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The Scoop Episode 4: Would Sport Be More Exciting If Doping Was Allowed?
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Jan 30, 2025
Would legalising doping make sport safer, more exciting, or even more dangerous? On this episode of Myprotein’s The Scoop, you'll be shocked to the core as we uncover the world of professional sport. With guests David Walsh, award-winning journalist who exposed Lance Armstrong and Oxford Professor Julian Savulescu who argues for legalising doping. We'll also ask Olympian Kira Toussaint what it’s like to be falsely accused. Listen and subscribe to get the scoop. This isn’t an episode you’ll want to miss.
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0:02
my name is david o'laker and welcome to myprotein's brand new podcast called the scoop where we do just that we get you to scoop on the
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most nail-biting intense and controversial topics in fitness with our expert guests providing the
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information to help you make your mind up on what to believe topics discussed in gyms homes pubs and
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just about anywhere around the world surrounding sports nutrition and training this is where you get the
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scoop today's topic is a controversial one but one i'm super interested in and that is
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would sport be more exciting if doping were legal to discuss this we have not one not two
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but three guests julian savolescu a professor in biomedical ethics at oxford who has written a number of articles and
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done ted talks discussing the ethics of using performance in hearts and drugs david walsh journalist for the sunday
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times who is the famous author of books exposing lance armstrong and doping and cycling and kira
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toussaint a my protein athlete and dutch olympic swimmer who was falsely accused of
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doping a couple of years ago guys how's it going very good thanks good thank you
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good to have you all on good to have you all on um well obviously the topic today is quite
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a a heavy one and so just to break it break it up a little bit and for those that
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don't know or may not know so much about you guys we're going to kick start with a little a brief quick little quick fire q a um
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david i'm going to start with you because obviously you're my namesake the same name as me uh it said it so this or that i've it's
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only about four four or five questions um so quick fire this or that ready to
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go yep all right let's go uh early bird all night out nylon
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uh watching athletics or cycling cycling england or island
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ireland what's more important winning or taking part
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taking part strong very strong okay okay uh kira we're gonna come to
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you next um morning or evening training morning uh amsterdam
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i knew it uh indoor outdoor pools outdoor for training indoor for competition
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all right okay okay um and strength or endurance training uh sprint
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all right okay okay okay um and julian ready to rock and roll yeah uh
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fiction or non-fiction books uh fiction uh watching or competing in
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sports competing early bird or night out early for work uh not for pleasure
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all right so starters done we're gonna delve straight into the mains which is would sport be more exciting if
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doping were illegal i'm going to come to you uh julian to kick this one off well you're actually looking at an adult sport
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already so independent estimates put you know the number of of participants winning in the olympics
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or elite events of one-third to two-thirds of doping so the first thing to realize is you are watching dope
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sport at the moment if you were able to legalize doping what you would see
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is people who currently are disadvantaged by remaining clean being able to come up to
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the level of the dopers and you wouldn't see so many of these medals being removed months or years
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after they've been won so it'd be much more interesting because you you wouldn't have so much doubt
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about whether the winner is doping or not clearly if you had a free-for-all you'd
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have probably a lot of probably a lot of of of side effects and
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deaths but if you regulated doping so that people were within the normal
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physiological limits which is what they're doing now you might see a much fairer much more
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consistent spectacle um david i'm going to come to you what's your what's your thoughts or
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response to um to that no i i don't agree with that at all and
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from what julian has said i get the impression that it's like the problem is we've got a 670 mile an
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hour speed limit and lots of people are are breaking that limit
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and the cops are pulling one person in and as that one person is giving his details other people are
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getting are going past and not being detected so let's let's put the speed limit up to 90 and
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all those people who are going between 70 and 90 are now within an acceptable limit but of course what
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happens then is people want to go at from 90 to 110
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and that doesn't actually solve the problem so i don't see allowing people to take a certain amount
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of doping as as solving any problem
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and i would have a just a fundamental you know antipathy to a situation where
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you're saying to somebody who says i do not want to put doping products in my body
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you're saying to them well you're at a disadvantage now because some people cheat and the way to kind of negative this
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inequality is for you to take doping and again my my feeling has always been
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that it's everybody's right to compete clean and it's the ones who want to compete
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clean that we should all be working for and all our efforts should be directed towards
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giving them the playing field the level playing field that they deserve of course there are people cheating now
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and and that's not good but the solution is not to not to legalize it
