Antidoping Solutions for Ultrarunning Part 2 - Paul Dimeo | Koopcast Episode 82

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and i am once again excited to have everybody back today for the second in the series of anti-doping solutions in the sport of trail and ultra running for the uninitiated or if you're just jumping into this podcast right now for the next let's see five six seven podcasts wait a minute that's not right one two three four five podcasts that's how many it was i'm losing track of all now for the next five podcasts are all going to be focused on anti-doping solutions in the sport of trail and ultra running on may 27th i released a podcast with usada's chief science officer dr fedorick this week is with paul demio who is the author of the book anti the anti-doping crisis in sport causes consequences and solutions uh next podcast coming up next week is with lisa roberts who got a little bit entangled in western states's anti-doping policy the week after that june 17th is with charlie ware who has tried throughout his best efforts and put a lot of time and effort into finding the solution uh to this in trail and ultra running and finally on june 24th i have a conversation with dylan bowman and mario

frioli about what potential solutions could look like within the community i hope that all of you listen to all of these podcasts because the vein of the entire series is to get some initial education and ideas on the table that we can all use to galvanize some sort of solution out there this conversation in particular is with paul demio who is a researcher at the university of sterling he's a professor at the university of sterling in scotland and he is the author of this really interesting book titled the anti-doping crisis in sport causes consequences and solutions and i wanted to use this conversation as a little bit of a history lesson for how we got to where we got to in the current state of affairs of anti-doping policy predominantly in the olympic sports where that has gone awry and how we can use those lessons of where has gone awry to enact solutions within trail and ultra running which currently doesn't have a solution and we don't have to abide by any of this ioc stuff at all if we choose not to i hope you guys enjoy the conversation i hope you enjoyed the conversation last week i hope you enjoy this one and i hope you take it into consideration as you start to have conversations with your peers your fellow racers and other members of the community about how we can solve this non-issue right now but i guarantee you will be an issue 10 years from now

if we don't do anything about it right now which is something that we actually talked about on the podcast so here we go i'm going to step right out of the way let's get into it here's my conversation with paul dimeo so you guys are just wrapping up semester right yeah yeah that's right so just finishing the undergraduates the postgraduates have a bit more to do in the summer they do their dissertation in the summer but uh the bulk of it's done okay which is nice yeah yeah yeah and what do you teach at the university so i generally teach sports policy and um mainly kind of social issues anti-doping uh do some sports history as well so i'm a bit of a kind of utility player shall we say in the team well i've always appreciated your work over the over the years it's been something that obviously me being involved in sport and then elite sport we have to kind of keep track of all different angles of things and usada is actually in my backyard i live in colorado springs and so obviously there's kind of like the the anti-doping kind of tie-in there just from a also a personal and a professional interest so i'm actually really thrilled to get you on the horn and get you get you on the podcast today because your work has been it's just been it's been really neat to follow and just see how the thought process has evolved over the years

yeah thank you that's very kind to say that jason and it's always nice to hear from people outside you know academic life um and obviously your podcast is doing so that's you know i'm really pleased for you to kind of attract a good audience and um i'm sure the readers dear listeners rather benefit from all your different topics this is this is a big one is and as i explained in the emails that we exchanged back and forth i'm trying to line up a lot of different angles of this top of this topic because it's complicated and you combine with that the fact that the audience is fairly naive they don't really they kind of the the lay audience is the lay audience anywhere they just read the news reports and things like that but the community of athletes and race directors who are ultimately kind of like the coalface of a lot of these uh policies they they really don't know where to go you know and i i think a a big vein of of of putting together not just one podcast but a series of different podcasts with a lot of different angles is to really inform the public at large so i was hoping to leverage your expertise in that specifically and i think what we can kind of start out with is just some history we're going to leverage your you know your academic career a little bit since this is the end of the semester and you can probably you can give us a semester in maybe like 10 minutes or something like that the ultra cliff notes version but we've you know we've seen these we've seen these

doping and anti-doping stories kind of transpire over the years and anybody who's been involved in elite sports really since the 60s 70s and 80s has seen a dramatic transformation of how this aspect has been regulated across sport and you specifically have written a number of different papers on some of those different inflection points can can you just give a broad overview of how doping policy has been regulated and we're going to use the olympic model as the kind of the model of context here because that's what most people will be familiar with just give a broad overview of that because ultimately what i want to drive down to is what are the lessons that we've learned from each of these models over the years and how do we carry it forward into a group that doesn't have they're not going to get adopted likely into the olympic model right so we can do whatever we want to and we don't want to repeat past mistakes so can you set that table for us really quickly yeah absolutely thank you very much so by way of broad historical summary sport was essentially modernized in the forms that we know it late 19th early 20th century and at that stage there wasn't any regulation against doping we see a couple of incidents that are controversial but the first actual statement against it is not until 1928 which is the international amateur athletic federation followed up 10 years later by the ioc obviously they then have the second world war to prevent any further so this sort of issue has continued that 1950s before it's

really taken seriously and probably the one olympic moment that made people take it seriously at that stage was the death of a young danish cyclist in the actually in the rome olympics in 1960 so he died actually during the race and it was blamed on amphetamines which turned out not to be the case but that kick-started the ioc to say well we take this seriously and there was some research in other sports and particularly in italy and a little bit in a couple of other european countries so football and cycling um soccer i guess you would just to clarify that one so soccer cycling and field athletics they were the main sports because it was amphetamines that was the issue so the first testing was in cycling races 1965 was the world cup 1966 the first ioc list of banned substances was 1967 and introduced to the winter olympics 1968 and in the summer olympics the same year so amphetamines were one issue which they wanted to control the emergence of steroids anabolic steroids was really the game changer because there was no test for steroids until 1975 so it was introduced into the olympics first in 1976 but the challenge with anabolic steroids compared to amphetamines is that there's a washout period so anyone who took steroids in preparation for an event all they had to do was

