Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Monday, August 06, 2007 More thoughts on dopingOne of the ways to stop fraud - and doping is a kind of fraud - is creating something auditors call a strong "control environment." The control environment involves things like rules and policies, tone at the top, organizational culture, and so on.Orienteering has a reasonably strong control environment (though there is a lot of room for improvement, I think). In particular, in comparison to other sports, orienteering is less "medicalized" (can't think of a better term). I think most orienteers try to eat right and might take a multi-vitamin. But, they probably don't get vitamin injections. I'd guess that you could do an athlete survey across a range of sports asking one simple question: Have you ever had a vitamin injection? I wouldn't be surprised to see that sports with a high portion of athletes who have had vitamin injections are also sports with a high portion of known doping offenses. I'd think doping is a smaller step from sports when injections are normal than from sports where injections are unusual. In other words, it is a small step from a vitamin injection to EPO than from a healthy diet to EPO. I'm NOT suggesting that individuals who take vitamin injections are doping. I'm suggesting that sports where a lot of the athletes get injections are more likely to have doping. I'd also expect sports with more money to overlap with athletes getting injections. I was thinking of this when I was reading a news story about U.S. sprinter, Justin Gatlin. Here is a bit of the story (from Yahoo News): The top assistant to track coach Trevor Graham gave Justin Gatlin an injection, which he believed to be vitamin B12, two weeks before the world record-sharing sprinter tested positive for steroids. After Randall Evans gave Gatlin the shot, the sprinter was given what he was told were anti-inflammatory pills as a follow-up, a person with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press on Monday. I don't know anything about the Gatlin case. I don't know anything about vitamin B12. But, the story reminded me of my theory (another possibly flaky one) about vitamin injections and doping. Of course, Gatlin's argument might be that he intended to have B12 and somehow he got something else or that Evans thought he was injecting B12 when he was actually injecting something else (both scenarios are pretty scary, if you think about it). Over the years, I've written a lot about doping. I find doping as fraud interesting (sort of a professional interest). But, I also feel like orienteers tend to down play doping in our sport...and doing so doesn't strengthen the "control environment." But maybe writing about it does. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 7:56 PM 
Comments:
Probably, but I don't have any specific suspicions. I would be very surprised if doping in orienteering is wide spread.
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