Doping: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

The Olympics, aka your biennial reminder that NBC exists, the real games are right around the corner, so get ready for lots of cheesy athlete profiles like these Tory Bowie is a sprinter working her way to the top, Her success goes far beyond the neglected field she started in high school, in her childhood pool there is still a bench where he was forced to sit and take time outs, but what others struggled to contain in daily life, Phelps put it into practice when something was at stake, Burrows is driven by elemental truth. of the sport that fills your dreams, yes, those videos are not only uplifting, it's basically inspiration porn, but that's what you watch a fireworks show when you want to masturbate, but hey, the Olympics feature thriller II, exciting displays of athletic prowess that can also take place underneath. the dark shadow cast by

doping

scandals and these Olympic Games are no exception according to a report that sounds like a Cold War spy thriller Russian secret agents and a mysterious Moscow laboratory we use for state-sanctioned

doping

of an athlete and trainer secretly filmed the distribution of drugs like candy Russia shockingly accused of using its security services its new KGB to manipulate supposedly tamper-proof bottles supposedly using this hole in the laboratory wall to change samples it is true a Russian laboratory used a secret hole in the wall in an attempt to win Olympic medals making this the first known example of a literal glory hole and just listen, just listen to how the athletes ingested some of the drugs in the first place, Chiang police executed cocktails of three different performance-enhancing drugs, following their instructions, washed down by athletes with alcohol. to shorten the screening period chievous for male athletes vermouth for ladies wait what's the move for ladies.

I have doping still going on but I hope the unnecessarily sexed illegal products would go away Virginia Slims crack pipe hashtag feminism hashtag crack pipes now the Russian track and field team is banned from competing in the next Olympics but there is nothing new In this story for as long as science has existed, people have used it to squeeze the human body. In the 1920s a Russian-born French surgeon fashioned thin slices of chimpanzee testicles into people's scrotums, which was obviously Ridiculous these days. We know that it takes a thick slice of chimpanzee testicles. That's when it starts to work and there's a long history of athletes circumventing the rules at the 1904 Olympics.

One of the marathon runners. He clocked 11 miles in a car, a move that requires balls so big they must have included a huge serving of chimpanzee nuts now as in the modern era, although no one knows exactly how many athletes chase, there are some shocking hints. A leaked survey found that about 29 percent of track and field athletes at the 2011 World Championships said they adopted it

last

year and presumably that doesn't even include athletes with devices who responded by shouting the survey "it makes me angry," which crumpled it up and threw it at the moon, but The prevalence of doping is a bit surprising considering how rigorous testing regimes can be in elite sport.

What happens to a runner just seconds after crossing the finish line. From now until she can provide a sample, two things will be constant. and Flanagan's anti-doping chaperone, the chaperone makes sure the athlete doesn't try to cheat on her drug test. It's a great time to buy skills because you're so excited and you want to enjoy the moment, but at the same time, yes, you have to do it. focus and prepare yourself with pain, no, but that has to be hard because you probably won't be ready to pee on command right after finishing a race, that's not what your body is prepared to do at that moment, it's like ask someone to have an orgasm. in the middle of a test drive and this and the cube, it won't be easy, that might take a while and if you think it's not fun for athletes, it's not very fun for testers, neither did real sports follow one of them by surprise. competition test, your task this early Saturday morning is to collect a sample from an elite rower named Alex, so Alex from CIL agreed to let us film the moment of truth.

Lowell is required to witness and have an unobstructed view that this is the face of a man who reconsiders every decision he has made in his life and at the same time desperately wishes that the athlete had not had asparagus for dinner, but despite the rigorous testing, athletes are clearly running away for various reasons to begin with, there are multiple tests and none of them. It can detect the full range of drugs and athletes can be taking everything from anabolic steroids to EPO, human growth hormone and the most powerful drug of all. To avoid false positives, testing thresholds are often deliberately high and athletes can dope and still be below those thresholds by doing things like microdosing or using masking agents to hide banned substances and those are just some of the ways in which it's possible for top athletes to cheat while still being able to say things like this people are smart, they say Lance Armstrong ever tested positive?

No, your Lance Armstrong has been put through a lot of testing. Wow, that's a confident lie, which isn't really surprising. Remember this is the man who looked America dead in the eye and said cycling is a great sport and King believed him and the techniques some athletes have used to beat the system have been incredibly imaginative. Take, for example, European cyclists who would insert clean urine condoms into their anus and then in To hide everything they would cover it with fake hair that would blend in with the real hair from the nether regions and you have to imagine that to convince the cyclist To do that, a coach would have to give the most inspiring speech in the history of sports.