remember the washout period which was usually only two or three weeks and they wouldn't test positive and there was no out of competition testing so that whole period the 70s the 80s probably most of the 90s it was relatively easy to actually avoid testing positive if you actually understood the nature of the drugs that you were taking so it's a little bit of a kind of free-for-all the pharmacology expanded epo came on the market human growth hormone was used insulin growth factor you know this whole kind of sense of the different types of steroids and they could do slightly different things the diuretics that could be used to cover up the steroids so the whole nature of that really exploded i would probably say in 1990s thereafter obviously we learn about what was happening in east germany a little bit about the soviet union although most of the evidence is east germany focused we have a few more scandals in the 90s particularly in cycling rumors of deaths caused by epo poisoning or overuse and that's when the world anti-doping agency gets created um led by the ioc um and the interesting thing for me was there's quite an interesting sort of moment when the ioc decided they're under pressure they need to be seen to be doing more so they're also at this around the time of the salt lake city but um corruption scandal so in november 1999 they host a conference and they want to call it the olympic doping agent

and several people in that conference particularly politicians including um from america um stood up and basically said the ioc should not be the only organization in charge of this you know we need to have some independence and autonomy so the world anti-doping agency is created 50 funded by the ioc a lot of the leadership is the ioc a lot of the definition and terms as i'm sure we'll discuss are olympics focused and so the first world anti-doping code is produced in 2003 which is what we're now kind of living with so that's my general overview um i've missed a lot but yeah you just screamed through some history right there and i think not to that was brilliant by the way um not to i think we'd be remiss not to mention that in addition one of the pieces of fuel in this whole doping arc that you just mentioned was the political environment that existed at the time particularly in the 70s 80s and kind of maybe even trickling into the 90s a little bit because a lot of times we think about this as an athlete-centered problem right it's the athlete that is ultimately the end user but the origins of that are actually quite different where a lot of these state-sponsored regimes were essentially instituting it as part of the gig it was part and parcel with what you had to do if you wanted to be an

athlete yeah well absolutely so i mean as i say most of the evidence we have of that is from east germany because you know as i'm sure everybody knows they basically were no longer a country after the fall of the berlin wall and there was reunification trials of people who were seen to have committed crimes during the east german period so a lot of that data was still there so we have records of PhD projects from the mid-1960s and they only really used one drug which is oral tiranabol which some people still use today and yes they've essentially forced their athletes to do it there was other countries where athletes maybe weren't forced in the same way but they were certainly you know highly encouraged and you know the political system worked both ways you know both sides of the iron curtain wanted to show their prowess and they wanted to win things and interestingly enough though i mean you're absolutely right and i totally agree that's one of the frameworks but then you had the occasional little country not little i shouldn't say little you had that occasional other country that would just basically say we need success and an example of that is canada so after the 1976 montreal games where they didn't win any gold medals they wanted success going forward and they were charlie francis was given a kind of open book to go and do that and that's why he ended up with the ben johnson scandal and the various other

athletes and if you there was a report in the aftermath of that by a lawyer called charles dubbin and if anybody has a little bit of time if they looked that up the commission of inquiry into you know the canadian um situation it's extensive you know they were trafficking steroids across borders you know in chaining camps they were selling them to each other and to other people but that was also going on in america it was going on in across europe you know by the time we get into the 90s we see evidence in australia you know the middle east and african countries so yes i absolutely agree there's a huge political environment that probably held back and open for a couple of decades but the concept of i the concept of illegal performance enhancement is pretty much a global phenomenon yeah and and that's one of the pictures i want the the the listeners to appreciate is that for decades there was this environment where it truly was the wild west and there was no reasonable way that you could compete as an elite athlete as olympic level athlete with very few exceptions without some sort of performance enhancing drug it was so prevalent during those times it was completely unregulated and as as a lot of athletes have put it it was just part of the deal and your final point that that that environment

probably set back anti-doping a couple decades is kind of poignant because we're into a couple of decades right now if you go back and say okay water was started what year did you just say 2002 well the first first code was produced on first of january 2003 2003 okay so 2003 we're coming up on almost two decades right 2021 right now so right now should be if we sit we're set back to two decades we should be kind of caught up and we're going to talk about that in just a second but it is a game it is a game of playing catch-up i guess is what i'm trying to uh what i'm what i'm trying to illustrate here so we have this landscape where where the sporting environment went from the wild west any sort of efforts were extremely fractured and they were handled within the country and then with the within each sport within the country which is never the way that you would do it if you were to set it up from scratch and then the world anti-doping association was established sorry the world anti-doping agency was established and the framework that emerged from that is they set the rules and it's up to each country to enforce the rules so usada here in the united states uh gets established that equivalent gets established in the uk and other countries kind of around the world and each country is essentially responsible for their pool of athletes across all of the all of the different olympic types of sports but still throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s we still we still see these issues start to emerge and

