Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ELA
In my opinion you are collapsing the shield and the sword. A drug positive does not make a person a cheater in my mind. It is not absolute. I was not inferring the industry would disappear.
As far your last sentence, I don't understand what you are saying.
Eric
|
I never said that a drug positive makes a person a "cheater." Just like the fact that, given the current limits of testing, the fact that a person has never had a positive does not mean that he or she isn't cheating. (See Marion Jones in another sport.)
However, when one has multiple, repeated offenses for the same thing (you use clenbuterol as an example), I think there is a real problem. Sometimes these clenbuterol positives are innocent, but I've had a trainer of mine tell me that most of them are not so innocent, especially those that occurred when testing for clenbuterol was first started. The "guilty parties," in an effort to push the envelope, were trying to determine withdrawal times and doses they could get away with. Given the lack of serious penalties, they were willing to "take a positive" to learn how they could take an advantage down the road.
As for the last sentence of my thread, there are about 13,000 trainers (90% of the total) with clean records. If we were to run out of the game every trainer that had a positive (I'm not advocating this), there would be more than enough horsemen to take care of the horses currently trained by the other 10%.