Well then, I’m even less sure what the Wikipedia link is supposed to prove, since plenty of the American athletes listed on that page are long retired, and were primarily active at the same time that East Germany was doping its athletes to the gills.
Seems to me that if their swimmers had gills, doping wouldn’t be as attractive an option.
I’m on board with a wait-and-see reaction. Maybe she just consumed a lot of Red Bull and beetroot.
I did wonder how comprehensive the wiki articles were, which I pointed out when I posted them. I searched, but failed to find another source for a country-by-country breakdown of doping cases. If anyone has a better source, I’d be interested.
The fact remains, the biggest doping scandals of recent times have not involved Chinese sports-people. It’s grossly unfair to single out Ye as a possible cheat.
And I agree, and after seeing her swim the 200IM she has an incredible free. I haven’t seen much else of her swims but her last 50 in both IMs she swam harder.
I don’t know why they are still comparing Ye’s swim to Lochte’s. Lochte shut it down the last 50, he was faster then the world record at the 300, then lost it by almost 2 seconds in the last 100.
Swimmers are taught to swim the last 50 harder, sometimes harder then the first 50. Looking at the Long Course World Records you can see that generally the last 50 is faster then most, if not all of the previous 50s in events longer then 200.
She’s 16, kids of that age can and do drop a lot of time just out of nowhere. She’s been training specifically for the Olympics and tapered at the right time. No one’s saying anything about Ruta Meilutyte who won the 100 breast and dropped a few seconds off of her personal best. Two to three seconds isn’t supposed to happen either, yet it did.
Ye very well may come out as a cheater, but I haven’t seen much to really believe otherwise right now.
You mean, powdered rhino horns and tiger penises
Maybe one could say the same about Gabby Douglas???
“It is unusual, she really charged up and made a fantastic improvement, I don’t recall anybody this quickly rising from an average good gymnast to a fantastic one,” said U.S. women’s team co-coordinator Marta Karolyi. "Every single competition she did better and better, we had to work with her consistency.
Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that Gabby Douglas was doping? Could doping even provide an advantage for a balance beam or bars routine?
If she comes back with a positive test, I’ll eat my hat. I’m not even sure why you would make such a suggestion, actually.
I don’t think Gabby Douglas doped at all. She’s always had fantastic energy! I do think her scores were inflated during the qualifying, though. I was shocked she beat out JW.
edit: If you were able to watch her performance, you’d catch mistakes. She seems to be a judges favorite but I’m still surprised she scored as high as she did.
To not question Ye’s performance would be foolish.
If you don’t want your athletes’ incredible performances questioned, run a clean program – top to bottom – year in and year out.
Just as people who know steroids could line up ball players and get it right w/out a drug test, so do people in the world of swimming know when to suspect doping. Everybody knows your kid is drugs, but you as the parents just don’t frigging see it.
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A 15 year old US swimmer has just won gold in the 800m freestyle, her competitive debut. She finished just short of the world record, but that was set in a high-tech, low resistance swimsuit, now banned. I’m sure that in the interests of fairness, you’d like to join me in casting aspersions on her achievement.
(I repeat the point I made about Ye. It’s not that unusual for teenage swimmers to knock seconds off their PBs in short periods of time. Again, I really hope her performance is genuine.)
Is she an All-American Girl[sup]TM[/sup]?
If so, you’re way off base. Her performance edge comes from God’s Providence and a healthy dose of stars, stripes, and apple pie.
Going back to the “Ye swam faster than Lochte” thing, it’s not actually unusual for woman swimmers to go faster than him on the final leg of a race. For example, Rebecca Adlington managed it in the world championships last year, despite swimming twice the total distance. Lochte paces his race very differently, his overall time is much faster.
There are all sorts of unusual performances knocking around in this Olympics if you look for them.
For instance, and at the risk of seeming unpatriotic, the GB female pursuit team in the cycling have raced together 6 times in total as a team. On each of those 6 occasions, they broke the world record. This seems odd to me - either we have accumulated one hell of a lot of marginal gains, our cyclists are superwomen, the rest of the world sucks at this event, there is something fishy going on or all of the above in some combination/measure.
If this were any other nation, people would be leaping at the drugs accusations immediately (and indeed, the French and Germans have been casting serious aspersions at the GB cycling team - and at Jason Kenny’s press conference, the bloke who he beat in the final nicked a journo’s microphone and spent 7-8 minutes asking questions - like, “I beat you easily in 2009, how come you’ve managed to get so much better?” and “what are you going to do between now and Rio - are you going to hide away and then explode at the Olympics again?” - a clear question that insinuates drug use by hiding from competitive testing programmes).
On point, the Chinese swimmer’s achievements warrant closer examination. They are clearly outstanding (in the true - this is an outlier - sense of the word). But, in this case, everyone should be prepared for serious examination of every mental performance we see (presumably Usain Blot has been through this and deemed to be kosher, due to the preponderance of evidence). I don’t have a problem with this - if we want clean sport (in itself a question perhaps), then athletes have to accept that those who have gone before them have removed the benefit of the doubt for every competitor out there.
He’s got a brass-neck if he said that, given he himself (Bauge) was stripped of a world championship for swerving a dope test.
