Hardy’s positive test elicits calls for education, system reform (USA Today)
The swimmer’s agent, Evan Morganstein, has aforesaid he was told Hardy had sum of two units negative tests sandwiched around a veritable sample at the trials.
Hardy, a 21-year-old swimmer from Long Beach, qualified for the Beijing Olympics in two individual events — the 100-meter breaststroke and 50 freestyle — and the 400 free relay. She was a strong contender to medal in her specialty, the breaststroke.
“Every day in favor of the past four years I have had this in the hindmost of my mind,” Hardy, a former water polo player who didn’t start swimming until she was 16, said at the trials. “I am so thankful and grateful that it has become reality.”
Hardy burst on the international scene at the 2005 earth championships, when she set a world remembrance in the 100 breast. Her time remains the American record.
A bubbly, self-described “typical Southern Cali girl,” Hardy typifies the clean-cut image projected by the U.S. Olympic swimmers.
“Our athletes are like All-American kids,” Wielgus said recently. “If you align yourself with them, you dress in’t run the risk of athletes being found in some strip club in Vegas.”
Hardy is at home with her line of ancestors in Southern California while her case unfolds in succession the model of she left the U.S. schooling camp at Stanford.
The American team departs Friday for Singapore, where it elect trail until Aug. 4 before leaving with a view to Beijing. The Olympic vertigo competition begins Aug. 9.
Wielgus said USA Swimming has been notified of the anti-doping case involving Hardy, whom he did not mention by name Thursday.
“The matter is being handled by USADA and we are hopeful that the matter will be resolved expeditiously,” he related in a statement.
Typically, a first-time offense results in a 2-year ban.
Hardy’s case recalls that of Jessica Foschi, who in 1995 tested explicit for the anabolic steroid mesterolone at the U.S. nationals in Pasadena, Calif.
Foschi, then 15, denied knowingly distress the drug. The Court for Arbitration in Sport upheld her positive test for steroids, but reduced a two-year international ban opposed to the Long Island, N.Y., swimmer to six months. The case was resolved in time for her to compete in the 1996 Olympic trials, but she didn’t make the team.
Hall contends that all doping scandals are not a direct result of positive tests.
“Unfortunately, we rely on an inadequate doping system and doping agencies for the proof,” he said recently. “We behave in a society where innocent until proven guilty, the key word being proven, and we don’t have any way of proving these people are cheating. We never did.”
Hardy’s case involves Clenbuterol, banned nearly two years ago by means of the International Olympic Committee. It is one of five anabolic agents on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list. Although it has anabolic properties, it is not an anabolic steroid.
“It’s a complex drug,” related Dr. Don Catlin, who oversaw testing for anabolic agents at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and who ran the region’s first anti-doping lab at UCLA for 25 years. “We know actual little about it.”
Clenbuterol is not approved for use in the U.S., although it’s accessible via the Internet and is popularly used for weight loss. It’s legally used in American horse racing because it can increase lung capacity, although it fustiness clear a sheltie’s system within a prescribed time face to face with a trial of speed.
Clenbuterol is approved in some countries by prescription to help asthma patients breathe easier.
In September 2006, more than 300 people in Shanghai were poisoned by eating pork contaminated by Clenbuterol that had been fed to the animals to keep their meat lean.
“It can be pretty toxic,” Catlin said. “There have been some epidemics whither sympathetic beings have ingested it by ingesting meat and that has given them some in some degree bad reactions. That’s surely one of the reasons it doesn’t get into the U.S.”
Catlin now runs Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit construction he founded to study performance-enhancing drugs, unmask new drugs being used illegally and develop tests to detect them.
Catlin is a proponent of replacing drug testing at events — where samples are identified by song, not athletes’ names — with using multiple blood and urine tests to settle a baseline for athletes, then comparing subsequent results against the baseline.
“The possible value is you be possible to then stand up and say an champion is in your program and you’ve been following them for a year and they’re perfectly clean,” he said. “That gives you the ability to say something nice about somebody instead of, ‘You doped.’
“Most people dress in’t dope, but those that do spoil it for everybody else. That’s really a calamitous set of circumstances.”
Swimmers Michael Phelps, Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin are among the Olympians who signed up this year for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s new pilot drug-testing program that is similar to the one Catlin favors.
Torres is on her fifth Olympic team at age 41. She said she sought the extra testing to quiet rampant supposition that she uses performance-enhancing drugs.
“I have to prove it now and that’s for what cause I have done this,” she said.
Torres’ coach, Michael Lohberg, has been in the sport added than 30 years and agrees with Hall that swimming has its share of cheats.
“I don’t suppose we will ever have a clean mockery,” he said. “The testers can excepting that find what they are looking for and there bequeath always have being tribe in this world for whatever reason — credit, money — will everlastingly attain to ways to cheat and have existence ahead of everyone else.”
Lohberg blames the increased sponsor money that has flowed into swimming in recent years for providing greater incentives to cheat.
“If there is no prize, why would you do it?” he said. “It’s a part of the game and you have to make that decision for yourself, and can you live with yourself and what kind of bodily form you are.”
Wielgus agrees the temptation to cheat exists, but, outside a superstar in the manner of Phelps, most swimmers put on’t earn millions.
“You can make a comfortable, middle-class living,” he before-mentioned. “But it’sitting not going to send you into the stratosphere where you have five Rolls Royces in the garage.”
Hall has called for WADA to create a list of allowed supplements in place of just the current list of what is banned. He said calling the WADA hot row and asking if a certain supplement is acceptable gets the same response: take it at your own endanger.
“There’s not an OK list, maybe we should create an OK list,” Hall said. “It would make it a lot easier for the athletes. It certainly doesn’t help the athletes that are kind of in the dark on these things.”
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