DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Paralympics and PEDs

Not really a PED, but still interesting nonetheless.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-29/pa.../?site=brisbane

Quote:

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Paralympic boosting cheats under the spotlight


By Martin Cuddihy

Updated August 29, 2012 18:49:16

The Paralympics Opening Ceremony will be held tomorrow and officials are now testing not just for banned substances, but also for a practice known as "boosting".

When a person suffers a spinal injury, their blood pressure drops and it stays low. This can be a real disadvantage for some athletes, so they try to shock the body into reacting and induce a common condition called autonomic dysreflexia.

To bring on the condition, competitors deliberately hurt themselves by breaking a toe, using tight leg straps or in extreme cases, by twisting the ..

The practice was banned in 2004. Athletes do not feel the pain because of their injury, but it is not without risk.

Autonomic dysreflexia can cause stroke, internal haemorrhaging and even death.

Former Paralympian Karni Liddell says in simple terms, boosting is cheating.

"Boosting is one of those things that has been around for as long as I've been around for, which is a long time," she said.

"It's just one of those things, it's like anything with cheating and sport. It's a very unique Paralympic way to cheat in sport and quite hard to detect as you can probably imagine."

Professor Andrei Krassioukov, who teaches medicine at the University of British Columbia in Canada, believes there should be another classification so athletes do not have to expose themselves to such risky tactics.

"As a physician I totally understand why these Olympians are doing this and as a scientist I'm obviously horrified," he said.

"I hope if we can find addition to Paralympic classification, and give them points for their poor blood pressure control, then they will not require to do this boosting."

The World Anti-Doping Agency interviewed 99 athletes with spinal injuries around the time of the Beijing Paralympics.

It found that more than half had heard about boosting, but nearly a fifth had used it, even though they knew the dangers.

Liddell says boosting is not openly discussed within the Paralympic community.

"I never came across it but you can probably imagine though in swimming it wouldn't help at all. I did hear about boosting more in the sports like wheelchair rugby or wheelchair basketball," she said.

"I can tell you now I've never witnessed it with Australian athletes.

"I think our athletes are too body conscious and too health conscious to do that to themselves. You run a fairly big risk of going too far as you can probably imagine."

The International Paralympics Committee has promised to carefully monitor those events where boosting can give athletes an advantage.

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That's insane.

so is the US relay team going to be disqualified from the Olympics because the guy broke his leg

i agree it's crazy, but I don't see how you legislate things. when athletes are competing and pushing themselves to the limit, these things can happen. how do you determine whether it was on purpose or not?