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akira you got uh julian saying that one third to two-thirds of athletes um competing
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you know relatively taking some some enhancements from that perspective um
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you as an athlete that's in the sport what what are your thoughts surrounding that as a as a topic
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well maybe i'm really naive but i really don't believe that one-third to two-thirds of the my competitors are
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using doping maybe it's just because i really don't want to believe it but
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i don't think that's true and i also don't agree with the statement to just legalize doping for
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everybody i think what um david has said that that would just
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move the problem to from the 90 miles an hour to 110 miles i really believe that is true
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because there will always be people that will break the new rules of what is
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legal in doping use and i completely disagree with the statement that we should
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legalize it all because i think the beauty of sports is that the clean athletes
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which we don't know who they are for sure to see them win and to see them compete
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and do the things they can do best i think that's the most beautiful beautiful thing in sports
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um david i'm going to come to you and ask you that so what what do you think it seems though you're on the side
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that's against that what does doping take away from the sport um because i think julian's position
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or the position of the question is asking it from from a perspective of already that
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sport isn't fair as it currently is anyway because there are people that are doping so what does
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doping take away from the sport well doping i i think about it in two different ways
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i think doping robs a sport of integrity and it it it takes from the public
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the right to believe in champions which is a terrible thing to lose
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imagine there are people now and there are lots of people who say i don't watch the olympics anymore
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because i don't know what to believe and that is a travesty
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for all people who love sport but what doping also does is it takes away from the individual athletes
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the right to know how good that man or woman
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could be because once you take doping it's not actually you it's you plus
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chemical enhancement and and when i think about you know legalizing doping in any way i
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think about a situation you know let me quote you an example
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floyd landis when he talked about his doping as a professional cyclist he won the
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tour de france in 2006 it was taken away from him because of doping he said when i took human growth hormone
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they were terrible for me because it just they made my muscles stiff and
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they didn't help georgetown cappy said when i doped on the us postal team
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human growth horn was my drug it was great for me it worked so what you end up with then if we allow
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doping are the athletes who will do best are the athletes
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whose bodies respond best to doping so it's it's never actually going to be
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a playing field if you legalize doping products because
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just as i give you an antibiotic because you're sick i take an antibiotic
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we don't necessarily respond in the same way so if we apply that principle to doping
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we end up with the champion being the guy who's whose metabolism his system
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his his innate dna responded well to doping and is that the
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kind of champion we want can i respond to yeah yeah julian please
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i i think david and kira have raised some very important points which i think i'd just like to
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respond to i think it's important to start with reality and not some fantasy so with respect to the
10:41
facts about doping when michael lashman an independent doping expert reanalysed the blood
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specimens from the london olympics he estimated that a third
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of the medals involve suspicious values when water itself the world anti-doping
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agency did an anonymous survey at the pan arrow and the commonwealth games they found that
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45 of athletes admitted to doping in the last year in the pan arab games
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and about a third in the commonwealth games those are the facts last time i looked 10 people had run
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less than 9.8 seconds ever nine of them have been implicated in doping
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it's only usain bolt that hasn't been involved in doping that we know of uh michael
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ben johnson said if you want a human being to run under 10 seconds you have to cope with
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the injuries in order to train that heart you have to take steroids to enable you to continue to train the
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reality is that the sport that we require from people today means that many people
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are doping now with respect to doping determining the outcome and who responds
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best to the dope well we already have legal doping we have caffeine
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caffeine improves the time for exhaustion by 10 so famously the the um sprint cyclists
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from the uk um won a number of gold medals in track said i have five espressos before i do
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my race we have people who take glucose and creatine those enhance performance of course
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the interaction between a substance and your body is going to affect performance that's just what sport is it's the
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interaction between a whole range of different features of our physiology
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and the sort of things that we take now with the very interesting speed analogy
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i completely agree if you've got all these people breaking the speed limit at 70 and you just raise it to 90 you're
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going to get the same number of people breaking there's no point in raising the speed limit but if you move
