[unprinted]

What swimming (and several other sports) need is what cycling now has: biometric passports.

This involves monthly blood tests for everyone and if there's a big change in any of a variety of figures, big questions get asked.

[ebam_uk]

I guess the argument / fuss is to legitimise all drugs in sports because i would be more surprised if no one in general cheated. Especially if you can get away with using currently undetected drugs the Temptation to cheat will always be there.

[Agenda Suicide]

What's the point in everybody on here talking rubbish about it?

There is absolutely no way anybody on here is likely to have even close enough to knowledge to give a good concrete answer that would explain. You won't know until she does the drug test, kind of pointless speculating.

Edit: Oh and if she was British would speculation the same? The girl won, she's been tested straight away after. She'll be scrutinised. Why because somebody does well does it sudddenly have to be drugs?

[Fires]

Basically, if there was perfect compulsory drug testing and no hope of cheating the system, China would slip about five places down the medals table. Some other countries would also be slipping...

[RyanT]

(Original post by Krish4791)
I think it was legal and all that - maybe it was just one of those freak performances, sort of like the Nadal vs Rosol tennis match at Wimbledon this year?

High variance in a skill based sport can be accepted as a freak performance.

High variance in a physical/endurance sport is indicative of one thing only, doping. Being psyched doesn't increase your muscular strength, it doesn't increase your oxygen transportation etc etc.

This swimmer doped and people who find that hard to believe should look at what cycling was like in the 1990s. They were taking EPO that thickens up their blood so much some were dying of heart attacks in their sleep. If you think this swimmer isn't on the current generation of dope then you're incredibly naive.

There is no "why would she cheat if she'd get caught" element either. It's highly likely that the only people who know about this drug are in a lab somewhere in China.

[RyanT]

(Original post by Fires)
Basically, if there was perfect compulsory drug testing and no hope of cheating the system, China would slip about five places down the medals table. Some other countries would also be slipping...

America would be one of them.

[Casshern1456]

Reading this is quite sad, the girl won the GOLD and broken world record and everyone is like SHE'S ON DRUGGS!!! Everyone performs better in the Olympic finals because of the adrenaline and hype of the event. No one suspected that other 15 year old Lithuanian girl of winning Gold and breaking world records. Why don't we just congratulate them for their achievement and enjoy the moment.

[Aeschylus]

A 400IM requires some degree of pacing so it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was waiting for the last 100. However, while I'm pretty certain that most olympic athletes in general are on drugs, (ones that cannot be tested for, as HGH was used for about 10-15 years before the authorities cottoned on, so it seems likely there's a new wave of designer drugs) I'm also certain that if Ye Shiwen had been American the rumours of drugs would be far less prevalent than they are now.

[RyanT]

(Original post by notnek)
She swam the final 50m in 28.93 compared with 29.1 for Lochte in his 400 medley race.

But the female world record is 23.73 for 50m freestyle so when you compare it with that, it doesn't seem that special. And the male world record for the medley is around 25 seconds faster than what Ye Shiwen managed. Is it right to compare her final 50m with Lochte's? Because this is what the media is doing.

You may be able to tell that I know very little about swimming. Maybe someone who knows more can help me here?

Whisper it quietly: Lochte is probably doped too.

So are most of the winners at the Olympics.

The question for me appears to be how can Ye Shiwen beat a man who is probably doped and also has great genes for swimming? I cannot find an answer for that. Your comparison of 50m freestyle suggests that Yi Shiwen had not built up a normal level of fatigue from the previous 350meters. That smells like doping to me.

[Vanbrugh]

I am somewhat sceptical about the result, but I will not jump to any conclusions yet.

What must be understood is that drugs tests are not at all infallible. Testing in and out of competition is very thorough and if they have not detected illegal substances yet, I think that this athlete will be cleared. This does not necessarily prove that she is innocent, but great athletes exist and no one should cry "Guilty!" without proof. Her “samples” should be kept for re-testing in the future.

I have had professional experience involving the international drugs testing business / World Anti-Doping Agency and it is a known fact that makers of synthetic performance enhancing drugs are usually a step ahead of drugs testers. New drugs tests are developed reactivity in response to new drugs which can go undetected for up to a year or more after use at a sporting event. If viable samples survive years after the games, re-tests with new detection methods can show doping that would have been undetectable before. This happened to some athletes that won medals at the Sydney games, for instance.