You want to be a champion, so you get into that piss balloon cake, that hot glue gun slaps that smiling aina and you ride like a champion full year Curtis can't lose just when they've tested positive the excuses have been yet more imaginative before Sprinter Dennis Mitchell insisted his positive testosterone test was the result of having had sex at least four times the night before and drinking five bottles of beer and that if that's your life, you don't really need the Games Olympics, now that other athletes have done them. He blamed the positive tests on eating a cake made from doped carrier pigeons or eating a piece of Bors graded meat and organs for free and I'll say this, if Wheaties really is the breakfast of champions, their ingredients list will now include pigeon meat and pig sperm. or it's over but none of that beats my favorite excuse of all time cyclist Tyler Hamilton had to explain why someone else's blood was in his veins claimed he was a missing twin absorbed into his body in the womb the court won't he thought oh but that twin is not missing, it's me, I'm your brother Tyler and my name is not John Oliver, I'm Skyler Skyler Hamilton and together we are Skyler and Tyler Hamilton, a pair of missing twins and we are both equally good at riding bikes and In some ways, you can see why a fleet might want to dope.

A split-second lead can mean the difference between winning and losing, and there's plenty of money at stake for everyone. There is a massive financial ecosystem that depends on spectacular athletic achievements. in scandal-free games and that includes the networks that make over a billion in advertising sales, the IOC, which makes billions in broadcast rights, and then there are the sponsors who love to use Olympic athletes to ads like these to get your best workouts done, it should be a lifelong passion. Driven by a foot-long passion, that's why Debbie Phelps is always there for her son Mike with his favorite flavor filled with fully loaded, foot-long subs, because first, no professional swimmer wants a sandwich on the pool and, for the record, there is nothing more viscerally disturbing than a woman feeding her soaked, nearly naked adults in something called a fully raised foot line and when you combine the point is when you combine all the money that incentivizes athletes Unfortunately, some countries lack the resources to conduct robust testing, while others seem to lack the desire and a sense of how compromised the test can be. system.

Let's go back to what happened in Russia because that's how things worked. In this case, a Russian track and field athlete would compete for his or her national sports Federation and that Federation would be under the control of both the international body that governs athletics and the I double AF and the Russian Ministry of Sports, which of course is part of The Russian government would now separately be examined by the anti-doping agency of its country, in this case Rusada who would send it to a laboratory that is accredited by the world anti-doping agency or water that receives funding from both the IOC and countries like Russia. and you can see this system looks like a mess, but I suppose it could technically work if every step was genuinely committed to eradicating doping.

However, they have already seen that a laboratory had a glory hole and, in addition, a recent investigation. discovered that Russian officials routinely accepted bribes from athletes and gave them advance notice of when they would be tested, and also discovered that Arif's former boss had worked with the director of that glory lab to hide positive drug tests and, although You'd expect the IDF to have been uprooting all of this, the head of its anti-doping department was suspended for five years after an ethics investigation, by which time all of this is actually making FIFA look good. FIFA keeps FIFA and they are basically just a mafia with Marca a little better and finally there is water.

Now they're supposed to help prevent things like this, but their investigation into the scandal got off to a rocky start because we only really have all this information thanks to one whistleblower, a former Russian employee named Vitaly Stepanov. He approached Wilder with a wealth of information, but his response was not reassuring. He sent two hundred emails and fifty letters detailing what he had witnessed, but Vitaly says Water told him that he did not have the power to investigate inside Russia. That's true. The point is that water didn't have explicit authority, but that's a little strange in itself.

You don't want the global drug agency to basically have the authority of mall cops. Hey, thief, stop it or I'll be forced to go straight to the food court and complain about your behavior in a bag of pretzels from Wetzel cinemas and while water now has more authority and has appointed an independent commission to investigate the evolving scandal of Russia, his boss Craig Reedy sent a strangely welcoming email to a Russian Sports advisor The minister says on a personal level that I value the relationship I have with the minister and that there is no intention in WADA to do anything that will affect that relationship , which is a disturbingly friendly tone for a regulator if Tom Colicchio promised to judge the top chef fairly. but then I told a contestant I value my relationship with you and I won't do anything to affect it the other contestants would rightly think this is clearly useless here you have a hot pocket go yourself and at this point I'm supposed to tell you that the officials Russians and The former head of the RF has widely denied all these accusations and for his part Reedy says that he has done nothing to interfere with the Commission's investigations and that his email has been misinterpreted and you know this for a fact and since For a while now this is clearly not the system we need. it might actually be the system we want, just listen to the former water chief, the phenomenally named Dick Pound, who has a depressing theory about why there aren't more dogmas because there are machineries, the question is do people really want it to work.

