THE blood-doping within athletics saga rumbles on. The Sunday Times newspaper, in conjunction with the German broadcaster, ARD, got their hands on more than 12,000 blood test results from around 5000 athletes between 2001 and 2012 and revealed that at least 800 of those competitors have displayed 'suspicious' dope testing results. The fall-out from this story has been severe and widespread. During the last week, eight British athletes have voluntarily disclosed their blood-test data in an attempt to provide greater transparency which, they hope, will engender more trust in the athletes and convince observers that they are clean.
Mo Farah is the most high-profile athlete to have made his blood-data public – it is likely he felt compelled to do so in the wake of the Panorama programme that made doping allegations against his coach, Alberto Salazar and his training partner Galen Rupp. In the eyes of many, those claims cast a shadow over Farah even though there was nothing whatsoever implicating the Englishman in any nefarious behaviour. Among the other athletes who have released their blood values are Jo Pavey, Lisa Dobriskey and Scotland’s Freya Murray.
None of these athletes were under any pressure to release their data yet they still chose to disclose this private information. Their intentions are obvious; they feel that by letting everyone and anyone view their test results, they will eliminate every shred of doubt that they are anything other than squeaky clean.
But the more interesting aspect of their move is 'where do we go from here?' Transparency and openness are, indisputably, positive things but there are several problems with the release of data. While the group of athletes claim that they do not wish to exert pressure on other athletes to do the same, this is exactly what they have done. I fully believe that this group of eight had no intention of forcing others to follow their lead but it is an unavoidable consequence. Now, any athlete who displays even an ounce of resistance to disclosing their results will be immediately accused of having something to hide and branded a doper.
There could be many reasons why an athlete may wish to keep their blood test data private and only one of those reasons is because they are doping. I am not convinced that releasing this data will solve all the problems in sport and UK Athletics, UK Sport and UK Anti-Doping have all urged athletes to be extremely cautious when contemplating a similar decision. UK Athletics fears that data could be “misinterpreted” while UK Anti-Doping chief executive Nicole Sapstead said that the logical conclusion to such a move would be that those who resisted publicising their results would be suspected of doping.
Analysing blood data is not a simple procedure and cannot be done by merely glancing at some figures on a page; indeed the IAAF rebuked the Sunday Times' interpretation of the data claiming that the experts the newspaper deployed to assess it have made “a number of seriously incorrect assertions”. These are experts who have decades of experience behind them and their findings are still being questioned. Wait until the ‘amateur scientists’ come out in force to analyse athletes' data if it were to be made public on a mass scale. Abnormal values can occur through completely legitimate means but it is likely that an athlete would be tainted, perhaps irreversibly. For example, former Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond, had an astonishingly, some would say abnormally, high VO2 max yet he is believed to have been a clean rider. It was his abnormality that made him great.
A similar issue regarding analysis of data arose during this year’s Tour de France when Team Sky released Chris Froome’s power data in an attempt to put a stop to at least some of the doping allegations. Observers had looked at Froome, scrawled a few calculations on the back of a fag packet and deemed that his performance was too good to be true. Team Sky’s release of the data did no harm for their PR but it answered few questions.
Athletics would find itself in a similar situation were all athletes' data to be released in a free-for-all. There are few individuals in the world who possess the expertise which would allow them to accurately analyse athletes' blood samples and, despite what a glance at Twitter may make you think, few ply their trade on social media. The analysis of test results would immediately become the focal talking point in every stadium, newspaper and television show. Is that a positive development for the sport?
We are now in limbo. The IAAF must decide whether to make it compulsory for every athlete to release their data because leaving it up to the individual has many pitfalls. The governing body’s biggest problem, though, is that if the release of data did become compulsory, it would sate the cynics for a while, but then they would demand greater transparency still. So the question is, where will this stop?
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