i want to drill these down into the endurance olympic sports since it's going to be more audience relevant at this point and once again the vein of this is to try to learn where the traps are where the terrain traps are and try to avoid it for future policy so if we look at the sports of track and field cycling and triathlon which are kind of the endurance cohorts where are the where are the current like failures in the system as we see them since wada was established yeah so that's a good point our question so if we start with cycling so the history that 20 year history is basically uh a kind of roller coaster ride so initially the uci were a bit reluctant to become signatories to the world down to open code the president at the time had some concerns about some issues that would be associated with that the obviously what happened in the 2000s you know the and all the things we learned about lance amstrong and his teammates you know that gives us the impression that the controls were not good enough to stop some of the ways in which those cyclists had managed to strategize you know their techniques for blood doping po use and testosterone use in the aftermath of the introduction of the athlete biological passport which is around about 2009 in the aftermath of the usada reason decision

about us postal and those other teams and then there was the circ report a couple years later so cycling in some ways seems to have improved its game you know there hasn't been the level of major scandals and a lot of people within that sport say that it you know it is different to what it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago and i suppose if you look at what's going on around uh british cycling and team sky well you know as much as i think they're the evidence of what we know is kind of incomplete they are now you know they're focusing on very kind of minor issues so chris fruman he's salbutamol he's asthma inhaler you know dr freeman barton freeman who orders some testosterone patches that may or may not have been used a jiffy bag that may or may not have had something in it it's kind of like smoking mirrors yeah yeah but it's nothing like what it was in the mid 2000s right we could probably see an element of improvement and progress track and field may be the same i'm not too sure i mean certainly some of the issues that were revealed in the blood doping files from the iwaf that was when was that now 2015 a lot of countries some that you wouldn't even think of north africa and middle eastern countries were showing high levels of suspicious blood values in that data and obviously then we

have the russian scandal where they've managed to you know allow their track and field athletes to be doping and still go to the olympics we have the retrospective testing from 2012 in particular from the olympics that shows there seemed to be quite a lot of ongoing doping in those olympics so track and field seems to be cleaner but it's probably been a bumpier ride i think as well triathlon had i mean i don't know if there's been major scandals i don't think it's had the same level of issues um perhaps it's not had the same amount of testing or focus or media attention or sort of celebrity status i certainly think sometimes our understanding of specific sports is skewed by the way in which that news coverage or news feed comes in you know russia is a great story because it's not just about athletes it's about the whole russian state system right um um so there's other countries where things have been going on that's kind of slightly under the radar and probably consistently going on and just to come back to one of your points that you've made very well which is that the structure of the governance system means that each country has to be trustworthy right right and there's not really much way that wada can go into every single country and make sure they're doing all the right things they're supposed to be doing yeah and i want to bring that point out a little bit more and if we if we kind of go back to the origins of this once again the framework is is

wada which is i'll call it an international organization just for for geographic purposes but it's an international organization they come up with a set of rules it's up to each country to go out and say okay here's how we're going to deploy our testing for olympic level cyclists here's how we're going to deploy our testing for olympic level track and field athletes here's how we're going to deploy our testing for this that and the other and it almost creates like a fox in the hen house type of deal and don't get me wrong i love the people over at usada they're my they're my they're my friends i don't mind admitting that i have friends over there i have colleagues over there over the years and and things like that they are all trying to do fantastic work but the structure of it is always going to be suspect to be manipulated by within the country and we saw that exposed to a great extent with the rut with the russia with the russia scandal in in in sochi where they just decided as a country they were going to game the system because they were in control of the doping policy so what's the what's the solution to that i mean does the whole thing need to get dug up and say listen we can't have each country be responsible for testing their own athletes like what's the learning lesson in this structural flaw that is pretty pretty clear in the current landscape even to even to a lay eye it's pretty easy to see that once they peel back just one layer of the onion yeah i mean it's interesting because i always think wada was so olympic ioc focused that that's a similar structure to the ioc so

the ioc has national olympic committees and initially before um anti-doping organizations were set up in each country the olympic anti-doping was done through those national olympic committees and that was definitely seen as too close you know that was an organization that was training those athletes to go into the olympics and drug testing them at the same time so at least we've moved forward to it's an independent agency that has to report to wada and not to anyone else within that country however you're right that if the various stakeholders within a specific country got together and said oh actually if we've got the laboratory and board we can make sure those positive tests disappear if we actually can speak to the drug control officers and tell them who to test and when to test them we could probably warn the athletes or direct them to people that we know are definitely clean or direct them to lower level athletes that we don't really mind getting busted we just want to avoid our stars getting busted you know it's all rumor mongering but there's definitely some sports in which you know digested that you know the celebrities superstar athletes have you know been kept out of the limelight as shall we say so there's definitely ways in which the system relies upon a level of trust and a level engagement a level of commitment you know resourcing so so far we've talked about north american european countries but you know to what extent to other countries that are less well

developed economically have supposed to do this if you take a blood sample it has to be stored in a fridge and if you're far from the accredited laboratory you have to transport it within you know a certain time period a couple a day or two each test costs the equivalent of what i would call seven or eight hundred pounds which i'm guessing over a thousand dollars you know so for some countries that's not really a priority they've got other things they want to spend their money on and yeah the system is definitely full of cracks i would say even if the countries are reliable and dependable which are not always the case there's a financial resourcing situation as well um and it's quite interesting that countries that have a reputation for corruption in a general sense are given you know free reign to go and look after their own anti-doping system right it's so screwy man like every time i look at it i just shake my head okay so let's get down to the practical matter right we've gone over this umbrella and i wanted to do that to set the table of how it's currently being handled at the olympic level from a structural standpoint i think that that that that's really important so the this audience this this ultra marathon audience that is going to be listening uh to this it's it doesn't fall underneath that jurisdiction right does not fall underneath the

