Testing positive doesn’t mean you are a drug cheat
Sumary of Testing positive doesn’t mean you are a drug cheat:
Breaststroker Rickard did not swim in the final, but did so in the heat and the rules state if one team member tests positive, the team is disqualified..
If the court considered character witnesses, Rickard could emerge as an athlete with his reputation intact and a finding that, like a growing number of athletes around the world, he has fallen victim to the ever increasing sensitivity of tests that find ever smaller amounts of banned substances ingested through a contaminated product..
(L-R) Australia’s Matt Targett, Christian Sprenger, Hayden Stoeckel and James Magnussen pose with their bronze medals after the men’s 4x100m medley relay at the London 2012 Olympic Games.(Reuters:.
Michael Dalder) Shayna Jack flew home from a training camp ahead of last year’s World Swimming Championships in South Korea for personal reasons..
When it emerged later it was because she’d tested positive it caused a sensation around the world because of Australia’s perceived holier than thou attitude to doping..
Either Australia has a doping problem in the same way we accuse other countries of having, or we are seeing evidence of possibly innocent athletes caught in a system that threatens to destroy their reputations..
Once tarred with the ‘drug cheat’ brush, there is little recovery, but there is a growing body of evidence that suggests testing positive does not mean you are an intentional doping cheat..
In the most recent WADA Anti-Doping Testing Figures report (2018), there were almost 600 positive tests for diuretics and other masking agents, of those the most common was furosemide — 172 out of 589 positive tests, or 29 per cent of the total..
Doping scandal tests Swimming Australia’s resolve Australian swimmers have been cheered on for pointing the finger at drug cheats this week..
Unintentional doping was first recognised as a legitimate problem in 2000, meaning just because you test positive, does not mean you are a cheat..
The Swiss Anti-Doping Lab and the Swiss Federal Office of Sports conducted one of the first studies into the issue….