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to more enforceable limits like physiological limits like a hematocrit a blood red blood cell
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percentage in your blood of 50 that's very easy to pick up rather than trying to pick up small deviations
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within the normal range it will be more enforceable the problem today is zero tolerance and the reality is
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physiological amounts of doping that athletes are taking with testosterone growth hormone
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epo aren't dangerous and they're impossible to detect you could easily
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change the rules and make them more enforceable that's why it would be easier to pick up people at 90 than it would be at 70
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unlike the car example julian simple question you've just said thrown it out people might mistake it
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for a fact epo is not dangerous you said i've just written physiological doses
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anything is if you have enough water will kill you if you drink enough caffeine can i can i finish the point yep
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and you said epo is not dangerous um i've just written a book with julia
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stepanova and her husband vitaly who blew the whistle on russian doping julie was part of the
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russian system and she used epo what the epo did to her body was that
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because she had to supplement if you're using epo you've got to take a lot of extra iron because that's needed in the
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processing once your red cells go up you you need supplementary iron
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she stopped taking epo now but because of what she's been through her body is producing really high
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iron levels now she can cope with that as long as she's exercising
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intensely as she is she runs every day for maybe two hours she knows that as soon as she stops
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running the medical experts have told her you're going to need to go on really serious medication to cope with
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your excessive iron levels which is seriously dangerous so when people say that
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such and such a drug is not that dangerous they're saying stuff that is really dangerous well well
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i'm actually a doctor and i'll you know i'll say this epo is given
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every day to patients extremely safely what you probably had in this situation
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is somebody who wasn't given it in a medically supervised way who probably had underlying hemochromatosis
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iron overload is common in as a problem for with people who have a genetic abnormality
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you treat it by giving blood trans blood donations regularly now i'm not saying that unsupervised
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doping is safe that's the real problem today what you have is a black market of
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dopamine with people taking bad blood uh unsupervised doses of steroids
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epo in the wrong way and of course that's dangerous that's why it needs to be medically supervised
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uh just bringing in kira on this one right how difficult is it as an athlete um
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obviously there's like a list of banned substances that are used and so on and so forth how difficult is it as an athlete to
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keep up with you know the ever-growing list of things that are now
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placed on that and and what do you do well there is an app the wada has an app that you
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can check all the medication that is illegal and the dutch doping authority also has an
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app that that's the one i check if for anything i need to know if it's
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legal or not also since i was very young our national team always had these
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educational sessions about doping prohibited substances and i think
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education on the subject is a very important part of getting the sport clean
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because i think that a lot of people in countries where doping is not very
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controversial are not educated in why it's not good for the sports and i think that
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is a big part of the problem um so i think good education and well just
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checking everything you take like if i take a vitamin supplement there is
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well in the uk you have informed sports testing and in the netherlands we have uh also a
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national system that checks all the supplements so a company can send in their
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supplements they get checked on van substances and if they are
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uh checked well then they get a a trademark or um they get a
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a seal of this um supplement doesn't contain any
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prohibited substances so i only take things that are uh checked by either informed sports or
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the dutch system that is in place so i cannot just go to the grocery store
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or to the um pharmacy to get any vitamin c um supplements
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because that's um not checked and i don't know what is actually in there okay
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um there's been like loads of there's been loads of cases in and i understand like both sides of this argument about
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there's also been like loads of cases in some sport where where you know dangerous sports what
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about dangerous sports such as like boxing for example where opponents could be you know
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killed in a ring that that's happened several times um what's your thoughts on um
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performance enhancements within that framework because there's a lot that goes on within that um within that
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sport so what's your thoughts on that julian
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gee well first of all boxing is a lot more dangerous than
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doping in sport um and so i i think that it's a question a general question of
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what level of risk are you going to allow people to take in sport
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and if if if doping increases that risk i think significantly i think it's
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it's a candidate to be banned so for example i don't think you should be able to take analgesics
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in boxing to be able to compete you know for longer with worse injuries
