Do skaters take performance enhancing drugs? | Page 2 | Golden Skate

Do skaters take performance enhancing drugs?

Actually Thierry Cerez who represented France at euros and worlds i think was tested positive for a performance enhancing drug and banned for a couple of years in the 90's. Even rhythmic gymnasts Kabaeva and Chachina have been on drugs and i'm sure skating isn't miraculously exempt.
Funny i've just found this thread because i was laughing to myself this morning when i got my french skating mag: baboo is advertising some miraculous "natural" produce that helps with eveything a skater might need from cartilage strengthening to weight loss to no more blisters...
 
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millyskate said:
Actually Thierry Cerez who represented France at euros and worlds i think was tested positive for a performance enhancing drug and banned for a couple of years in the 90's.
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Ah, so that explains what happened to him. I was actually kind of wondering about that last week when I was going through some of my old "archives" and seeing the name pop up here and there....
 
Joesitz said:
I really don't get the push to win. Is it the contestant? or is it the demand of the countries' leaders? I remember the East German Team was doing everything to win BIG in the Olympics using Drugs and also Transgenders. I can't believe it is the athlete's themselves who want to stoop so low. Joe
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That's precisely why I was so DELIGHTED that the US 4x200 meter freestyle relay team smashed the world record that had been set in 1987 by the East German swimming team. Those women were on steroids - a fact that came to light after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. No wonder they won so many races.
They were built like amazons. IMHO, the athletes themselves were not to blame. Their government was the culprit - they wanted gold medals at any cost, and if that meant risking the health of their top athletes, so be it.
For shame!! :mad:
 
PrincessLeppard said:
Has a skater ever tested positive, other than Elena and her cold medicine?

Laura
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At the same World Championships Pairs skater Evegeniy Sviridov was also tested positive for the same substance.
 
Joesitz said:
I really don't get the push to win. Is it the contestant? or is it the demand of the countries' leaders? I remember the East German Team was doing everything to win BIG in the Olympics using Drugs and also Transgenders. I can't believe it is the athlete's themselves who want to stoop so low.Joe
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That was one of my pet peeves about the East German women's Olympic swim team. Those women were built like amazons - more like men than like women. They dominated several Olympic competitions and left the rest of the swimmers in their wake. Just looking at those GDR women swimmers, a person would have to think, "Do they or don't they take steroids?" As it happened, after the collapse of the GDR, the facts were brought to light - indeed, the East German women swimmers DID take performance enhancing drugs. I do not blame the athletes for this, however, as they thought they were taking vitamin pills, etc. Still.....one has to wonder why they weren't stripped of their Olympic medals.
 
Just a questions about Kyoko Ina and her refusal to take the drug test.........
I read here that it was due to the fact that she didn't want to test positive for marijauna. Is recreational drug use not allowed (Exctasy, Pot, etc). Sorry for a question that might be completely ridiculous, but I don't know. It seems that, at least, pot would actually hamper a skater because of how it is usually ingested (smoking it). Anyone, let me know....Thanks
ABryan
 
Oceanguy said:
Just a questions about Kyoko Ina and her refusal to take the drug test.........
I read here that it was due to the fact that she didn't want to test positive for marijauna. Is recreational drug use not allowed (Exctasy, Pot, etc). Sorry for a question that might be completely ridiculous, but I don't know. It seems that, at least, pot would actually hamper a skater because of how it is usually ingested (smoking it). Anyone, let me know....Thanks
ABryan
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I think I read about someone tested positive of marihuana... a guy, but I can't remember which sports. Maybe this doesn't result in a two-year-ban, but at least they search for it and he got some punishment.
 
In 1998, a snowboarding Olympic gold was taken away from a Canadian because he tested positive for marijuana. The irony was that the test was conducted 2 days after the competition. According to the athlete, he smoked pot after his victory; he tried convincing anyone who would listen that he would have had to be insane to get stoned before the competition.

Anyway, I know the rules are quite strict. In one interview, TT mentioned how she was always careful to keep hers and Yagudin's water bottles seperate, in part out of fear that there could be some residue from the many medicines she takes in her water.