Katie Ledecky’s 800m freestyle performance does seem amazing from my position of not knowing a great deal about swimming. I would intuitively think that a long haul event like that would be more of an older athlete’s game. Is it precedented for 15 year olds to lay down the law like this in the distance events? Seems unusual that a 15 yo would have the engine for such a commanding victory - although maybe 800m is more middle distance in the pool, didn’t they used to have a 1500m in the olympics?
At the last two Olympics, the GB cycling team has indeed made the Chinese swimmers look like a bunch of amateurs. However, if you dig a bit deeper, there are reasons for this. British cycling is the best funded in the world. At Beijing, we had a technological edge. Since then, there have been rule changes, the equipment used must be available for public sale. However, funding and training also helps us build the best team. They go into schools looking for riders. The riders train in wind-tunnels, to find the best posture for optimising aerodynamics. It’s similar to US athletics, but on a smaller scale, where intense internal competition pushes people on.
There are a lot of team events in cycling, where performance is dictated by the weakest team member. The GB Woman’s team pursuit-ers won gold in 2008, 2009 and 2011. This year, the 37 year-old Wendy Houvnaghel has been replaced, so it’s no great shock that times have improved. As for the 6 consecutive records, the riders are very precisely paced by the coach, to the nearest tenth of a second. It’s very scientific. Their tactics are different to the other teams. They are making fewer changeovers, as each one costs a tenth of a second in total performance (less time slipstreaming).
Our innovation in this games has been to equip our riders with electrical “hot pants”, which they wear between warming up and the race, much like F1 tyre blankets. This keeps their muscles at an optimum 35C. I have no idea if this significantly affects performance, but if nothing else it gives us a psychological edge, as does the home support.
And Kenny beat him in 2011.
Yes, all athletes deserve scrutiny. That’s my point really, I don’t see why the Chinese athletes, Ye, or anyone else merit special scrutiny. They certainly don’t deserve uninformed aspersions being cast against them. It would be naive to think everything is above board (there have been some failed tests in this games), or that new methods of cheating won’t be developed. However, I do hope that testing methods and the consequences of being caught have progressed to the point where the majority of what we are seeing is genuine.
I’m not sure about 15 year olds, but it’s not unusual for swimmers to hit their peak in their teens and early twenties. Sprinting is all about power, but swimming is a blend of power and endurance. The 100m freestyle WR is longer than the 400m track record. 800m in the pool is much closer to a 5000m run than a 1500m.
You see, I am on board with all of this. But the fact remains that the Brits push the very edges of the rules in cycling a lot and operate under a veil of secrecy, launching stuff (rightly) at major competitions to get maximum surprise advantage (this may be one of the reasons that we’re so good - but it’s also a reason that a lot of the newer rules were brought in and, having watched the interview with Boardman on Sunday, is also a reason why the UCI are informed of everything that goes on in the British camp, because Team GB have been brought up on rules before). It all makes sense. But if you operate in such secrecy, you are doing no different to the Chinese in swimming - hothousing the best talent and unleashing it at the right time - so the scrutiny should be the same.
ETA: A good example of pushing the limits of the rules is that the Team GB bike is available commercially. But it was developed, in secret at the UK sports institute and can only be bought on their website for a cool £20k. This is perfectly legal - and means that the intellectual property in the bike is not being shared with other nations via the bike manufacturer - but it does show how far Team GB will go to get an advantage. Pots of money obviously helps, but the operating in secrecy part is also important.
I realise we’re basically arguing the same point. I’ve just come at it from the opposite angle. No special scrutiny is right. But if we are going to scrutinise the Chinese swimmers at x level - then the Team GB cycling team, having delivered eye-popping numbers - also should be subject to the same scrutiny. And people will not like the insinuations that such scrutiny will cause.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/06/london-2012-olympics-cycling-jason-kenny
Here’s the story on Kenny’s post race conference. The Guardian journalist is most charitable in couching the questions as “curiosity”. The question about “being a sheep” is almost overtly about being underhanded.
I think we’re much on the same page really. Yes, GB cycling certainly needs to be scrutinised carefully, both in terms of technical regs and drugs testing. What angers me is assumption of guilt, based on either prejudice or lazy arguments. Some of the comments in this thread are pretty disgraceful, and I’ve seen far worse outside this forum.
I’d be unsurprised if cycling rules were tightened up again after the success we’ve had in this games. It’s the job of teams to find every advantage within the rules, while sporting bodies need to try and close any loopholes. Sport is rarely a level playing field.
Going back to the swimmers, we’ve had three young women produce stand-out performances to win gold. American, a Lithuanian who trains in Plymouth (UK), and Chinese.
A nice analysison the BBC website about Ye Shiwen which suggests that her performance was hardly that anomalous. As it points out it’s not unusual for teenagers to make big leaps in their best time. Neither was the lap which she swam faster than Lochte that unusual. In fact Adlington swam her last lap faster than both Shiwen and Lochte and that too in the 800 metres. Obviously it depends on the state of the race and whether the swimmer wants to push for a fast time. Just slicing out one lap out of context and comparing Shiwen to Lochte is silly.
Unless there emerges hard proof that Shiwen doped, I would have to say these accusations are basically BS motivated by jealousy.