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i don't believe you should be able to take drugs which reduce your fear so mike tyson famously said he would
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take cocaine before boxing um because i think part of boxing is dealing with your fear and
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dealing with your pain yeah and in this case these sorts of agents are unsafe
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and undermine the spirit of boxing so i think that you know cocaine angel dust analgesics
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not anti-inflammatory drugs in boxing or to be banned they're easy to pick up because they're not
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natural to your body your body doesn't produce angel dust or cocaine so you can do a
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simple test to pick those up and and see who's cheating that's why those sorts of bands
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are easy to implement but bans on growth hormone testosterone
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epo are almost impossible to enforce because the body produces those substances
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itself and within normal within normal limits they're they're they're safe so i think
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there will be cases of substances that you do want to ban so for example in soccer and american football and rugby i
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think analgesics anti-inflammatory drugs local anesthetics during competition or
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to be banned because they're unsafe and they undermine the spirit of the sport of dealing with the pain that
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occurs during competition but if you just said that if you stop if you have the rule that you
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let people stop at 70 how and that's if somebody stopped at 70 you cannot check
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the other people how are you gonna check everybody because you cannot test everybody at all times
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before and after every competition on every level so if you would allow some sort of
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doping but not everything how are you going to enforce that well you'll use the limited
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resources that you have now the sort of 20 million dollars or something that water has a year
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in a more focused and more productive way so i think in 2012 water did
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25 000 tests for repo only 40 of them came back positive and there's no way
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that that accurately represents the number of athletes that are taking ipo if you want to test for
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substances like tramadol which is a opioid analgesic that's used in cycling
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that's very easy to pick up even a trace amount will will be able to be picked up in your blood so of course you won't be able to
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eliminate doping you won't be able to create a completely level playing field
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but you'll be able to do better than we're currently doing and i think the reality is that a zero tolerance approach has
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failed and we ought to rethink the enormous banned list that the world anti-doping agency has and
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focus on the things which are really dangerous and which are really against the spirit of the sport
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like analgesics and opioid analgesics and non-steroidals in in full contact competition
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david has it failed yeah um there is a feeling out there that the
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anti-doping system has failed that people are still cheating
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and getting away with it and i think that's a simplistic view i also think it's um it's an uneducated
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view to believe that everything is the same as before and that the anti-doping movement hasn't made some progress
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and let me quote you two examples that strike me as being relevant um when president putin put
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50 billion dollars into creating the sochi olympics
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he created the most extravagant winter games that had ever been seen
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in a visual sense it might have been the most spectacular olympic summer or winter ever seen he also wanted
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his russian athletes to be the number one nation at the winter olympics of 2014 in sochi
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they were they were doping they knew that there there was going to
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be a lot of testing at the olympics at the winter olympics and they knew
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that they they wouldn't win the medals that they wanted if they stopped doping before the
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olympics so they keep doping but they they can't beat the system
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by masking their drugs so what they do is that they they build an alternative
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laboratory a second lab small office alongside the main lab and they get the samples
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that the athletes give and they get them out through a mouse hole they have an fsb guy who opens up tamper
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proof bottles replaces the urine that contains doping products
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with the clean urine that had been supplied months before by these different athletes now the
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point about this is that russia wouldn't have had to go to those incredible lengths
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and create this alternative system of of you know of this alternative lab
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unless the testing worked two would agree the testing is working
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and julian mentioned all those epo tests and only 40 positives to exist to deter people
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if people know they're going to be tested they're far more likely not to dope a sport that i've covered
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for the last 40 years basically as a journalist is the tour de france
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and i've seen lots of doped winners of the tour de france who i knew were doping and if you said
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to me now david if you said what about that young colombian guy who won last year
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he looked spectacular what about him i would say i believe he's clean i think
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he's an extraordinary talent who has had the advantage of growing up
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in a city at altitude zip aquira in in in colombia so that has been an actual advantage he
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had but i think and believe he won last year's tour de france clean
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now that wasn't possible for most of my time watching the tour de france it is possible now because
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if we properly apply ourselves to tackling people who cheat we can do
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it i'd what i believe we don't need to do is to say