BTW, as to rhythmic gymnasts Kabaeva and Chachina, I believe it was the same kind of nonsense that took the medal away from Andrea Raducan 4 years ago.
 
I think in East Germany the pressure to win came from a warped sence of patriotism. Personally, I prife myself on my ability to do things for myself. That is, not because some drug is doing it for me.

The puberty hormone thing sounds like an urban myth type thing. You know, someone looked at the little girls and said "I bet they take pills so make themselves that way" and then it gets spread around like its real.
 
I don't know about figure skaters, but for girl gymnasts I have heard that it is the intense training itself that delays puberty (by generating a lot of testosterone), and gives you a certain body type and a high squeeky voice, etc.

I'm not sure what the physical effects might be of the kind of training that skaters undergo. Michelle Kwan, in interviews, has said that the only thing she doesn't like about her figure is her "skater's bubble butt." Also that she was leery at first of adding weights to her Pilates because she didn't want to "bulk up."

Mathman
 
SkateFan4Life said:
...the East German women swimmers DID take performance enhancing drugs. I do not blame the athletes for this, however, as they thought they were taking vitamin pills, etc. Still.....one has to wonder why they weren't stripped of their Olympic medals.
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I'd read that it's because up until this year, they'd made a concious decision not to go back in time and remove medals from people due to drug tests done years after the medals were awarded. They would only strip medals from people if they didn't pass a drug test soon after the event. Of course, this seems to have changed with this whole BALCO thing, where they are re-testing old urine samples with new technologies that weren't available back when the events had actually happened. So who knows what will happen now.


As for the female gymnasts (or skaters) taking drugs to delay puberty. As others said, that is not necessary. The training alone, done at an intense level, will prevent menstruation and can prevent puberty. You'll often see female gymnasts, once they stop training at an elite level, suddenly seem to develop boobs and hips, their faces will look different, and even their voices will drop a bit lower. People talk about gymnasts - "oh, she must have gotten a boob job", when sometimes all that's happened is that she's finally, belatedly, hit puberty.
 
Ross Rebagliati was the Canadian snowboarder who tested positive for marijuana after winning the Gold in 1998. His team argued successfully that the minute amount that was found in his system was due to second hand smoke from all the pot smokers at Whistler. :p It was mentioned at the time that marijuana could possibly calm someone down before such an event, which was why I mentioned the beta blockers in a previous post.

Athletes often get screwed by mistakes made by so-called experts. Silken Laumenn was suffering from a dry cough before the 1995 Pan American games and was advised by her teammates to take Gravol on the train ride so she could sleep, which, although it's not banned, was bad advice. She talked to her doctor and he advised her to take Benadryl, presumably because it would help her sleep and was a wider acting antihistamine than Gravol (dramamine). Another bad piece of advice because a dry cough usually means you have thick mucus in the lungs and an antihistamine would dry it even more. The correct medicine would be an expectorant to loosen the phlegm. So, Silken went to the store to buy Benadry, and at that time, in Canada anyway, you had to ask for it over the counter. There was only one store I knew of that carried a variant of Benadryl with a decongestant - 60 mgs. of pseudoephredine ( a banned substance at the time) and they kept that on the shelf, while the plain Benadryl was behind the counter. So, she goes into a store, sees Benadryl on the shelf and buys it. She's a rower, not a pharmcist or a doctor, and shouldn't be expected to know what all the ingredients are in cold medicines. She was stripped of her medal and possibly lost money from sponsorships.
It was the same with Kyoko Ina - the USADA drug tester showed up at her house late at night when she was about to go to bed. She told them she couldn't produce a sample at that time, but would first thing in the morning. The tester, whose credentials had expired , and showed up with her boyfriend, had her sign an "Athlete Refusal Form" and they arranged for the test to be done the next morning, however the tester did not show up. You can read Ina's statement here:
http://www.figureskatersonline.com/ina-zimmerman/news_articles_003.html
 
IIRC, according to CBS, another argument the Canadian Olympic Committee used to reinstate Rebagliati's gold medal in Nagano was because, at the time, marijuana was not a listed banned substance in the snowboarding's governing body, or it wasn't as high-crime as a performance-enhancing drug.
 
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