ioc's jurisdiction with very very very very rare circumstances and i've been saying kind of from the get-go that if this community wants anti-doping solutions it's going to have to come from the community the community is going to have to be galvanized somehow the athletes the races the sponsors the stakeholders are going to have to all come together in some form and develop a solution from scratch that is contained within the community within the community within the particular sport and there are some examples of that happening in the ufc here in the uh in the united states is a good one where it's not underneath the ioc umbrella and they've worked as a partner with usada to develop an anti-doping policy for that for that particular sport way different scale of economics but there are templates that that exist worldwide that might be the one that that most north america that most north america most of the north american audience is familiar with so since we have this opportunity to start from scratch and i think it is an opportunity it's not an easy one but it's an opportunity to start from scratch build something up from the community what are the key pieces of framework that these key stakeholders who are listening to this podcast should take into account when developing whatever policy starts to emerge okay good question i gave you the big broad ones because i know you can handle it

yeah it's interesting because some of the some of my thoughts or writing about wada was that it was created in the moment of crisis and i think if you can create an anti-doping policy or any policy that's not actually a reaction to something you know a short term quick fix this is really what we need to toughen up you know get you know draconian and serious about this you know could you do something which avoids some of the excesses of the current anti-doping system or or some of the flaws and so okay so let me try yeah let's back up to the excesses piece because you can you can certainly expand on that i know what you're talking about but the audience probably doesn't yeah so the excesses to me are first surveillance so how does an athlete or you know the ultra runners ultra running community how much do they want the intrusion into their life so all athletes who are in a organization that's a signatory to world dance to open code have given up lots of privacy rights they can be tested anywhere anytime 365 days a year if somebody comes to the house they have the right to you know chaperone them until their rays go to follow them to the bathroom you know they have to expose their genitalia they have to be watched and then you know the test is given a sample is obviously given to the lab the athlete

has no sort of insight into what happens in the lab if there's any mistakes or any issues if a test comes back positive because of the strict liability rule it's the athlete's responsibility they will get a sanction of some sort there's almost no route of appeal regardless of how that substance got into the ability you know they're deemed to be fully responsible for it so the so there's been a lot of cases and a lot of my work focus on that where there's been really disproportionate sanctions for contamination or medicines or you know complete accidents um or things like spiking and sabotage done by someone else but i can take a so that's one thing sorry but i think i think that the key point there just not to interrupt you but i want to kind of encapsulate that is that first off the the at least the way that the that it's implemented across water the athletes give up a lot of their privacy and a lot of athletes will say hey i'm willing to do that as long as it creates a level playing field i'll present that counter argument but in addition to that it's relatively easy for an athlete to make a mistake and i'm using mistake in a very broad term either a whereabouts mistake taking something that's contaminated and on and on and on and the penalty for that could be very high and some some anti-doping agencies and i i you know i uh i had uh uh dr fedorik from from usada on the podcast as well and he kind

of took us through their whole adjudication process so the listeners can reference that previous podcast if they want a little bit of a dialogue on that but the point with that is is some of those minor mistakes result in in your opinion in heavy punitive damages that are disproportionate to the error that was made or the infraction that was actually uh uh incurred yeah yeah absolutely i mean it's what we've called collateral damage in some of our writing right you know so you have a policy it's pretty intensive um it's pretty comprehensive and it's designed not to allow little loopholes so people coming back and say it's not my fault you know this happened and this happened and you know the dog ate my homework kind of you know approach to it and it's designed to stop that from happening which is fine you know and i don't dispute that you know something needs to be in place to stop people making issues but i my own view on it would be there must be a better opportunity for the athlete to be able to come forward and say you know something was fine in my system i believe it was related to you know this batch of supplements which i just started taking a month ago you know i've been tested before and i was clean so it suggests that something has changed i could i i'd like to have that supplements tested to see what i can find but there's a cost to that of course and then there's

the legal cost you have to pay for a lawyer to come and represent you so a lot of amateur athletes they would just give up and they would just say this has been found in my system it's a standard four-year ban you know i can't afford the time the money whatever so you know there must be a way to have an appeals process which allows an element of representation for the athlete in a relatively quick and easy and independent kind of way to see if it might make sense that that is what's happened some of the other things could easily be solved so you know there's a case of a dutch athlete who you know she started in competition right away in life she hadn't really education about the process declaring medicines so she didn't apply for a therapeutic use exemption for something she'd been taking for several years and then she got a ban um after testing positive so to actually get understand that situation and do the retrospective therapeutic use exemption should have been quite easy but it wasn't because in the framework as it currently exists you know you're not allowed to do that because they think that people will just do what lance amstrong did back in the early 2000s so there must be something which athletes can be given a voice given an element of trust an element of you know representation where they can actually just make a case and i think that that softening up of the

the appeals process to me is an opportunity to do something different but just to come back to the edge of education at the moment all the responsibility for education lies either with the athlete or their kind of local environment and sometimes that doesn't happen so something i've been thinking about and mulling over for a while is could you have a system whereby the level of education is actually taken into account when the sanction is decided so if somebody's test positive doesn't really matter what it is you should be able to come forward and say almost as a mitigation you know i've never been to a workshop nobody's got me to fill out any sort of assessment or done an online course or anything i've just appeared and i've been tested and now i'm in trouble you know so that i i fundamentally believe that that should be part of the appeals process now other people of course say oh well it's all online you can go and look it up it's you know it's not that's not an excuse but i think that would shift the responsibility away from the athlete and to the organizations involved like you would do in a normal kind of workplace environment to actually say well we need to protect the athletes by giving them the information they need and ensuring that they have that information before they're going to be tested rather than some people finding out the hard way this is what happens you know after they've been tested i'll go over a quick story that it came out a little bit in my conversation with dr fedorek and

