By Harold Tackie: A lot has been said in regard to the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight not taking place. There are many who blame Floyd Mayweather for the fight not taking place, saying he is running scared and that he does not really want the fight. Others blame World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao and his team for refusing to take the blood tests. I personally fall into the latter category and I will explain why I take this stance as I go through this article.
Many people get confused when they hear Olympic style drug testing and figure it something that is used only in amateur sports. What many fail to recognize is that there are very few amateur athletes who still take part in the Olympics any more. Whether the sport be athletics, football, tennis, swimming, basketball, gymnastics or cycling, it is pretty much professional, paid athletes who participate. Probably the only exception to this is boxing, where the athletes are paid to cover the cost of training and nothing else. They don’t really get sponsorship deals in order to make ends meet. The bottom line is that participating in the Olympics is viewed to be the pinnacle of any athletes career and as such the testing for PED’s is going to be the most thorough in order to ensure the highest levels of fairness and sportsmanship- that is what the Olympic movement is all about.
The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) is the bidy responsible for carrying out these tests and they are said to used the most up to date methods in order to screen for the latest designer PED’s. We are not talking about the anabolic steriods that Ben Johnson got caught with in 1988. We’re talking about Human Growth Hormones HGH that can disappear that can not be detected in urine tests. We are talking about Blood Doping where athletes attempt to increase their red blood cell count in order to be able to carry more oxygen which helps to improve performance.
The only way you can catch athletes who use these methods to, essentially, cheat is to carry out blood tests as they tend to only be detectable by carrying out blood tests. However, it is not enough to just carry out blood tests as these “drugs” can vanish from an athletes system in a matter of hours, especially the highly sophisticated ones.
The only way to insure a high probability of catching people is to carry out random blood testing so that if someone is blood doping or using HGH, they can be caught. Many sports use random body testing from football (soccer), to tennis, cycling, skiing, rugby, athletics, and most have a fairly good success rate.
Boxing, if it is to survive it needs to follow these other sports start using random blood tests as standard. Call me a skeptic, but as much as I would love to believe that all boxers are clean, the reality is probably far from that. Unfortunately, because blood tests are pre-organized and not random, those you may be cheating will not get caught as they can simply stop taking their drug of choice
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