I’ve just got word from the British Team Captain, Calvo Burns, who is already in Mexico that he has received confirmation that there will be ‘strict dope testing’ at the World’s.Now, the word ‘dope’ can mean many things to many people. Does it mean?
1/ The dope we buy from shady characters on street corners to smoke.
2/ Performance enhancing drugs (whatever those may be in a sport where you sit on your arse for hours on end).
3/ The banned list of substances as defined by the International Olympic Committee.
4/ Anybody’s guess, as there seems to be no widely accepted definition.
Sensing a bout of political correctness (something I really do hate) coming from the FAI, and being slightly concerned by the fact that I take two prescription drugs daily which may or may not be banned, I set out to do a bit of homework…
An email to the UK comps panel mailing list generated a few replies. The ever resourceful Tom Payne discovered a list of ‘banned substances’ at the World Anti-Doping Agency – http://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibitedlist.ch2 but says he has ‘no idea if the FAI will use it but ‘there’s a good chance’. Well that’s clear then…
Kitt Rudd mentioned his time kayaking and said that pretty much all medication needed monitoring, whilst Adrian Thomas recalled being offered a beer by a marshal in goal at the Sierra Nevada Worlds which he happily consumed after the long task he’d just flown, only to be then asked to give a urine sample for testing! As he passed it (the test not the urine) he assumes that the testing isn’t too serious.
Rather like the urine samples after 5 hours in the air, this is getting more and more murky…
Looking at the famous banned list and its associated PR hype (download the DVD ‘Level The Playing Field’, the site urges) I tried to find the two drugs I take daily. Currently I use Celebrex for my arthritic knee, a hangover from my days competing in the Snowboarding World Cup, and Omeprazole for my dodgy guts, a real hangover of owning a bar and single-handedly trying to drink the stock through the years. I could find neither but, to be honest, without medical training and a thorough knowledge of pharmaceuticals it would be very hard to find anything. Hands up all those who understand the following statements…
“Endogenous AAS when administered exogenously: androstenediol (androst-5-ene-3β,17β-diol)”
“Peroxisome Proliferator Activated Receptor δ (PPARδ) agonists (e.g. GW 1516)”
Or “All stimulants (including both their D- & L- optical isomers where relevant) are prohibited, except imidazole derivatives ”
Hmmm…
Well, I’ll just have to hope that neither Celebrex nor Omeprazole are banned then. Either that or I’m going to have a very sore knee and an acid factory in my stomach for two weeks.
Two that I did see which there’s no doubt about were “Alcohol (ethanol)” and “Cannabinoids (e.g. hashish, marijuana)”.
Oh dear! That’s half the field in trouble then.
Alcohol is banned only “in competition” and limited to 0.1 g/litre of blood – about one eighth the UK drink drive limit as far as I can see. But with no real guidance as to volumes, we are rather worryingly reduced to guessing or asking friends. This shouldn’t be a problem unless pilots have indulged in a particularly heavy night and are feeling the worse for wear at take off the next morning. But how do we define “in competition”? Does it mean whilst flying? Or for the whole two weeks? If it’s the latter, the event parties are not going to be much fun with everyone drinking orange juice! If it means whilst flying, how is this defined? In the air? In which case how does the tester get the sample? Just after landing? If so, how long? You can be sure the Swiss and Germans will be timing it to the second. When you get back to HQ? What happens if somebody whips off for a quick taco? Are they then guilty of ‘avoiding a test’?
Anybody think this looks like a mess? I assume the phrase “in competition” was designed for most sports where competitions last a day at most, not paragliding where they last for two weeks. At least it will give the team captains something to argue about for hours on end, whilst we’re all having a cold b**r. Shushhh!!! Perhaps the ‘C-word’ in this competition will be re-defined as ‘Corona’. Rather a shame as I believe they’re sponsoring it and handing them out for free in goal.
Then we come to the ‘Cannabinoids’ or weed to you and me. This is also banned only ‘in competition’ but it stays in your system for 3 to 6 weeks and in hair for as long as you grow it. All the bald pilots will be happy, then! Or perhaps they’ll ask for a sample of our pubes?! Anyway, before I start thinking about Bikini Lines and how the girls could avoid such a test, let’s assume that hair won’t be sampled and it will just be blood or urine. How long does it stay in the system and give a positive? Hours? Days? Weeks? I bet there’re a few pilots thinking about this right now…
On a wider note why should it matter? I can see that it’s not clever to fly whilst pissed or stoned, but I would hope any pilot who’s amassed the many thousands of hours required to reach the level where they can get selected for a World Championship is going to know this anyway. We are all adults, after all, and don’t really need Nanny to be running around behind us making sure we don’t do anything naughty. As for the ‘performance enhancing’ argument, in spite of many hours of thought I can’t come up with a single drug that would help with flying. A laxative to make sure the pre-take off crap goes well? An anti-wee drug for those of us with small bladders? Easier to climb to the top of the stack and have a tiddle there out of your pee-tube, surely? Steroids? I think not – if you want to put weight on to fly a bigger glider then eating pies, curries and drinking beer is cheaper and more effective. It works for me!
I can be smug because I don’t like weed and am not drinking right now, but it would be a sporting travesty if I got beaten in the air by somebody who later got disqualified on the ground because they enjoy a smoke in their spare time. I know it’s not a popular view with governments but alcohol is not everybody’s tipple and why should we, as pilots, really care what the fastest guys in the world do in their spare time as long as they’re not cheating? In the absence of any definable ‘performance enhancing’ drug for pilots the logic truly evades me…
So what is the point of this little exercise? A vain hope by the FAI that one-day paragliding will make it to the Olympics so they should get their house in order? A job creation scheme for bureaucrats? Power-crazed leaders trying to impose their totalitarian view of the world on the rest of us? A way of excluding body-builders from comps? The Americans? (always easy to blame for everything). Or too many committees with too much time on their hands?
Or is it just that nobody’s ever really stopped to ask…?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Mark H
