually put myself in that opinion category as a coach i know that i know that training that i apply to an athlete yeah lasts for more than four years if i'm doing my job right sure but in addition to that the scenario that they have in their head is

an athlete gets popped for something heavy hitting like epo they go into the arbitration that you just mentioned yeah they they present some compelling reason my meat was contaminated and i was taking this you know over the counter this that or the other my supplements or whatever and they get their restriction reduced yeah not raised yeah like i want i want listeners to understand like peel the curtain back a little bit on how usada either sticks to we're going to levy out this four-year sanction or reduce it yeah well that i mean that's where that's where you know by and large the the legal process and arguments come into play right so when we're when we're saying okay we think the athlete should get a four-year sanction we're and the athlete challenges that they may have their reasons for challenging it we have our reasons we have science that suggests that they got this performance benefit it's an egregious substance you know a whole host of explanations and then it's up to the arbitrators to say okay who had the better argument and who are we going to believe you know it's not a it's not a uh beyond a reasonable doubt it's to a comfortable satisfaction that's the legal framework that we operate under so you know it by and large if an athlete is not able to argue effectively that this substance you know appeared for a non-doping reason they're going to get the full sanction where does the benefit of the doubt lie in those um what do you mean i mean i mean

the athlete is always going to say they're going to come up with some reason and we see this play out in the media all the time there's all these you know i can say it i know you probably can't but there are all these bullshit reasons why athletes have tested positive for something and they're going to come to the table with those reasons in a room with usada with the science officers and things like that and inherently there's going to be a disagreement yeah yes i did this no you didn't when in deciding what ultimately happens like in in the it in the legal system there's a burden of proof right that lies on one side yeah where does that lie within this system does it lie on the athlete or does it rely on usada proving that something happened yeah so great question so when we have a positive test it's on the it's the athlete's burden to demonstrate that's what i want to get at but but in other violations like use violations or a passport case it's you saw it as burden to demonstrate the athlete doped so it's different depending on the situation okay absolutely okay yeah and then and then you know it's my job one of the things i love about my job is the legal department comes to me and says the athlete gave us this excuse tell me scientifically if it's a valid excuse or not and that's my job is to write a scientific opinion consult with outside experts look at the research that's being done maybe even do additional research out there to demonstrate whether what we're seeing lines up with the athlete's explanation or it's due to doping and that's what i do every day what's the craziest reason you ever heard i

know you probably can't tell me but i'm gonna ask the question anyway i want to know the most ridiculous off the wall thing you've ever heard you know you could stylize it yeah i think i think the most the most challenging cases recently in recent mind and and you know i would have never believed this is is the the intimate contact cases that we've recently had and and it it it um you know it takes a lot of scientific evaluation and work to piece together you know the pharmacology the pharmacokinetics the how they ingested it how they were exposed like all these cases i mean they're analyzed to the nth degree to try to determine whether it's possible and and some people would say it's not i firmly believe depending on the circumstances that these were true contamination cases and no athlete should be penalized for that so those are some of the craziest i mean there's been you know it was in my toothpaste or um you know i i i rubbed up against somebody or you know i think there was one excuse like i ran by a hospital and epo splashed on me from the street and you know you know just crazy stuff like that but generally those are always um like i wanted to use that though as a little bit of an example that it's not like you're just taking the athlete's word for it absolutely it's not just like oh well you know so and once the coop said that you know he had a contaminated tic-tac or whatever and you know okay well we believe him you're actually looking at the validity of the whole situation yeah through a lot of different

very complicated mechanisms that we're not going to go into okay i i appreciate that dialogue thank you for entertaining you can tell me the real the real story off there uh okay let's theorize for a little bit you you kind of know ultra running situation right it's a sport that doesn't fall underneath any sort of governing body either nationally or international with very very very very few exceptions and the community as a whole is trying to figure this out the athletes are trying to figure it out i'm doing my part as a coach try to figure it out race directors are trying to figure it out sponsors and brand managers are trying to figure it out sure we're not going to get adopted by something and have a rule system all of a sudden placed over us we've got to kind of figure it out what what what are the big broad brush strokes that you would advise the community to look at as we're trying to get our feet wet and like just figure out a solution yeah yeah and i think this goes back to you know one of your first very first questions i think there's there's four things you need to think about you know education testing science and results management and and so in breaking those things down i think you know you need a harmonized program you can't have different rules for every single event or you know athlete so having a harmonized set of rules and taking some cues from what's currently working i think is the first step and then you need to educate athletes around that

you can't put rules in place and athletes don't know what rules they're subject to so you know for example in the ufc program we didn't even start testing athletes for six months we spent six months educating those fighters on what the rules were because we knew that was important for them to understand once the program hit and we started testing they were then responsible so that's how i would outline how you would start then you've got to have a testing program in place that not only has in competition testing but has a robust out of competition testing program so athletes it's almost like an iq test when you test them in comp like you're gonna you know they know they're going to be tested because they compete so they can stop using whatever they're doing and they're using it during training so those most highest level athletes in your sport i would suggest you know an out of competition program on those athletes where they file whereabouts and they are subject to testing anytime anywhere and and that is a huge deterrent to doping in in the sport and then of course you've got the science component and and making sure that you know if if the resources allow that you're adopting things like the passport and you're doing some of the scientific things to increase the the analyses of samples so you know beyond just the basic analyses having a framework in place to do epo testing to do testosterone testing some of these things that are likely being used in in the sport due to its their risk you know you want to make sure that you're at least doing some testing of those in intelligent