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let's legalize it to a certain level because as kira said and what i believe is that that
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certain level will be just something for the cheats to try and get beyond
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and and let me say one thing about about sport there's always a feeling that if we if
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we were to do this officially if we bring in more doctors and we supervise it and we allow certain
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amounts of this and so if we do that we'll make sport somehow cleaner or or there will be less
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risk when doctors came into sport and worked with teams
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in my experience the doping didn't go down it went up and the tour de france and the cycling
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was a great great example of that everybody used to say if we could get a
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doctor working with the team an official you know medically qualified
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doctor things will get better when those guys came into the sport things got worse is it it
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sounds similar to like um accountants and tax avoidance in essence from that in that from that standpoint
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that you know um i mean do you think we do you think human beings are predisposed to trying
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to find a way around things and i think is does that is that what i think julian's
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point is kind of like towards the fact that this is what the human beings are going to do period is that
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would that be would that be that i agree with you i agree with julian i totally agree with that you know
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everybody wants to hitch their system to an outside motor
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you know the idea that that you could attach yourself to something that will allow you to transcend
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your own natural limitations it's a very seductive thought you know when people meet somebody very
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rich yeah yeah they want to say to the guy or the woman tell me what it is that you did that
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made you rich as if it was one thing like what is the secret in the same way people are looking for
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that product that's something but in actual fact it should be a whole string of very
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small things as well as you having a lot of natural talent
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for that particular you know that what you want to be you know should be based on your talent
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and your hard work and your your dedication and all of that stuff and and one other thing about about
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doping and so many people down through the years have said to me
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why don't we just allow them do what they want basically you know let them take what they want
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and i say to that person so you're a 45 year old dad
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and your 18 year old son or daughter comes to you and says dad i've got to
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take anabolic steroids now to get me to the next level or i've got to take epo what do you say to your own kid most
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people say i tell him not to do it and my next question is always then
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so why would you apply a different morality to for somebody else's kids and they get
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stuck at that point well well i'm very um
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i i get what julian is saying but i just really disagree because
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like the beauty of sports is that okay so when i got accused of
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using doping well maybe i should tell a little backstory because please do please yeah so in
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2018 i had a world cup swimming in china and in that season i um
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was doing very well i broke national records um every other week and
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um so i got tested like six seven weekends in a row um i got back home
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and two months later i was back in china again for the world championships and i
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got an email from fina the world swimming organization um well that i had a
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positive test when i was at the world cup in beijing and my whole world collapsed um
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i had to fly home the federation sent me home and the substance that i tested uh
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supposedly tested positive for was called uh two lobuterol which is
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um asthmatic medication um so in the end
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three months later um it turned out that the the lab in beijing made a mistake and
30:56
they uh switched another medication that i
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use for that medication because it has the same molecular structure
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or the same mass molecular weight and so i could prove myself that i
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didn't actually use that substance and that i was innocent but still um the world championships
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that were in that i got sent home from they got it felt to me that they got
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taken away from me um and
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what my yeah i when i got accused of doping to me that was the worst thing
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that could happen to me like i did i broke all these records because i worked hard and i um performed well
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i got better with training and then all of a sudden um people were thinking that i was
31:54
cheating and that was that was the reason that my performance were better and to like you could be accuse me of
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anything but cheating like using doping was to me the worst thing that i could be
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accused of that people would think that of me um and to me that that
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that's the worst thing that shows to me that i really believe in clean sports because if what
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um david said earlier that if you have if you want a gold medal and
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you know that you have achieved it yourself by hard working by uh your dedication by all the years
32:36
of training you put in then i think you can be really proud of what you have accomplished
32:41
but if you know that you have cheated to to get there i think for me that will
32:47
take so much away from the feeling of being the best
32:53
um well that's that's my point of view on it definitely um yeah i was going to say
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because that happens sometimes doesn't it david like some people do end up getting accused of cheating or
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or it comes it becomes apparent that some people do get accused of cheating but then