Currently, the race is on to develop “masking drugs” which are able to hide the use of other performance enhancing drugs – this are incredibly hard to detect and the presence of a “masking drug” in your system is sufficient to ban you from the sport, even if the specific performance enhancing substance is not detected. This is a multi-billion dollar industry and uses the most advanced technology, but the resources available to fund R&D into undetectable performance enhancing drugs is also well funded. The cost of the newest (illegal) drugs is quite phenomenal though.
It is also no secret that some states do secretly try to develop drugs that can fool testers at sporting events. I won’t lie in thinking that there is a lot of this present at the Olympics. East Germany and the USSR were prime culprits back in the day, but before the 1990s testing was infinitely less thorough.

[Aaron_xyz]

(Original post by midlandsman)
lol, just found this article on a chinese site. Not the most PC thing I've ever read. http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/thread-774385-1-1.html

It's not an article, it's a forum thread..

[cyfer]

(Original post by FluxD)
You can run cycles of steroids and PHers and have them out of your system within a week. The half life of test cyp is 3 days.

The top athletes are tested immediately after a race or final.

[Agenda Suicide]

(Original post by Fires)
Basically, if there was perfect compulsory drug testing and no hope of cheating the system, China would slip about five places down the medals table. Some other countries would also be slipping...

Oh please, how could you possibly even come to that conclusion#?

[drummer]

Its sad to accuse someone of cheating just because they did an amazing feat. However results will still show lositive or not. Sun Yand and Ye Shiwen are part of the the same swimming team and if Sun Yang competed in 2008 it seems less likely that they have been using drugs.

[roh]

No, I believe she is innocent until proven guilty. The only thing I find odd is that she doesn't swim the 200 and 400 free when she's probably the best women's freestyler at the Olympics, but not being able to do more events seems to prove that she thinks she'd fatigue which suggests she's not doping.

I don't get where the claim she's come out of nowhere has come from. She won the 200IM last year with a blistering freestyle leg. At 16 it's hardly surprising she has continued to improve and extended that to the 400!

The Lochte stat seems a weird one to me. The 400 IM is a long race, people don't swim it at uniform effort in each section. Lochte was out to beat Phelps, that would mean he had the hammer down throughout the back and breast, as those are the strokes where he's better than Phelps and would be knackered by the time it came to the final 50 free, which wasn't a problem as he had the race won as intended. Ye clearly went for the free as where she was going to win it, and thus her effort was concentrated there. Over the whole event Lochte is nearly a length ahead of her, so she isn't swimming as fast a the world's top male!

Ye's technique is absolutely sublime, which could well be a factor.

Also, this smacks a little of Western hypocrisy. When Michael Phelps and Missy Franklin emerged as world beaters very young we hailed them as the next great dawn of swimming and commented on their unworldly talent. When a Chinese girl emerges at the same age it's because she must be doping. Seems like double standards to me.

Is it worth checking very thoroughly? Yes, same as it's worth checking Cam Van de Burgh, Dana Vollmer, Lochte and anyone else who breaks a record which stands from the era of 'technical doping'. But, that doesn't mean we should jump to the conclusion she's on something. Until anything is proven celebrate her swim as we have the other three and also the fact we have a new world swimming star.

[Aaron_xyz]

(Original post by roh)
x

lol look at the article the DM just published http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...st_read_module

If this isn't sour grapes I don't know what is

[roh]

(Original post by Aaron_xyz)
lol look at the article the DM just published http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...st_read_module

If this isn't sour grapes I don't know what is

He first says it's 'suspicious' and that other athletes 'trained equally long and hard' then goes on to write an entire article about how China's, admittedly morally questionable, training program means she's likely trained longer and harder!

Also he clearly knows next to nothing about swimming as revealed by the comment 'the niceities that can make a difference in competition...behaving impeccably in front of the judges'

[Fires]

(Original post by Aaron_xyz)
lol look at the article the DM just published http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...st_read_module

If this isn't sour grapes I don't know what is

I don't like to praise the Mail, but that's actually a pretty penetrating, interesting article, with a lot of extraordinarily awful revelations. Seems like China continues down the East German path of taking small children and putting them through a cruel, punishing regime to turn out super-sports kiddies on steroids - the Olympics becomes a contest between regular human beings and these robots.

[Nutty_Psychologist]

(Original post by UglyBarbie)
I have even seen people saying on different forums/youtube that she could even be a boy performing as a girl, that's why she could swim so fast or something

Lol that would be one sport you would seriously struggle to erm hide the fact you were a boy lol
Talk about budgy smugglers lol

[I Came]

You wonder why China is winning all the medals across the board - they put their athletes through hell, like it's a matter of life or death.