unfortunately i can't bring the key individuals on the podcast to to relay this story because they're employed with different entities and you know how ndas go and things like that but i'll synopsize i think i can synopsize it without violating anybody's trust because all this is public so if we use the ufc as i mentioned earlier as framework one of the really good things they did with that program and i'm not going to mince words here that program was really hard to implement it was institutionally from an organizational standpoint it was extremely challenging to do that across their 600 uh some odd fighters one of the things that they did that was really interesting and i think very effective and very smart was they had a six month no fault period so they can't you know actually might have been nine months now i'm thinking about it is either six or nine months but what that means is is usada came in and said listen we're going to implement everything that we would normally implement whereabouts program testing blah blah blah blah but for six months everybody gets a free pass and the the the reason for that is they wanted to have ample opportunity to educate not only the groups of fighters but their entire entourage and their entire team that was working with them so their coaches their nutritionists their training partners everybody that they came into contact with it was it was a big part not the only part of

this big educational effort to your point to get the entire ecosystem on board with what this policy is ultimately going to look like what the pitfalls are and how they have to kind of interact with uh with the system and while it was still challenging because there was a just like cycling there was a big culture of doping within that within that particular sport but it gave a little bit of a runway to ultimately implement an anti-doping policy so that they could kind of initially get everybody on the same page and even with that even with that six month uh runway they still it was still hard to pass along a lot of these educational moments to the fighters and the group of people that were uh that were working with the fighters so i used that to kind of further illustrate your point that this initial education piece while we can debate on whether that can be part of the sanctioning side of it and there's that's another debate but the educational piece of it is a is i i believe and i could totally agree with you a key lunch pin when you start to implement these types of things in our community we have to educate not only the athletes but the race directors who are somewhat naive to this across the board they don't want to deal with it race directors don't that's why the ufc has has usada do it they don't want to deal with it race directors should be the same way they they shouldn't have to deal with this stuff um coaches and anybody else working with athletes needs to have

that same educational opportunity because there's you know it's complicated i guess is what you're saying yeah absolutely so i you know i agree with all of that and i think related to it is this idea of what actually is good education so you know when i work with a group of students you know we do a lot of you know if i want to teach students about anti-doping it takes all semester you know and there's two points of assessment and there's points of attendance you know they have to come minimum attendance and there's extra resources they can go and look at and i want to know that each of those students is kind of keeping up at each stage so there'll be touching points every maybe two weeks um and so that's how we design our courses um some of the educationalists i've worked with or spoken to sorry and working with elite athletes a lot of the feedback that they get is if an athlete doesn't think they're ever going to fall foul of the doping system or the anti-doping rules they're not really that engaged with the educational program so i guess it would be like i'm trying to think of parallel examples but if i am quite a safe driver you know i always stick to the speed limits and i'll never drink drive and somebody in the village i live in is putting on a safety driving campaign i think you know i don't

need that i'm not going to do that so what i've heard from people working with athletes is actually if you package it within other things and i suppose in particular performance enhancing strategies and nutrition then you get a lot more engagement because then you're actually saying to the athlete like where are you just now where do you want to get to how do you get there and actually what are the risks even if you do get there right get injured you know you missed the cut you know where's the points of temptation where you might really be looking for some desperately looking for some help and i think that type of education which much more rounded this about a journey that people go through and the things they're trying to achieve and what happens when they plateau out or they fall off their achievement or whatever um and who are they working with can you trust the people they're working with to give them the right advice you know that sort of thing should be embedded in almost the day-to-day learning of being an athlete not just plonked on as here's a bunch of rules go away learn them you know and if you don't learn them and you get caught then it's all your problem so you know people have to be committed to that and oftentimes i guess if we try back to the history of this what we see from the past is the sports that have implemented systematic testing and systematic education are the ones that were forced to after there was a scandal right as a major scandal that

ruined the image of their sport and their best athletes were taken out of frame for whatever reason so really ultra running and ultra marathon you know you want to avoid that knee-jerk reaction type situation you want to be pre-emptive and say can we put in an environment a culture a kind of positive approach to this in which people feel they've they can engage with it that they value it that they see the benefits for them they don't see it as the kind of you know just rules you have to go away and learn the rules and you know follow the rules all the time they shouldn't it shouldn't be a fearful thing and that then links to this whole thing about education sanctions appeals you know even the publicity that goes around a positive test you know this shouldn't be something that people have to constantly fear it should be something which is protective and has an approach which actually engages with athletes and engages with the situations that they're going to find themselves in and not just treat them as all potential suspects all the time right i think the theme that i'm taking away from this is to be proactive not reactive because if you're reactive you're always overshooting the you're all you're always overshooting on the sanctioning and clamping down too much from a rules management perspective if you're proactive you can come up with the balance of rules and

