Where Racewalking Is King, the Antidoping Officials Are Busy

Sounds like a good plot for a Will Farrell comedy ...

I have likely been personally harmed by competing against athletes who are doping. I finished 19th in the IAAF World Championships in the 50K racewalk and it is likely that some of those who finished in front of me were using or had been using banned substances. The use of banned substances in sports is deliberate cheating to gain an unfair advantage. It is morally reprehensible, as morally wrong as bribing an official to try to influence the outcome of a competition. All of the doping walkers and all of the coaches and supporting personnel involved in their doping should be banned for life, should be subject to civil financial penalties (compensating those they have cheated), and should even be subject to criminal penalties, as are other thieves.

On another matter, those who are dissing racewalking are simply betraying their ignorance. There are few sports that require more athletic skill, more difficult training, and more grueling competitive challenges than racewalking.

For example, an elite 20K racewalker has the same cadence as an elite 800m runner, and yet he/she must must maintain this high rate of turnover for 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 hours, rather than for only 1 3/4 to 2 minutes. Also, the technical demands of the racewalking stride are as exacting as those of high hurdlers or field event athletes. The best racewalkers have higher VO2max than the best runners, cyclists, and swimmers, because of the whole-body demands of the stride. Only XC skiing demands more.

As other commenters noted, racewalkers routinely leave the ground with both feet. You can actually see this in one of the articles' images (the 2012 IAAF) where two women in the background are off the ground. However, according to the rules, this 'flight' has to be detectable by the unaided human eye to be a violation (yawn).

Athletics are, well, simply entertainment and business today. Nothing more. And doping goes on in all sports at levels higher than a kite. If we want to ban doping in sports (god luck with that) then perhaps we should also try to ban it in other forms of entertainment and business. My guess is that half of Wall Street is high on speed (one form or other, and a good pc of other business managers and workers do their share), and then there's all the other forms of entertainment. I wonder if doping goes on in the music industry? Let me ponder.

We have to remember that we only hear about the athletes who get caught. I am all for pursuing offenders. But some of the more sophisticated dopers probably stay ahead of the regulatory bodies, as Lance Armstrong did for years.

Like cycling, this sport is tainted beyond any credibility. Sad.

Racewalking is a great sport.

The rules of racewalking specifically say that the feet can’t both be off the ground as judged “by the human eye.”

Ever watch closely the way umpires in baseball call balls and strikes – over the plate knees to letters, you think? Please. Ever see an uncalled penalty (or wrongly called one) in football? Or a faked injury, or missed jersey grab in soccer?

Sure, computers, lasers, and cameras, etc., could be used to tighten up rule enforcement in sports, and maybe they should be used, but don’t trash the sport because it isn’t officiated perfectly.

The only reason this is news is that the Russians are very sloppy. No of Salizar's athletes tested positive and he was doping them all. A French television show just recently aired a program where they used micro-doping to beat every possible test, including the blood passport.
I recall watching the Olympics last time with a friend of mine, a former 800 runner who may have been the last honest man in sports. He said "You see that? Any time someone pulls away from the field you know they are on something."
The question is not who is doping at this point, its who isn't.

Racewalking medals in the last three major world athletics championships (2011 Worlds, 2012 Olympics, 2013 Worlds) have been won by athletes representing seven countries from five continents. Current male world record-holders at the championship distances (20km and 50km) hail from two additional countries (Japan and France.) The reporter misreads global interest in the sport, dismissing it with "peculiar...snickers...wiggling... between niche and punch line." Anyway, the task at hand is the same facing most athletics disciplines -- the removal of the fox as guardian of the henhouse. Doping control remains in the hands of national, rather than international, authorities.

Even if they combat doping in racing walking the sport will continue to be a joke while competitors continue to run. If you watch any race in slow-motion on your TV it won't take like to find competitors who are technically running continue racing unpunished.

One begins to wonder if there is any sport left that doesn't have a doping scandal waiting to be discovered.

The TV series "Malcolm in the Middle" did a great bit on racewalking, which should be two words -- to emphasize that it's every bit the oxymoron of "jumbo shrimp." I half expected to see the competitors in the photo wearing helmets with built-in spoilers.
If I were in charge of the Olympics, racewalking would be removed from the event list, as would any event using the word "yacht" or "equine." On second thought, I might combine the three in homage to Monty Python's Upper-class Twit of the Year competition.

Of course, the whole sport is a bit of a joke and a fraud - you're not supposed to run and have both feet off the ground at the same time yet video after video shows race walkers doing precisely that, over and over.

cold war style article. nice....

Sad about the Russians. So paranoid - "America is out to get us..". I for one would just as soon Russia were like any other relatively normal country with which it was possible to get along and with which it was possible to be at ease. When will they get grasp the idea that most Americans have no interest in our either destroying them nor invading them? Probably never - the sense of being put upon is fundamental to the Russian character. Sorry guys - objecting to your doping your athletes is neither a political assault nor a scheme to assert dominance. In the larger scheme of things who besides a very few even gives two hoots about the outcomes of racewalking events?

They're doping in racewalking now? The next thing we'll hear is that they're doping in bridge tournaments.

Is it so important to win this race that people are willing to destroy their health? I remember the East German women who received hormones to get a medal and spent a lifetime crippled by health problems.

When you see Lance Armstrong developing testicular cancer and Bruce Jenner feeling more like a woman than a man, makes you worry about hormones are their effects.