Had never heard of this Roxadustat drug she's been done for. I looked into it a bit and there are serious concerns around the drug's safety. It was approved for use in China in 2018, Japan in 2019 and the EU in 2021, but only a month before the EU's approval it was rejected by the US FDA citing serious safety concerns.
Roxadustat is used to boost erythropoietin production and, even though it wasn't authorised for medical use until 2018, it had been already been banned by the WADA in 2015.
That same year it was detected in a couple of "second division" cyclists, and digging deeper I found medical research papers clearly earmarking it as a PED in 2012, with licensing agreements for its development stretching all the way back to 2004, at the very least.
In other words, the dopers had the jump on the authorities for years. This is hardly a groundbreaking revelation, just a reminder that doping in elite sports has and will always be rife. If second-rate athletes are doping with the hope of making it into the upper echelons, how are we supposed to believe that anyone in the elite can possibly be streets ahead of them using only natural means?
Seems to me that for every scapegoat there must be a ton of escaped goats.
4-year ban for Halep
posted on 13/9/23
comment by Diafol Coch 77 🏴 (U2462)
posted 1 hour, 18 minutes ago
comment by Kobbie The King Mainoo (U10026)
posted 1 hour, 41 minutes ago
Shouldn’t this be on the Liverpool and City board?
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No. It should be on the boards of teams who consider this kind of thing as being wrong.
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posted on 13/9/23
Seems it increase haemoglobin which your body uses to transport oxygen (energy) round the body. Can see why it's banned, probably no worse than 20 Liverpool players being suddenly diagnosed with asthma and using inhalers though.
posted on 13/9/23
Mamba, as noted in the article, PEDs can be around for years before they're put on the WADA's banned substance list. Once your drug of choice is listed, what's to prevent you from moving on to another? It's hardly as if FG-4592 (roxadustat) was a secret before it was banned. There had been articles about it in the medical literature for years. It's almost certain that athletes who are ready to dope with one substance and aren't caught doing it will move onto another if they decide the previous one has become too risky.
And Halep's actually been banned on two counts: one for the roxadustat, and the other because retrospective analysis of 51 tests on her biological passport were consistent with systematic doping. That itself raises an important question: if her body chemistry wasn't consistent with that of a 'clean' athlete, why wasn't that used against her earlier?
I'll add that tennis is one of the least credible sports when it comes to its pursuit of doping. Dudes built like Popeye, smashing a ball at each other and chasing them down sometimes for over 5 hours, but there's just been a handful of positives in 25 years, and fewer still that actually led to bans. Really? And a significant number of those have not even been for performance enhancers but, but for recreational drugs.
There's also been your amount of known cover-ups in other sports as well, both on the behalf of governments and of sporting governing bodies, along with a vast number of sportspeople have only spoken years after the fact about doping being commonplace during their competitive days.
posted on 13/9/23
In order to detect substances, you need to know what substance you’re looking for. e.g. if looking for cocaine, the machine that is examining the sample must know what cocaine is in order to identify it.
posted on 13/9/23
comment by Be A Grizzly (U2206)
posted 4 minutes ago
In order to detect substances, you need to know what substance you’re looking for. e.g. if looking for cocaine, the machine that is examining the sample must know what cocaine is in order to identify it.
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and there are plenty of drugs that bodies cant afford to test for.
For eg (not sure if its been updated) but in UFC and boxing they dont test for EPO cos they cant afford it !
EPO is a massive benefit in these two sports.
posted on 13/9/23
Yeah they aren’t testing for traces of a drug, they’re testing for unsaturated hormones, minerals, oxygen levels etc
posted on 13/9/23
Unnatural levels*
posted on 13/9/23
comment by whodunnit (U22710)
posted 2 hours, 2 minutes ago
comment by Be A Grizzly (U2206)
posted 4 minutes ago
In order to detect substances, you need to know what substance you’re looking for. e.g. if looking for cocaine, the machine that is examining the sample must know what cocaine is in order to identify it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
and there are plenty of drugs that bodies cant afford to test for.
For eg (not sure if its been updated) but in UFC and boxing they dont test for EPO cos they cant afford it !
EPO is a massive benefit in these two sports.
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Since 2015, the United States Anti-Doping Agency® (USADA) has been recognized by the UFC as its official, independent anti-doping agency.
USADA tests for EPO.
posted on 13/9/23
comment by Devonshirespur (U6316)
posted 8 hours, 4 minutes ago
She should have been banned years ago when she had her breast reduction. I was a huge fan until then
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She had seriously humongous baps though. I can see that that didnt help her tennis.
posted on 17/9/23
shame, I like Halep
More of a shame was the breast reduction surgery she had a few years back, as her baps were getting in the way
she had a smashing little bod with great T&A
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/SPORT-PREVIEW-Simona-Halep.jpg?strip=all&quality=100&w=1500&h=1000&crop=1