sanctions that meet the culture and the in kind of the current performance level of the the constituent base that you're designing those rules for because if you're right if we go back and we look at those if we look at those um uh sports we always use cycling example but weight weightlifting is a good example as well they got caught so far behind the eight ball that they had no choice but to overshoot the solution to try to rein it back in because it was this big boulder running downhill and there was no way you know there was almost no way to stop it i think ultra running it is in it's in a position that cycling was in in the 80s and 90s without the rotten culture there's no testing at all it's very fractured but the people are good maybe i hope that this is i hope that my generally positive outlook is true so who knows but the the the people are good there's not a lot of cheating going there's not a lot of cheating going on there is cheating going on but there's just not a lot of it and it's certainly not embedded in the culture but what i always tell the people because people can look at that situation go well you don't need to do anything right what i always say is that well that's not a static proposition the culture is not static the culture is dynamic and as more people more athletes more lead athletes kind of enter the culture that obviously changes the kind of the goulash of people that are you know that are participating in the sport so i'm kind of getting from you it's like get ahead of get ahead of the game and you can come up with reasonable solutions almost

yeah absolutely and another thing which i was reflected upon the other day after you contacted me was there's also an opportunity here to actually ask athletes not just how they want to be tested how they want to be educated but actually which drugs and which methods do they want the focus to be on you know what do they see as the potential risk issues in the sport and i do feel myself that the world antidoping agency created a huge long list which basically is intended to cover anything that anyone might do in any sport at any time and so you know if you're in bridge you play bridge you know what's the point in being tested for steroids really you know it doesn't make any sense and so this one size fits all it doesn't have to be the case and i believe i might be wrong because i've only heard this from one person so i was about to say don't quote me on it but i'll say it anyway that um esports yeah i know where you're developed a list yeah that was based on what the athletes kind of had an input into and i don't know what they focused on i haven't seen it but i should imagine that they focused on cognitive enhancers and those sorts of things so doping products doping methods which enhance endurance seem to be the thing that which you should focus on and so you might then avoid some of the cases in other sports where people have been

caught and banned and publicly humiliated for a substance which bared bore no relationship to their performance enhancement so sanctioned at the moment i feel sometimes sanctions are not directly related to cheating they're related to breaking the rules and if you want to design rules that are focused on cheating then that's the substances you should focus on or the methods like you know blood doping and so on and so forth vas and have all this big long list of things which is kind of fairly peripheral but you can still chip up an athlete um kind of unfairly really so i think that's an opportunity that perhaps this community has so here's the here's the devil's advocate statement on that if you'll entertain me for a second is that if you start out lenient which is kind of like what you're angling towards right i'm using lenient it might not be the the best term to use but i'm going to kind of go with it if you start out lenient and saying okay we're going to precisely define these drugs we're going to get a give a lot of opportunity for adjudication what it ultimately leads to is this cliche slippery slope where the athletes find all of the loopholes and try to circumvent it and that slippery slope becomes more slippery and more slippery and more slippery and then you end up in the situation where you are having to enact kind of more corrective

measures as we've talked about in weight in weightlifting and cycling so the skeptic to that statement paul would say you're we're better off as a community since there are no policies to start out on the harsher side of things as a deterrent to draw a thick line in the sand and say that this is not acceptable in this community and then adjust from there and i know that that this is like a totally esoteric situation but in your opinion you're the expert here where does the balance of that lie with with a group of people a group of athletes who have no governance right now should we err err on the side of creating super strict things as hard deterrents against against dopers or should it be more reasonable and pragmatic and allowing just i guess a little softer right i mean i i struggle to come up with the vocabulary because it's hard to be anti anti-doping right i mean it's just that's a hard position as a coach which is my profession right to take and anytime you take a soft stance on doping your subject to criticism so i'm having a hard time formulating my words but you kind of get what i'm saying is like where where does the when we're coming up with this rule structure in your opinion where should the balance lie between being really harsh and really hard or more lenient yeah okay yeah i mean yeah i've ended up in quite a few arguments and you know on people on twitter have accused me of

being soft on athletes and all this kind of stuff um and my kind of speculation on this is probably comes from you know trying to be on the side of respecting people and respecting the decisions that they make um and not necessarily assume that everyone would you know opt for the shortcut cheating type route if they had the opportunity so i guess by saying let's not have a big long list of banned substances i'm just thinking that there's some things which are really about you know given maybe a short sharp stimulant benefit that wouldn't make a huge amount of difference to an endurance athlete but they might want to say that maybe on a sliding scale yes okay if you take a stimulant there is a sanction but it's not as much as using epo because we know the epo is actually the thing that's going to make the difference to you know that endurance side of performance i guess what i'm thinking of is here is things like you know medicines so some people take medicines over a long period of time and they're taken for therapeutic reasons they're not taken for performance enhancing reasons or you know diuretics another one diuretics have been on the list a long time so there was a case of a i think it was an american skier zach lund not sure if you've heard of that one so he took a um a cream for his um loss of

hair so uh finisterine i think it was i might be wrong and the point is sonalisk is a diuretic so he missed out on the olympics one of the early winter olympics must have been 2004 possibly because he'd been caught using this substance now that was on the list because it was a diuretic because it could potentially use a masking agent to cover up steroid use so there was no scientific evidence that actually would work that way so a few months after he had you know served his band missed the olympics so on so forth it was taken off the list because it basically been put on the list as the diuretic because it was diurem you know therefore it must have been you know a problematic substance and then it was taken off the list so this on and off the substances that have kind of come on and off or the thresholds have changed it's because as we learn more about those substances then you know we understand their potential benefit or not sorry i'm talking about too much but my point about the sac loan case is that there was no real need to give them the ban in the first place and i think it's those sorts of cases which i think i would like to see you try to avoid um and also some substances where there's no threshold level so clenbuterol is in this food chain you know you can