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they haven't done but then they're also stripped of something or an opportunity that they
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could have really pressed on and done whether is that just an is that just they um
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i don't know a piece of collateral damage that we have to accept when it comes to then keeping doping out of sport or is
33:31
there a way of of getting a bet of getting better at doing that no it's a very difficult situation for sure
33:38
because the only way the anti-doping system works is by holding every athlete
33:43
responsible for what goes into their body and there are occasions where an athlete will do
33:49
absolutely nothing wrong but maybe gets a contaminated substance or maybe
33:55
some something happens that they ingest or take something that they totally unknowingly take a doping
34:02
product and you would hope that the system would admit its mistakes but there are going to be mistakes for
34:08
sure because it's impossible to to say what what was in somebody's mind when when
34:16
the doping product went in their system or whether they had even any knowledge of it but at the same time that's the only
34:23
system that works by holding athletes accountable for what's what's
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what's in their in their bodies they have to be they have to explain it basically
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but does it doesn't julian would you argue that your view then protects in essence those athletes
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from that from the situation where they might end up losing out on the peak of their career or the peak
34:49
of their powers um because of an accusation of doping if
34:55
it was legal in that sense look i mean if i i don't have any flesh
35:03
in the game unlike david and kira so i'm just a sort of an observer um and and and my observation
35:11
is is not the same as david's that the system is working he mentions the russians in sochi they beat the
35:18
system the only way they got caught was through an informant and it's the same with lance armstrong
35:24
past 200 tests the only reason he was caught was because of the forced testimony
35:30
of his teammates who escaped penalties larry bowers the expert from the u.s
35:37
anti-doping agency said in the armstrong inquiry a negative test
35:42
does not equate to the absence of doping so i i agree with with kieran david if if
35:48
you could have a clean sport it'd be great i i don't i'm not an evangelist for doping but the
35:54
system is failing and the problem is that you're trying to pick up people
36:00
with limited resources on a whole bunch of different parameters most of which don't work like for
36:06
example meldonium isn't a performance enhancer isn't
36:11
unsafe and so the athlete gets caught up in a system which is got way too few resources
36:19
for picking up the things that matter so if you started to draw some lines that were enforceable that were
36:27
realistic and that were important and put your resources into that you wouldn't have so many mistaken false positives you will
36:34
have some as david said system's never going to be perfect but the problem is it's a disaster that you've got
36:42
you've got billions of dollars at stake pressures to doper enormous the probability of detection is very
36:48
small it's hugely widespread you've got basically no testing and
36:54
you've got these limited resources in labs trying to do you know the best they can it's just not
37:00
a functional system and the athlete gets caught up on it even when they're clean
37:05
and it's it's just an inappropriate use of limited resources so i think my my only call is to why
37:12
don't we rethink where we're going and try to draw the lines a bit better this is what we did with caffeine
37:18
caffeine used to be illegal now it's legal it's a performance enhancer it hasn't destroyed the spectacle of
37:24
sport it's much easier to enforce because you don't have to work out whether somebody had a can of coke two
37:29
hours before their race and that's the cause of their their positive caffeine rating so what
37:35
we did for caffeine we could do for other things and then make the system more enforceable
37:41
and fairer for the athletes why don't we consider it yeah well just just a couple of points
37:47
and julian you made the point about all the tests that lance armstrong passed and
37:53
he certainly passed along and one of the reasons why he wasn't caught was was after failing a
38:01
test in the 1999 tour his first tour victory the authorities covered up that the
38:08
anti-doping system worked on that too or it picked up his his triumph cinder
38:14
and violation but they covered up for it so and the second one i would make about
38:21
lance is that i heard him do a podcast in 2018
38:26
and he was asked about doping in the peloton now and
38:33
how he felt about it and he felt it was a much cleaner race now and he was asked why he said in my day
38:41
he said like for my first two tourists they didn't even have a test for epo of course they've
38:46
got a test now he said in my day they didn't do any out of competition testing
38:52
now they're all over the athletes in terms of out of competition testing and he said i have zero doubt that i
38:59
could get away with now what i did then and i think that's that's relevant and i
39:05
would say to you i don't know how closely you follow sports uh in terms of the events but if you
39:11
were to believe me let's say you believe me when i when i tell you that the young colombian who won the tour de
39:17
france last year wouldn't clean you might say david that's only your opinion and i would say you're right
39:22
julian it's only my opinion but i have been watching the race for 40 years
39:28
and and when i say watching as in working on it on the race every day most of the time during those
39:34
40 years i would have said to you this guy's doped this guy's doped i'm the arch skeptic
39:43
[Music] so if you said david i i trust you as a
39:51
as a journalist who's giving an honest appraisal here and if you're telling me that eagan
39:57
bernal who won last year's tour is clean i believe you well what would that mean
40:02
that after 40 years maybe of dirty tourists we may be in an era now where it's clean
40:09
is that not progress is that not something we should be aspiring towards and and one thing i would say to you
40:16
about a colombian winning the tour de france now it's not a coincidence
40:22
because when epo was undetectable and was being used by cyclists in vast
40:29
amounts it destroyed colombia as a cycling country because what colombia had their cyprus
40:37
they didn't have the strength of the europeans but they had the ability to climb mountains
40:42
because many of them had grown up at altitude and i think that gave them what i would
40:47
regard as a natural advantage they didn't have the material wealth of of
40:53
western europe or america but they had terrain that was terrific epo comes
40:59
along and it gives incredible endurance to all the heavy stronger europeans
41:05
and colombian colombians disappear from the face of cycling the authorities get on top of the epo
41:12
problem it's very difficult to use now and the colombians and the ecuadorians
41:19
last year last 2019 three grand tours two of them won by south americans first
41:26
guys from south america to ever win a grand tour two of them do it in one year
41:31
now that's because the authorities have got on top of the epo problem and to me that's admirable and
41:39
laudable and and represents much fairer competition
41:44
so look i i hope you're right i love watching the tour i like eagan bernard i like chris froome i want to believe that
41:51
they're clean but i've heard this now for 20 years
41:56
we've got a test for repo we've got a test for growth hormone and time and again those claims people
42:03
find a way around them what people are doing now is they're not just using epo they're using
42:08
blood doping which is very difficult to detect and then someone will come and say oh we've got a test for blood doping
42:13
and the athletes will find a way around that the times that chris froome is doing now is are still faster
42:20
than the times when doping was rife now maybe it's marginal gains as sky says i
42:26
