Dick Pound Is At It Again
Posted by Jimmie R. Markham | July 20, 2008
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Dick pound, the loose cannon from Canada who has had a personal vendetta against American track & field for years, is at it again. Yes, unfortunately, it turns out that he was right all along about Marion Jones, but now he is accusing US track & field of being "a hotbed of doping."
Funny, look at the IAAF’s list of doping offenses for 2007 reveals only 3 American athletes, one of them being Jones for "Admission of prohibited use of a substance." She actually stopped taking steroids in 2002, but it took 5 long years for her to confess. The other two on the list are Kenta Bell, a triple jumper who tested positive in 2007 for methylpredinisone; and Lindsey Scherf, a long-distance runner who refused to submit to a doping test in 2007 because she knew her asthma medication would cause her to fail the test. She had claimed a therapeutic exemption, and probably would have gotten one, but made a serious error in judgement by refusing to submit to the test. Still, it’s pretty obvoius she was not "doping" in terms of the classical definition of the term, which is performance enhancement.
So far on the IAAF’s list of doping offenses for 2008, only Antonio Pettigrew of the USA is listed. He’s another one of those BALCO people who ruined track & field. His doping offense dates back to the same time period as Jones’ offenses.
So there you have it. The "hotbed of doping" in the US consists of one actual doper (Bell), one asthma sufferer (Scherf), and two BALCO villians who are no longer even in the sport.
Bell made the 2008 US Olympic team along with two other former doping violators: Torri Edwards and Damu Cherry. All three athletes, along with every other US Olympic team member, passed their doping tests in Eugene.
Unless Dick Pound can come up with some evidence to back up his mean-spirited accusations, I’d say his mouth seems to be a hotbed of slander. There’s no room for people like him in the sport.
Topics: Blog, Doping/Performance Enhancement |