get a ban for nanograms or picograms found in your system you know picograms is like the new hot term right now across twitter and anti-topic everybody wants to know what a picogram is we won't we won't get into that we won't get into that pretending to be an actual chemist on this but you know the uh famous case was albelto contador of course um where the trace amount was was found in his system so if you get to that level of scrutiny then i think in a sense you've lost you've lost the sense of what you're trying to achieve and if it's keeping an idea on you're trying to protect the health of athletes you're trying to protect the level playing field do we really need these cases where we're agonizing over trace amounts of this or a medicine that's been taken over a long period of time that the athlete didn't get a tui you know the accidental consumption of cocaine you know has happened it's led to some people being banned for up to four years missing a test there was a scottish athlete missed it missed one test and he got a four-year ban you know these are the source of instances which i think we could avoid if we have a system which is essentially pragmatic and focuses upon the outcomes that you want to achieve and not just let this list grow and grow and grow for reasons that we've forgotten why is growing for sports that aren't necessarily relevant to the sport that you want to

focus on you know for trace amounts of things because the lab is so brilliant that we've got these machines that can detect anything i think these are the excesses you know you would use the word excess at the beginning of the conversation and i just think you can avoid the excesses i'm not saying that it's it's right i'm not being anti-anti-doping i'm being anti the excesses of anti-doping well i think from the community standpoint as we all start to think about this you're the way that you describe the potential solutions as being pragmatic i think is a very good uh a very good theme to keep uh to keep in mind and in addition to that once again we can start from scratch right i mean we can literally do whatever we want to do and that's i'm not saying that that's easy because it's very hard to become an expert in these subjects you can't even do it in a semester of your you know the semester of your class it takes years and decades well but my i think my my an aside to that point is is if you try to become an expert in a few months you will ultimately fail in that endeavor and we've and we've seen that and i'm going to have a podcast uh in a few weeks where that has happened where an organization has tried to become kind of an expert in anti-doping in a very short period of time and their their lack of expertise was was was very much exposed in the rule framework that they that

they created for their particular race that's that's an aside but i think the the the other point that i want to kind of bring out maybe we could talk about a little bit more is to really focus on the heavy hitters at the end of the day if we're detecting something on the level of a picogram which i cannot come up with an analogy to describe how minuscule that is and that's even with the chemistry background that i have and the lab tests are sophisticated enough to do that and it can be caused from any number of different things both from people that are cheating and not cheating but if you're detecting something on that small of a scale the impact that it's actually having is probably not worth your time to actually try to regulate and so what i'm hearing from you is is focus on the heavy hitters focus on the things that are obvious that are right in front of you that you can say yes this person is cheating it's very obvious from the chemistry that's coming back they need to be sanctioned in these smaller cases particularly in a sport that is not that sophisticated with all due respect to the athletes and coaches that are out there is a better is this is my my opinion you can tell me what you think is just a better way to go if we focus on the real impactful types of tests and substances first and then add things in later as the situation evolves almost yeah yeah i would totally agree with that um and almost i can't as you say it's evolving do you want it to start start manageable and then evolve kind of upwards or do

you want to start you know really dramatically draconian and then you might have to track back on it i think you probably you know it's maybe a sort of social experiment and how anti-doping might have been if wada wasn't the force to be so tough you're totally right because once again we're not correcting a problem we're creating a solution in advance of it so yes so yes you could focus on those definitely heavy hitters so in terms of you know the substances the level of substances that were found but you could also maybe relate that to the athletes kind of their performance and their training and you know when was it found and you know what impact might have had or not had you know i heard a case of a basketball team that was tested you know they were tested after the final of the major championship whatever it was i can't remember what it was but they're almost seeing a sense of what are you trying to do here you know what are you trying to establish that you know somebody's taken something after the event you know it's a little bit pointless i think if you had the target testing if you're focusing on people whose performance was improving or you're focusing on people who are going to come predicted in the top 10 of certain events then also becomes a more efficient use of money because this idea of just a random you know test them and test them here and there and everywhere it probably doesn't actually help achieve what you're trying to achieve which is to keep your main events as clean as possible and to

keep your top athletes kind of healthy and well um and maybe people returning from injury or think you know you can fairly establish the risk maybe the point of intervention when people return from injury it doesn't have to be a test it could actually just be some counseling or some advice or some guidance as to how best to do that um rather than necessarily just suspect them of being a doper and turn up to their house and test them straight away i just keep i just keep having this theme of just be reasonable to start out with i mean yeah you know i've had this conversation with you i've had this conversation with you just saw it i've had this conversation amongst the community the the overwhelming theme that i get as much as we want to say you know we want to take really hard line stances in this particular area is the more the the the better solution is the more pragmatic and reasonable one to start with for a whole host of different issues the audience is new you can move up and down as the situation dictates you're balancing the rights of athletes with the need to with the with the need and the desire to create an anti-doping culture and a level playing field within the sport itself and it's hard to do that at either end of the rules bell curve either not having any rules at all or having the most if we take both of those right not having any rules at all or banning everybody for life for any infraction if you

start from those two end points you those are they're impossible to negotiate from if you can kind of split the middle of it even though some people might slip through the cracks on others on either side which is always possible from a policy standpoint that's more of the philosophy that i keep getting from people as i as i continue to talk to them in the community yeah i i i sounds very sensible to me and i'm glad to hear that other people are um not everybody just some people some people are on either ends of the bell curve balls you know yeah of course i always come back to the i've just been working on a book um which sort of tracked back into those kind of 1950s and 1960s time periods which was a kind of crucible you know that was the beginning of what we're discussing now so yes there was some accidents you know some cyclists you know crashed when they were seen to have had too many amphetamines so and then there was a death in 1960 so there was a kind of health dynamic underpinning that which i think was was a good thing but when it came to the issue around the level playing field those early years that kind of early 1960s mid 1960s they only wanted to achieve one thing and that was to make sure that the person who got the gold medal hadn't taken amphetamines from the person that got this and the person of the silver medal didn't take them and the person