hope it is i hope you're right and then we don't need to have this debate but all i can say is over the
42:32
last 20 years time and time again doping has reappeared and maybe it's time to
42:38
rethink it and that you're right the doping is reduced the biological passport has
42:43
reduced the level of it but still people will try and find a way
42:49
around it and maybe we should work out what ways around it are safe and consistent with the sport
42:55
and what ways around it should we really be focusing on i mean the other thing to say about
43:01
about modern cycling is yes you know i'm sure there's less than when lance armstrong
43:07
was was was racing he won seven tours they couldn't reassign his medals
43:12
because 20 out of 21 of the podium finishers had also been involved in doping it was
43:18
extremely common and extremely severe but what happens today are therapeutic use exemptions
43:24
you know so people now are finding a way to get corticosteroids through therapeutic use exemptions
43:29
um that that then are using the sort of medical route to access performance
43:35
enhancement i'd like to to comment on on yeah
43:41
you say people are now using therapeutic use exemptions so okay in last year
43:48
team sky won the tour de france did they have anybody with the therapeutic used exemption in the race
43:54
well i certainly know bradley wiggins when he won no no no no i said last year last year i don't know
44:01
as i said i hope it's all clean i love i love you but julian if you hope it's all
44:07
clean and and you're you're kind of conceiving that you don't know whether anybody from team ineos last
44:14
year who won the tour de france had a gui you don't know whether they had or not i
44:19
do know and they didn't have now so i'm never going to say something like
44:25
they're now using tu e's what i'm looking for is evidence of people using tues and i
44:31
think it's kind of very easy to throw out a general observation they're all using t ues now without
44:39
knowing you know is do you not feel a responsibility to actually
44:44
check that comment out well i do know bradley wiggins has had several tues and
44:49
this was a sort of cast a shadow over his wings of the his win of the tour
44:54
bradley wiggins had three tues and they totally destroyed the integrity of his 2012
45:02
victory in the tour de france i totally agree with that now
45:07
that that was eight years ago last year egan bernal won the tour he
45:13
didn't have a tua the previous year garaine thomas won the tour de france he didn't have a tua
45:18
chris froome never had a tue in the tour de france now so in you know
45:26
if we go back eight years we find it to you we since then in the winners of the tour de france we
45:31
don't my belief is that if we keep working with the system we've got we put more resources into it
45:37
we can make it more robust and we can achieve something
45:43
well i'm going to go to our athlete um and just ask her a final question do
45:49
you ever do you think we could ever completely monitor it
45:54
the usage of um well no i don't think so because there will
46:00
always be people that find a way around it but
46:06
um i really hope that for example i get tested about
46:12
every two weeks every two weeks i have a out of competition test as if right now um well i hope all
46:20
the um the athletes i'm competing against have the same thing but i don't know that
46:25
so that is something as an athlete that you kind of always wonder if um
46:32
your opponents are tested as often as you are yourself but i think there will
46:39
always be people that go find a way around the rules but that's what
46:45
everything that's with law enforcement as well so that wouldn't be different with doping i
46:50
think but i hope that if the test gets more frequent also on a
46:57
lower level so i think the use of doping is a lot
47:03
more frequent in lower level athletes so because they want to get to the top
47:08
and they don't have many tests yet and then if they are at the level
47:14
that they will get tested well i guess they i don't know how people would do that because
47:20
maybe if they stopped they would lose their advantage and also their level of competing but for example in
47:26
swimming it's a very highly technical sport so
47:34
doping is i think less um helpful than in sports that are very uh
47:41
endurance based or strength based um but i don't think it will ever
47:48
really get out of the sport but i think we can by very good enforcement we can get it to a
47:54
very low level well that's what i hope at least
48:00
absolutely well guys it's been an absolutely rip-roaring debate and i think we could debate this thing for uh
48:07
for all day if we had the time to be honest with you there's loads of um viewpoints on both sides of the spectrum and i'm sure uh all our listeners will
48:15
would have loved all of the insight that you guys have brought um surrounding this topic um definitely you
48:21
care as an athlete as well um i think that insight of what it was like for you
48:27
um to be accused of doping and what the impact of that was on you and and your championship so guys i want
48:34
to thank you so much for that we do have some questions um from our listeners as well um so i'm going to fire those
48:41
off um firstly um i'm going to go to you kira um what's it been like
48:47
to train during lockdown and have you managed to get to the pool often
48:52
well i actually have only been out of the pool for one month
48:58
they opened up the pools for just a national team
49:03
with very strict rules so to deal with the coronavirus but i've
49:10
been able to train a lot and now we have a competition coming up
49:15
next week so let's see to see where i stand right now so i'm very excited for that because i miss
49:22
competing a lot yeah so what did you do during that month that month that you had off what
49:28
would you well i borrowed somebody's bike and i
49:33
started cycling but i um so very quickly that my body is not
49:39
very built for cycling and then i started running same story so um
49:47
i did a lot of strength exercises at my in my house and i also
49:54
have a stationary bike in my living room it's still standing here um so i did a lot of cycling and
50:00
watching netflix at the same time to not let it be so boring
50:06
absolutely yeah no i saw you you've been you've been putting up some workouts some live workouts um that you've been
50:11
doing during the uh during the the lockdown period um what's it like having the olympics was born by yeah i
50:18
know quite a few athletes um because i work across multiple different sports definitely in boxing
50:23
um who were really gearing up and excited about the olympics so how's it how's it been um having it
50:29
postponed for a year and have you had to alter your training uh well at first i was really
50:35
disappointed because i was doing really well um last december i had my first uh individual european
50:43
championships medal um so i was getting really improving and really um you know
50:51
getting we always call it getting on the train so uh if you get on the train you
50:57
everything is going well you um all the positives add up to each other
51:02
yeah uh well that's how it feels at least and so i was fairly disappointed but
51:09
then after that disappointment faded away i realized that i was doing well but i wasn't quite
51:17
there yet um i i am in the top eight in the world right now in my event
51:24
and now i have an extra year to reach the top three um so that's how i see it now and that's
51:30
how um i approach my training right now so i turn it into something positive
51:36
to having extra time for um an extra year of training
51:42
incredible thank you so thank you for those two i'm sure are our listeners that put those in would love those answers and david over to you
51:49
next um what was it like for you when armstrong finally came clean about doping and what does this
51:54
mean for the sport or for sport in general um what it was like david was kind of a
52:02
little bit anti-climactic in a way because you had this big moment when when the united states
52:08
anti-doping agency released its recent decision and gave lance a lifetime ban and gave
52:16
it took away his seven tours but it had been a story that i'd been on for
52:21
12 13 years at that time and i was pretty convinced from the very first week of the first year that this guy was
52:29
cheating and you're chipping chipping away at trying to convince people that this is a
