In early 1988, Johnson pulled his hamstring, curtailing his training and racing in the crucial months before Seoul. Then, at a meet in Zurich just five weeks before the Olympics, Johnson broke well and led early, only to have Lewis overtake him in the last 20 meters. It was Lewis’s first victory over Johnson in two years.
The injury and the defeat in Zurich apparently motivated Johnson to undergo a final round of steroid injections, administered by Dr. Astaphan, less than a month before the 1988 Olympics.
Move over, blood doping; cyclists might be ‘poop doping’ soon
.. a handful of microorganisms that apparently separate the guts of elite athletes from average people.
The most important, perhaps, is Prevotella. Not typically found in American and European gut microbiomes, Prevotella is thought to play a role in enhancing muscle recovery.
“In my sampling, only half of cyclists have Prevotella, but top racers always have it,” she told Bicycling. “It’s not even in 10 percent of non-athletes.”
.. Within a month, Peterson said, she began feeling better than she’d felt in years. She said before her transplant she was having trouble just training on her bike; just months later, she said she began winning pro races.
.. Fecal transplants have real risks,” he said, noting if a donor isn’t properly screened, the procedure could insert possibly deadly pathogens into another’s system.
The solution to doping is to extend the blame beyond athletes
We can start with the idea that athletes should not be the only ones held to account (in the sense of liability) for doping. In practice, this means changing WADA’s system of strict liability for the athlete. To do so, we first need a stakeholder analysis to understand who the relevant stakeholders are for each team, athlete or sport. WADA could require teams or individual athletes and their entourages to submit something akin to a classic organisational chart, showing who reports to whom, who pays whom, and who makes decisions for whom.
The next step would be to assign liability to the appropriate stakeholder(s). Here, we think that the individuals identified through the stakeholder analysis as possessing the most power or control over the ‘organisation’ should be held personally liable for the doping of the athlete(s) under their control. In some cases, the organisations themselves will have corporate responsibility.