Doping

According to the internet meldonium is generally used to treat people who have had heart attacks or angina, so I’d say the odds of it being prescribed legitimately to an athletic teenage girl are pretty slim. Doubly so because it is a drug specifically developed to increase cardiovascular capacity. It seems pretty unlikely that she could have been taking it completely unaware of its beneficial properties.

See, you've done that thing you do where you reply in bulk to everyone's posts and don't always take the time to read the content.
My point is that there are many, many ways athletes look to find the edge over their rivals, some which are clearly legal even if they're a bit weird (many pints of beetroot juice every day), some which are rather complex and unnatural (hypoxic training) and others which start going way into the murky grey area, which may be legal but one would probably argue are against the morals of sport as we intend it to be. Until Jan this year (or jan last, if you want to look at when it was added to the monitoring list), melondonium was one of these things.

Guess they should be legal then eh?

Beetroot juice vs. riding up high mountains vs. taking a 'drug to treat serious heart problems and aid the circulation of oxygen'

You're really suggesting this is a grey area?

What about a hypoxic tent?

What about it?

All it is doing is simulating being up a high mountain.

Like steriods are simulating spending hours in the gym? ;)

All it's doing is showing you how it is to sleep badly inside a noisy plastic bag.

melondonium

Is melondonium not just a food? That makes it ok, doesn't it?

I`m just suggesting that there are moral grey areas

That's all well and good but the rules ignore 'morals'.

The rules don't give a shit if you test positive because of contaminated supplement, they don't give a shit if you got wasted and thought rubbing some meth into your eyeballs at a party was a good idea, they don't care if someone spiked your drink, they don't care if your doctor says to "take this pill for your health" or anything else.

If you have a banned substance in your body, you will be punished and it's totally the athlete's responsibility to ensure they don't have a banned substance in their body.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/questions-answers/strict-liability-in-anti-doping#item-716

All I`m trying to say is that there are some grey areas. Some will consider one thing cheating and others will consider the same thing just looking after yourself

I`m just suggesting that there are moral grey areas

That's why we have an anti-doping regime based on science, not morality. Obviously they have some kind of moral framework ("fairness", athlete safety) guiding their choices of which things to prohibit, but the rules are then written in a way which doesn't require moral judgements. For example, strict liability means that WADA doesn't have to look into the soul of an athlete to find a mens rea in order to obtain a conviction.

I know. I`m just trying to continue the discussion that bashthebox started. By stating that there are moral grey areas where things that are currently not on the banned list are still questionable to do.

However there are also scientific grey areas! When is an advantage and illegal advantage.

Trying to make this black and white is simplifying the issues.

My suggestion about the grey area - I mean, clearly melondonium is morally wrong, it's been wrong since any athlete started taking it - it's a cardiac drug, not a supplement like iron or bicarb or even creatine. But the thing is, it's only been prohibited since the start of the year. By the rules, the athletes weren't cheating until they popped the champagne corks at the start of the year, but they will have been getting the benefits over athletes who don't take angina drugs for ages.
So they were cheating, but not cheating. Now you take a couple of steps down from Melondonium, and look at whatever things athletes are taking there - no idea what they might be, but you know it'll be something. Wrong, not wrong? Not illegal, yet. But certainly, a grey area.

Innit. I'm being really bad at explaining my argument - think you've put it a lot more concisely, thank you!

Trying to make this black and white is simplifying the issues

And that's exactly what WADA do. People can, and do, argue over whether a particular shade of grey is really black or white, and sometimes WADA will change the list and make it so.

there are also scientific grey areas!

Huge swathes of them, especially with substances which have small effects which vary significantly between subjects.

When is an advantage and illegal advantage

When WADA says it is

When is an advantage an illegal advantage

When it is on WADA's list. Which meldonium wasn't until 1/1/16 when it was added because huge numbers of athletes were abusing because there is no grey area because it wasn't on the WADA list.

it's a [cardiac] drug, not a supplement

This is the same false dichotomy which @hippy proposed earlier. If we limit the discussion to things which are administered orally, it becomes very hard to draw a reliable boundary line on the spectrum of effects and call that the division between food and drugs. We can't even agree on where the boundary lies between sick and well, and when we do we find that in some diseases we can move people across that boundary by changing which "food" they eat.

I get that. But when is it an unfair advantage?

Was sharapova taking the substance for 10 years when it was only just out of clinical trials and no publicly available wrong? I think it is

The question must be asked: who did the Russians piss off? They are certainly not alone in all of this, but they are getting pinged let, right and centre. Sharapova gets popped but Nadal's blood bags get destroyed (anecdotally of course).

Of course as someone pointed out on the previous page, failing a drugs test isn't about testing positive, it's about being stupid (Tiernan-Locke, Ricco etal), so perhaps the Ruskies are just being too damn blatent about it. But a big name like Sharapova, with all that brand power and serious wedge behind her, making a stupid mistake like this? Very surprising.

Life-pro tip: always read your emails.

Also surprised someone who is quite marketable has been popped.

The question must be asked: who did the Russians piss off?

Or who pissed off the Russians? The first question to ask whenever something bad happens to a Russian, whether inside or outside the country, is "Why did Putin want this to happen?". The best that you can hope for when you fall out of favour with the Kremlin is that when they throw you under the bus, they do it metaphorically rather than literally.

I don't think there is a 'moral' argument in top level sports. If it's allowed, you can do it, if it's not you can't. Mostly because of the complications in definitions that mdcc_tester is harping on about.

Exactly. She is a big money-spinner and poster girl for the sport. She is the sort of sports person that is protected, in the same way the UCI swept Lance's positives under the metaphorical rug. Pretty seismic that she has been pinged, so you wonder why she went under the bus.