fashion and then the results management of that is of course you know you don't want to put that in the hands of you know your governing body or your race organizers you want to have an independent body like usada governing that and that protects the sport it protects the athlete and it makes the process consistent from you know athlete to athlete if they test positive those are the bare minimum yep would you recommend in your professional opinion and you're you're the expert here finding a solution that doesn't have one of those components or has a really shitty part of one of those components and i'm kind of yeah i'm trying to work down to the practical piece of it so we can get together the education and the testing and the screening yeah but results management we don't know what we're going to do with let's just throw the solution out there yeah well i think those are the basic components because without any one of those what you're going to open yourself up to is a lot of criticism right you're going to there people are going to say well you're trying to do anti-doping but you're missing a vital component of this which is either unfair to athletes or it's totally ineffective or it's not financially you know viable because you can't have a race director funding the results management of a case that if an athlete wants to take it to the highest levels of you know adjudication it might cost tens of thousands of dollars i'm sure race organizers don't want to be you know on the hook for that after the fact i'm going to evoke a quote from i'm going to i'm going to keep this person anonymous because i probably wants

to be anonymous at this conversation but um when when we were originally talking about this uh kind of within usada he would tell me that you're better off having those four components and having a solution that meets the minimum part of those four yeah then removing one entirely in in a way to kind of get the program off the ground like you have you're you're going to be stuck with initially having imperfect solutions but if those imperfect solutions hit all those categories you have something to build off of and hopefully i've given you like a flavor for you know on the surface anti-doping may seem like just collecting a sample and analyzing it but there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that you know it's vital in order to have a fair and consistent and a confident you know athletes confident in the process if we had laboratories knowing whose samples they analyzed you know there's a hole there that could be exploited right so it's it's really you know that framework is so important we're we're going to leave it at that first off i really appreciate your time this has been over a year in the making it's awesome that i've finally been able to talk to you finally i will have explained that back story in the intro so everybody knows but to leave to leave the listeners and this is particularly pointed at the athletes if they want to get more educated on this whole suite of stuff where can they go to either in usada's website or uh anywhere anywhere else to get that education yeah so we've got a

comprehensive website that you know if you go to the athlete section a lot of these aspects that we've talked about today are are outlined and athletes can find about more about the collection process or results management or look at our education um so yeah i would encourage you to go directly there and um you know world athletics um as well as the international sport body they do great work as their anti-doping team there is is awesome so if athletes are interested to see what's going on internationally that's another resource yeah dr matt this is great man i really appreciate it i really appreciate your time and i i appreciate what you do within your organization what your entire organization does for for for sports i think i could speak for the sporting community and i i i i'm just greatly appreciative of it and i was here i moved to colorado springs in 2000 i saw the transition from ngbs running the show to usada running the show and i honestly think that despite all the criticism that gets thrown around every once in a while that's one of the most impactful transitions in all of olympic sport that singular transition right there and it has made such a big impact it's always going to have bumps in the road but seeing it from the ground level and what it did how it like transformed cultures yeah within sports has been absolutely amazing you're a big part of that and we thank you for that yeah thanks jason all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to dr fedorik for

coming on the podcast today i appreciate everybody that made it through the intro that was uh normally a long one i usually like to get through those a little bit quicker but i feel that the caveats are necessary because otherwise if i don't say anything people are going to be like why don't you say anything and i just want to get it out on the all on the table because this information is super important i do think that this uh aspect is super important for the community as a whole so stick around next week we've got paul demio that's on june 3rd that will be really released the next week we have lisa roberts who got kind of entangled in this whole thing with western states that's on june 10th and then june 17th charlie ware who is my hero he actually decided to do something about this god bless his soul we go through that whole arc of what he tried to do and what the pitfalls are and how people in the community can pick up on his work which is super important that is coming out june 17th and then finally a great conversation with dylan bowman amari frioli about what they think is community members what they think anti-doping solutions should look like so i hope everybody is looking forward to the next series of podcasts that i'm putting out i really appreciate everybody who has come together for these i did put these together kind of all in sequence so they're going to be really going to be released while i'm out on the pacific crest trail with timothy olsen and um uh uh what i want what i really wanted to mention with that is is i hope the community uses this as a galvanizing point and create some sort of

conversation around these issues because as i as i have mentioned and as i will continue to mention over the course of the next several podcasts is that it is going to be up to us nobody's going to save us but ourselves and the initial part in all of this before we start going down the rabbit hole of do we want to ban people for life or let everybody dope up to the gills or whatever solution kind of emerges before we go down that part of determining the finer bullet points of anti-doping solutions let's first take pause educate ourselves on all of the different complexities of this particular issue of which there are many educate ourselves first and then come together as a community and hammer out the solutions let's take some time and get some education underneath our belts i hope that the next that this podcast and the next several podcasts serve as an initial point for all of those educational pieces that is it for the podcast today let me know what you think on social media i'm sure it'll all fly around but i hope you guys are looking forward to the next week and the week after that and the week after that as always we'll see you out on the trails