I mean, can you? You can do hundreds of thousands of tests and then not catch anyone if you don't want to catch anyone is that what you think is happening is people don't want it to work, people don't want to work, well you should hit the dick first. I insist that everyone called him Rick or Rico if he really wants someone to listen fully, but by the time he wrote a report for the water assessing the state of drug testing, he found that among the sports community at large there is no appetite general to undertake the effort. and the expenses to offer a doping-free sport, which is quitefrightening.

We're trying good evidence like calorie counts on restaurant menus. Oh, everyone might say they want it until they find out that one onion has 32 million calories and their layoffs, King, are over and you might think well, let's just quit, why don't we let everyone not do it? But that's definitely not the answer for a start that could be very dangerous with athletes tempted to take increasingly larger amounts to gain that split-second advantage. and it could also force clean athletes to take drugs, at which point the integrity of the sport has pretty much been destroyed because if you want to know what it's like to compete against an artificially enhanced athlete, just listen to Alisha Montano, she lost in the 2012 Olympics . to Maria Savin by one of the Russian athletes implicated in the current doping scandal this was the first time that Montaigne was allowed to see the race lost to a gold medalist Maria 7 on Montano had led the race for about 600 meters before finishing. fifth, I mean Savin She passed you like you were with all due respect, literally standing, yeah, yeah, and you realize at that moment, I realized I'm running against robots, I'm running against robots, she's running against robots and it wasn't just being over. because the silver and bronze went to a room bar and Teddy Ruxpin, and when she competed against those same Russian athletes at the World Championships the following year, it was deja vu 7 that she lost in the

last

50 meters to finish second.

All Montaigne could do was lunge for the finish line and for the first time, she broke and I felt really failed and really betrayed. In fact, I felt like my career was a sham. You know, this is exactly what I'm doing here. What is the point? What am I doing here? What is the point? She is a world class athlete and she was left feeling like anyone else who paid for a ticket. a - you see me - what are we doing here? Well, what are we doing here? What sense does this have? What are we doing?

Look, look, we're focusing on Russia here because the details are spectacular, but they're far from the only offenders of late. For years Kenya, Jamaica and China have had doping scandals and American athletes have cheated with Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay both having been suspended for doping in the past but still expected to compete in Rio for the American team, so think of doping like Vladimir. Putin is far from just a Russian problem, it is something that negatively affects the entire world, so it seems we have two options at the moment, if we really want to clean up sports, we need to empower them more by making them truly independent and put pressure on each other. sports system to aggressively combat doping and if we really don't care enough to make changes, we should at least make our syrupy athlete promotions a little more honest since I was a kid.

I would love to direct, my parents sometimes tell me. I could run before I could walk, which doesn't make much sense, but I thought it was 5:00 am. One Olympic hopeful, Brandon Schmidt, had already been in the gym for two hours with his trainer's nickname, wash it pusher. I've been working with Brandon since he was eight years old. I discovered him running around the playground. That's how I used to find my runners just strolling around our playgrounds. I was looking for the fastest child. He can't do that anymore. Of course for Brandon every morning is the same routine first I do cardio then weights and then it's just all the pills I could fit in my mouth.

Harshit Brandon's path to Rio began years ago in a small room in Darby Ville Ohio, when I was a kid I had posters of all my heroes Lance Armstrong. Marion Jones Ben Johnson Mark McGwire and that guy who took a car to travel 11 miles in an Olympic marathon I wanted to be like them from those modest beginnings. Coach Jason Clark helped fill Brandon with the stuff winners are made of. Here you need your purples. We have tested pills containing everything, cat cock, dog cock, lizard cock, rhino cock, badger balls, muskrat anuses, squirrel fists, moose face, a 5 hour energy shot directly into his eyeball.

Oh, I once shoved a tampon full of jet fuel up his ass, oh, again. I had Regis Philbin scream in a jar and that made him inhale all this just to get that advantage, but even the most prepared athlete can sometimes get caught up and that's when Brandon relies on Coach Clark's strict excuse regime and says: "I slipped and fell." in a vat of liquid and feta means good Beck I was walking down this dark alley and a guy came up and stabbed me with the syringe full of sweeter, sweeter EPO, I ate my twin in the womb, I don't believe you, then I castrated the boar. spitting in my mouth is possible I like your stick Dylan last night I drank five beers and everyone in America how to do it are you ready now with your eyes on Rio and Olympic gold Brandon Schmidt hopes his years of hard work will finally pay off For me winning at Rio Eppie is a fairy tale come true.

You know it would be a Cinderella story, but if the slipper didn't actually belong to Cinderella and she took a lot of drugs to change the sides of her foot to fit. The slipper and Prince Charming fell in love with her and lived happily ever after. That is my dream.