Jamaican sprinters: is Carl Lewis right to be suspicious?

The Game Room
21

I think that these days doping is just trying to stay in the plausible deniability (is that a real phrase?) stage. The ones that get caught are typically the stupid or those that are so obviously doping that the authorities basically have to take them down. When Ben Johnson won the 100 in the 1988 Olympics, he was a roided out freak with muscles bulging everywhere and almost glowing yellow eyes. He blew away the field and destroyed the world record. There was no way that he was not doing drugs in a big way. There are conspiracy theories that he was framed in order to get a positive, but I won’t go into that here.

Over the past couple of decades, some of the biggest doping issues in track have been with national governing bodies condoning and helping to cover up any doping. A few years ago, a number of Russian women’s middle distance runners were busted because they were all submitting identical samples of clean urine. None of it their own, of course. WADA suspected them because they never missed an out of competition drug test, which is pretty much unheard of. This would probably have to be coordinated at a level much higher than the athletes or coaches.

Greece has been known to hide their athletes in the off season, and they rarely run outside of the country, so they are rarely tested. There was the faked motorcycle accident from Kederis and Thanou before the Athens games. The reason the testing officials wanted to test them is that they had been unavailable for testing for months. Another episode happened at a world indoor championship where the testers met the Greek sprint contingent as they arrived at the airport because they had been unavailable for months. The athletes dashed back onto the plane while the coach physically kept the testers at bay.

I also highly suspect the Turkish women in the middle distances. The woman who won the 1500 today had previously been banned for a drug offense.

As for the Jamaicans, they have an incredibly strong sprint tradition. Having been to the Penn Relays, a ton of Jamaican high school athletes compete at the highest level there. They usually take almost all of the sprint relays, totally dominating the US high schoolers. A huge chunk of those get scholarships at US universities, so it is definitely worthwhile for them.

I’ll stop now.

22

They should just let all Olympiads dope. It would level the playing field. And so many of them do anyway.

23

Oh, the double entendres keep on coming.

24

But being unavailable for testing is an offence in itself, that will get you banned. I don’t understand these claims that certain countries hide their athletes in the mountains while they dope them up to the eyeballs.

25

I agree. This should apply to all sports.

26

Thanou’s wiki is here. The Athens test that precipitated the faked motorcycle accident was the third missed test of the summer. The most probable reason that officials were keen to test them at the start of the Olympics is that they were hidden away doping to the gills. The athletes probably figured that they wouldn’t be tested until they actually competed. Note that the Greek federation initially cleared them of all charges and threw their coach under a bus.

Edited to add: Note that a single missed test is only a warning. A second missed test is also a warning. Three is a violation.

27

But no athlete would think that now, eight years later.

28

If I was getting any kind of test from a guy named Dick Pound, I sure as hell wouldn’t cheat.

29

This time they are keeping the blood samples. So any athletes who are doped and are beating the tests will probably get found out eventually.

30

It would appear that ‘innocent until they beat an American’ is the preferred method (Jamaican sprinters, Chinese swimmers etc).

31

Because nobody ever accuses American athletes of doping.

32

I will provide an example of this right now.

What a load of hypocritical BS surrounded the American women’s 4 x 100 m race, where the Americans beat an old East German world record. Yes, the East Germans were surely taking PEDs, although none of them ever tested positive. But does anyone doubt that Carmelita Jeter, for example, is juiced? Yet on NBC we hear about how the stain has finally been erased, or words to that effect.

33

In case it was not clear, I was being sarcastic. Very (Lance Armstrong), very (Tyler Hamilton), very (Floyd Landis), very (Barry Bonds), very (Mark McGwire) sarcastic.

34

Yeah, I know. It is just that the 4 x 100 m situation was eating at me. Sorry for the semi-hijack.

35

What is so unusual about a country being specially good at one sport? should the rest of the world be suspicious of our basketball players?

36

I’ve seen this sentiment expressed on numerous occasions.

Jamaica has a rich tradition of producing champion sprinters and athletes:

[ul]
[li]Don Quarrie was unlucky not to win the 100m and 200m double at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. He beat the Americans in the 200m, but lost the 100m final by 2/100ths of a second to Haseley Crawford of Trinidad.[/li][li]Merlene Ottey was the greatest female sprinter of all time, who won a slew of silver and bronze medals from 1980-2000, but never won a gold medal. If she had used the same gear as the East Germans, Flo Jo and Marion Jones, she probably would’ve won a few gold medals.[/li][li]Donovan Bailey emigrated to Canada at the age of 13 and won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996[/li][li]Linford Christie emigrated to Great Britain at the age of 7 and won the gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and a silver medal in 1988[/li][li]Ben Johnson emigrated to Canada at the age of 14 and won the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, but was stripped of his title after he tested positive to anabolics[/li][/ul]

Jamaica is a hot bed of sprinters. I don’t think the size of the population has anything to do with it. USA has over 250 million people, but 99.9% of Americans have zero chance of making an Olympic 100 metres final. It’s the same with most countries around the world. India and China both have more than a billion people. If population was relevant, how come they don’t they have any runners in the 100m final ?

It’s all in the breeding. In the same way that most of the world’s top racehorses come from the same bloodlines, the fastest humans on Earth are slave descendants from Jamaica and southern USA. They probably descend from the same handful of tribes from Western Africa.

It takes a lot of training, preparation and no doubt, some chemical assistance to achieve greatness in Track and Field, but it mostly gets back to genetics.

I think you can say the same thing about all sport. Many professional athletes around the world will seek chemical assistance if it means having lucrative career in their sport. Drug testing procedures keep it in check - testosterone levels have to be within prescribed limits - so we don’t see any more Florence Griffith-Joyner freak shows.

I just reject the idea that when Jamaica win all the medals it must be drugs, but when America win the medals, it’s because they’re naturally superior and have a bigger population.

Carl Lewis knows damn well that most of the sprinters are on a level playing field these days. The American sprinters no longer have enormous physiques compared to their rivals. Everyone else has caught up with their “sports science”. Lewis is simply being ungracious because he knows a man has come along who will be remembered as a greater athlete than him. Lewis is yesterday’s hero. He is fading into the historical background, just like Jesse Owens before him.

37

How does one train for sprinting? You just run as fast as you can don’t you? Do leg squats, leg lifts, anything to make your legs stronger. How would training with Usain Bolt or running away from the neighborhood dog be any different?

38

Weight lifting and other forms of resistance training like uphill runs, weight vest, running in sand , etc.

Besides doing overdistance sprinting, there’s start technique, transition from the starting drive to upright(timing of such), running form, learning to sprint all-out while staying relaxed.

Foot position in the blocks, improving reaction times, there’s much that goes
into that search for a few hundredths of a second.

39

Is this a serious question, or have you just undermined months and months (sometimes years) of specialized training?

40

Humans are not bred like racehorses. There is so much interbreeding that the performance of Afro-Caribbean and African American sprinters cannot be traced back to some miracle tribe in west Africa. There are other places in the Caribbean, not to mention Africa itself, that do not produce top class sprinters.