This is a great question! I’d say that the reason is to actually protect the athletes, rather than protect the “purity” of the olympics. If they changed the rules so that people could do all the drugs they wanted to, then it would basically mean that you’re required to do drugs to effectively compete - those without the drugs would have a big disadvantage against those who use them.

We know that many performance enhancing drugs can have very harmful side-effects, so that would ultimately lead to athletes harming themselves to be able to compete.

That would not be a good outcome for anyone, I don’t think.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago

Why can't they just all agree to have a good time

[+] nekandro@lemmy.ml -6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.

The US just can't accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn't biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/

But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there's no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn't a system to encourage it).

[–] sandbox@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

While China’s WADA positive test rate is indeed low, it’s higher than the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) positive test rate, by quite a significant amount, which may suggest that the national agency aren’t policing doping as closely as WADA. The USA’s national anti-doping agency (USADA) has a higher positive test rate than WADA’s, again, by quite a significant amount. Additionally, WADA has significantly higher sample rate in the US compared to the sample rate in China - despite the fact that CHINADA has a much higher sample rate than USADA.

My point isn’t that the US is better or more honest at handling doping than China, just that the analysis of doping test rates has quite a lot of variance, and it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from them.

[–] nekandro@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've been looking at this data for reference:

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/2021_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf

Where do you get your claims?

Either way, as another guy pointed out US athletes have a really quite absurdly high rate of TUEs. Maybe that's just because the average American is unhealthy, maybe that's just because the US healthcare system catches more of those things, but it's still odd that those athletes coincidentally take performance-enhancing drugs as medication for their medical condition. It's also odd how low the TUE rate is in other countries in comparison - WADA seems more willing to approve requests from the US, which maybe explains part of the discrepancy.

[–] sandbox@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Slightly more recent version of the same document, as well as the ADRV report

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/2022_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/2020_adrv_report.pdf

[–] filoria@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Global positive test rate is 0.67%. 25% of those are "legal" (~250). Of the illegal ones, 25 Chinese, 57 Americans, 135 Russians.

The Beijing lab reported 25 AAFs, for a 0.23% positive test rate over 10326 tests. The LA and SLC labs together reported 153 AAFs, for a 1.54% positive test rate over 9904 tests. So... Eh? Isn't this the opposite result being claimed? The US is able to run interference for a good proportion of their AAFs by claiming "medical reasons" and other bullshit.

[–] sandbox@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I feel that that it’s very difficult to formulate any real statistically significant findings from this data because you’d need way more information than we have available to us from the WADA report, personally. Your point that China has a very low rate is completely fair, and I agree with you on that, but there are just so many variables in the mix and the sample sizes are so low, I’d be uncomfortable in making a real conclusion with the data available - all you can really do is point to correlations.

I’m not arguing with you or saying you’re wrong or anything, just to be clear - just saying it’s really messy and complex. And I agree that the US is broadly pushing sinophobic propaganda as per usual.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

so are we just gonna ignore that cannabinoids are included in this.

[–] nekandro@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Flagrant violation of the rules knowing that the US national agencies won't give a fuck. The rules themselves might be questionable (but really, cannabinoids are still illegal in most of the world...), but it demonstrates that US athletes feel like they can basically ignore the rules because nobody will enforce them.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

well when half or more of the people who admitted to using PEDs were using cannabinoids it certainly cuts into your argument that there's a wide ranging conspiracy across dozens of disciplines to encourage doping.

[–] naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago

You're barking up the wrong tree with this one. The real story is the number of US Olympians that have TUEs that coincidentally are performance enhancers and the relative lack of TUEs for other countries' Olympians (e.g., China).