52:34
fraud this guy isn't who he says he is and the sport still has a very serious
52:40
problem and when the truth eventually is acknowledged it's like whatever you know i mean yeah
52:47
it was obvious and but it was an important moment for the sport in general the sport of cycling in
52:54
particular sport in general because it kind of said you know what you may get away with
53:00
it for a certain amount of time you know you may be acclaimed as a great champion
53:05
you may get the 100 million dollar endorsement from nike you know whatever but the cheating you
53:13
did may come back to haunt you it may emerge and in lance's case it
53:19
came back spectacularly and an athlete who was probably one of the
53:25
most admired iconic figures in the world of sport suddenly became a byword for all that
53:32
was wrong in sport and then maybe in the history of sport it was the most spectacular fall
53:38
because lance came from such a high place yeah and um and it was you know you could say
53:45
that it was um it was a terrible thing for all the people who had
53:52
survived cancer who hadn't survived who believed in lance who would draw an inspiration from them
53:59
and it was all a lie trump is a difficult thing for people
54:05
absolutely without a shadow of a doubt um especially people that like were inspired to start and step into sport or
54:11
into that sport of cycling um because of him um yeah the amount of
54:16
times that people have said to me you know i so believed in lance and i used to believe what you were
54:22
rising and i hated you for doing it and you know those kind of people
54:28
i totally understand it was like william butler yates the poet had a line
54:34
that said tread softly because you tread in my dreams and when you were writing bad things
54:40
about lance armstrong you were treading on people's dreams absolutely which which must have been
54:45
difficult yeah perspective yeah it was
54:51
but it was the right thing absolutely absolutely um well you've written a new book you
54:56
touched on it um on the russian dolphin scandal um would you be able to tell us i know you touched a little bit about it would
55:01
you tell us just a little bit um about it it's called the russian affair
55:08
and it's about vitali and julius steppen stepping off he was a guy who worked for
55:14
the russian anti-doping agency he believed in clean sport he believed in fighting for it
55:19
he falls in love with the woman who's an 800 meter runner and part of russia's doping system she
55:25
tells him on their first date that she's she she uses
55:31
doping and he says that he thinks this is wrong and she tells him to get wise because
55:38
everybody in russia dopes she says and when she had spoken to her coach
55:43
her coach would have said do you think it's any different in the us or in the uk or in germany
55:48
or in holland or any other country in western europe they all do it so she becomes convinced it's the only
55:56
choice she's got yeah yeah so they get married he's the anti-doping guy she's the
56:02
confirmed doper and it's a it's a dysfunctional relationship as it was always going to be he keeps
56:11
he betrays her by writing letters to the world and writing
56:17
emails to the word anti-doping agency saying lots most russian athletes dope
56:24
and i can tell you the details about my wife so he tells them what she's been doing
56:31
she's been involved in a relationship with her coach so she's betraying him in the personal
56:38
sense during their marriage they're about to get divorced to
56:44
you know you know ending a marriage that probably should never have happened and
56:50
she gets a ban for activate biological passport irregularities and she says to her coach
56:59
what do i do i'm not going to be able to run for two years it's all i've got and he says well what you do now is you
57:07
do what every russian woman does when she gets a ban for doping start your family
57:12
and she said i we have filed for divorce and he said well i can't help you then
57:19
so she thinks about her life because at the moment this happens she's in the crimea in the ukraine
57:26
getting mud treatment for her injuries and she's on her own and she thinks
57:31
about all the men she's been involved in in russian sports the coaches the doctors
57:37
the the officials and she realizes they were all using her and the one person who loved
57:44
her her husband she hadn't reciprocated his love and and those now that she didn't have
57:50
running she could feel you know she could see her life in a in a stark relief
57:56
and she thinks i've been an idiot here and she rings up her husband and says how about we don't get divorced and he's
58:04
always loved her so he thinks okay and they give it another chance
58:10
and he says now that we're going to keep our marriage going you can't run
58:17
you must come on to my side of the doping argument and work with me
58:22
and she says i will and all the recordings the secret recordings and the secret video
58:28
that brought the system in russia down were done by yulia stepanova
58:34
the former 800 meter runner she went into meetings with top officials top coaches top medical officer
58:41
and she recorded them all she recorded her friend maria savanova 800 meter runner the
58:50
olympic champion from 2012 and when they were doing this as a couple
58:56
they got closer and they had a they had a son robert at this time and their marriage from being pretty
59:04
dysfunctional became a loving good
59:09
marriage with the arrival of robert their son they end up in a family situation and
59:15
they're still very much together now and very close so it's like um a love story set against
59:21
the backdrop of a doping conspiracy and it's i think it's the love story that makes the book
59:26
interesting incredible such it sounds incredibly gripping and i have to uh i'm going to have to
59:33
give that a look myself honestly sounds incredibly gripping um what was that yeah uh julian
59:39
um over to you uh what first interested you in the ethics of sport and specifically doping well i've i've
59:46
always enjoyed sport just recreationally so i i love it i like doing it but i had a
59:54
medical student who came to me for an elective just before the sydney olympics and i said to
1:00:00
her because i was interested in enhancement generally and i said well why don't you see what's going on in
1:00:07
doping in sport there must be some stuff there that works now you know and this medical student with no
1:00:13
background in ethics or sports science came back with some facts that made it obvious in the
1:00:19
early 2000s that doping was everywhere and that the regulation of it was
1:00:24
was laughable the world anti-doping agency had this this criterion that you know you you
1:00:30
should ban a substance if it's against the spirit of sport it had this list of things like courage honesty teamwork as defining the
1:00:38
spirit of sports so we wrote a piece so then i called up um a colleague
1:00:44
who was the who was in charge of the testing at the sydney olympics and i said to him
1:00:49
um can you pick up growth hormone if athletes are taking it and he said no
1:00:56
and i said do you think it's dangerous and he said well if they take a lot they'll get a large jaw in large hands
1:01:02
but if they don't take that much it's not dangerous and i suddenly realized this is
1:01:07
everywhere and this whole system is a farce so we wrote a piece that got in the front page
1:01:13
of the newspaper and then we wrote an article that was was um was very highly cited but
1:01:19
so it was obvious in the early 2000s that lance armstrong the whole whole peloton were doping if you just bothered
1:01:26
to even look superficially at the evidence so you know that's i just took it on as a
1:01:33
hobby but you know nothing has changed as far as
1:01:38
uh i can see yes it's it's maybe been reduced a bit um but you know it's a fascinating human
1:01:45
story and that about wraps up this week's episode of my proteins the scoop podcast a huge thank you to all of our guests
1:01:51
keira david and julian who's given us some incredible insight um surrounding
1:01:57
uh doping in sports please keep the conversation going via social media using the hashtag the scoop
1:02:02
and indeed in the comments too don't worry we'll be back soon for another episode
1:02:08
i've been david olauca and thanks for listening
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