The medal ceremony for the team ice skating event at the Olympics has been in suspended animation for a week as authorities try to figure out what to do about Kamila Valieva, the Russian teen sensation who tested positive for a banned drug last December.
There are a bunch of minor mysteries here, but the biggest one is this:
- Experts seem to agree that the drug in question, trimetazidine, would do very little to help an ice skater.
- On the other hand, trimetazidine is an angina medication. Experts also agree that there's virtually no legitimate reason it would be prescribed to a healthy 15-year-old.
The world is ever more like a matryoshka doll these days. I suppose that's appropriate in this case.
Three more questions:
Why would anyone not afflicted with angina take that drug?
Does the presence of that drug mask the presence of another drug?
Why did the IOC ban that drug?
The drug is banned because it enhances endurance. Figure skating is not an endurance sport, so taking the drug seems to make no sense. But training for figure skating 8 hours each day is indeed an activity that requires superhuman endurance and any small edge is important to an elite athlete .
Could be that it’s not so much whether that drug really does help a 15-year-log girl but whether the coaches *believe* that drug helps a 15-year-old girl.
….. in any case, I’d go with mmcgowan1. It’s probably more of a training drug, if it helps at all. Her coach is known for grinding young female skaters into the ground in just a few short years.
Yes. I take offense at the idea that this 15-yo "took" this drug. She was given it by her coach/es. She didn't have the sophistication or the power to "take" it or not.
Angina is caused by cardiac arteries having restricted flow (spasms, stenosis, etc etc) among other things. This improves metabolism in cardiac cells.
Maybe continued use will foster or even grow collateral circulation to improve overall performance? Making her heart more efficient?
Seems like a bad trade-off to me. But then again I'm not Russian.
I blame the Covid Vaccine....
(now--will Fox pick this up???)
Weird…that’s the drug doping cyclists take to get over mountain stages in pro racing
With the athletes already competing as representing the Russian Olympic Committee rather than Russia thanks to previous doping incidents…
Musicians take beta-blockers to help with performance anxiety, not to help with their heart conditions. When chess was suggested as an olympic sport, many of the top players balked because the drug testing regime would catch the ritalin.
I’m pretty sure she was taking it to distract our attention from Ukraine…
So you're convinced the US media+govt's talking up Ukraine is completely legit?
Doesn't in the slightest remind you of, I don't know, the run-up to Iraq War II?...
No.
If anyone thinks this topic is interesting, get on your streaming service and watch “Icarus.”
It’s about a typically obsessive middle aged road cyclist who decides to do a documentary about whether, if he finds someone to prescribe it, the performance enhancing drugs used by the pros will help him. I mean, at this point you might be asking “help him what?”. Beat his pals to the coffee shop?
He accidentally uncovers the Russian Olympic doping program. And that ends up being the documentary.
So the documentary pivots from an actually interesting subject (what are the real world consequences of these doping substances and how well do they work) to an utterly boring and overplayed subject (here's yet another theory of shadowy people controlling the world from behind the scenes, in case QAnon isn't your jam)?
No thank you!! I fail to see why I would want to support such an obvious fail at making the media better.
Although this isn't film review site, that's not the point. Most of the first level results on this do a good job of not having spoilers, but I'll go closer to the line. No one is reading this anyway.
I thought the first part of the film was going to be interesting, to me, as a senior cyclist.
What the filmmaker/cyclist is after is seeing if he can find truly top level doping advice. Understandable, that's not easy to come by. The U.S. doctors he contacts simply won't take him on, even though they (the doctors) know exactly what the current doping regimes are. There is a bit of "we don't want the dopers to know what we know" in the first part.
But the film really takes off when one US doctor, incredibly, refers the filmmaker to a Russian doc who is on the Russian anti-doping agency.
The Russian guy will participate. But later, as the friendship between the filmmaker and the Russian guy grows, it turns out the Russian doctor is really part of a "doping concealment program" -- THE Russian doping concealment program.
"virtually no legitimate reason it would be prescribed to a healthy 15-year-old."
Unless . . . it's masking a performancing enhancing drug from olympic drug tests.
Given the their history in doping, and the questionability of this drug, the Russians should have notified the Olympic committee long she competed, and probably before testing even began .
I can't watch "women's" figure skating anymore. It's really just ritualized child abuse at this point.
The way skating is currently scored in the Olympics, there's a huge bonus for difficult jumps that happen in the second half of a routine. Also, skaters who are thin and light have an easier time making those jumps in the first place, but of course they tire more easily. Put them together and maximizing endurance of a young, thin girl is clearly the path the Russians have taken. And probably they are not the only ones.