in bronze medal didn't they only tested the podium basically right and he just wants to make sure that nobody had gained that short-term burst of energy or burst of stimulation that had given them a brief advantage over their direct opponents and you could actually just see it's a very very simple thing and in a way we're still trying to achieve that in a much much much more complicated world exactly i was about to say that the levels of complication have increased exponentially but i agree with you the same philosophy in a sense it's like you know one of the things which i've often thought about is the whole concept of antidoping has never ever really been reflected upon yes we need antidoping it's fine but actually what's it for and who's it for and if you've got limited resources how can you best use them to achieve what you want to achieve and you know it sounds like you've got the opportunity to ask those kind of questions which is great always go back to the fundamentals right i mean you can apply that to any area of life whether it's education or coaching or even this go back to the fundamentals and why you're doing things in the first place um paul i appreciate your time man um we're gonna leave it there if you have any parting words of wisdom if you can encapsulate the the entire four years of education you would you would opine on your students with if you want to leave us with something there i think the listeners would would very much

appreciate it well primarily i'm really looking forward to seeing how this unfolds i mean it could be something you could teach right five years from now a live experiment okay well we'll have to bring you back on once the solution unfolds paul uh yeah no it's really great to hear these discussions because as you say you're right you know oftentimes discussions either on one side of the table or the other side and just to have a reasonable discussion you know with a bit of logic and a bit of pragmatism and a bit of sense of actually we've got an opportunity here to rethink this you know to be careful in what we're doing to try to protect our community to try to protect our athletes and to me the word that always come what i really recognize here is a powerful thing is the word community because the world dynasty open code is a top-down document it's heavily centralized and people are forced if you like to take it on board whereas you have the opportunity to do something much more cooperative much more mutually kind of acceptable and discussed um and i think it's great i mean it's much more seems to me potentially much more democratic and a much more engaging way to do it and if you even that process itself should make it work better because people won't see it as the enemy they'll see it as something that they've contributed towards and had a part in developing um and if you i suppose my last point is what do you what do your listeners want your community to be

and that's it really you know you if you are a community you've got to want to be positive and proactive and healthy and fair and if that's what you want then you know that's what you'll get i could not agree with you more once again this is a situation where we're not going to get adopted into another rule framework so we have we as a community have to come up with it and it has to necessarily reflect the values and the ethos of the entire community that's not easy that's a lot of lip service and you know cliche you know things and and whatnot but but but it really it really is an opportunity and if we get it right we can take a lot of credit for it and you can teach it in your class and it will be a great thing to learn from but if we but if but we're holding the bag if we do if we fail to do anything and i firmly believe that if we look back we zoom out and we look back 10 years in 2031 and nothing was done we're going to kick ourselves because we had all the incentive all the opportunity all of the wherewithal in the world and people want it don't get me wrong it's a matter of horsepower and willpower right and those are those are hot commodities in the world today everybody has a limited amount of time but if we don't do anything the the community as it currently stands we are going to absolutely kick ourselves for not finding a solution before a problem emerges absolutely we totally agree i wish you all good luck in it

everybody who's involved and all your listeners who will be eventually part of it and uh yeah do hope it goes well look forward to getting some updates and seeing how it goes we'll we'll circle back once something starts to emerge i'm sure we'll seek out i'm sure we'll seek your counsel out offline once something does happen i appreciate your time i'll have links the show notes about everything that we talked about and uh uh finally where can people find you on social media or do you just want to like hide away in a cave now that the semester is over with um well i'm only really on twitter so it's just um paul de mayo too uh is is my name on that um the university of sterling is where i work in scotland so you could probably find me on that website and you can find my email address there if anybody has any particular burning desire to ask me a further question they're welcome to do so um but it's been a great pleasure i really enjoyed this discussion and um it was very nice to be contacted by you um it's been an honor discussing these things with you and as i say good luck to everyone involved well thank you for your time paul i think for the work that you've done on this it's always great learning from people like you who have studied this topic so uh into such a depth i appreciate that thank you very much jason all right folks there you have it much thanks to paul for coming on the podcast today that was a really insightful conversation i hope that everybody took a few nuggets of wisdom for that and has a little

bit of a history lesson for how these things can sometimes go awry because i can guarantee you we can't repeat past mistakes on this and i i hope that some of the lessons that paul and i went over everybody really takes to heart as we start to formulate solutions uh two things once again if you missed the podcast last week with dr fedorik from usada go ahead and check that out next week we've got lisa roberts coming up that will be released on june 10th the week after that we have charlie ware coming up on june 17th to talk about a solution that he tried to actually formulate himself and after that i have a conversation with dylan bowman and mario frioli to really brainstorm what some of these solutions can look like on june 24th i hope that everybody tunes in to all of these the best way to do that is to subscribe via apple podcasts or your podcasting platform of choice and you get notified right when those things release what do you think we just went through two kind of sides of the equation one with usada and another one with uh with paul let me know what you think on social media hit me up talk with your friends your family members your fellow racers your race directors i want to know what the community thinks because we all have to start to play a part in finding these types of solutions that's it for this week folks appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails