It depends on what you mean by "all current skaters." Do you mean everyone who goes to at least one ISU event? Or do they just have to be eligible for those events? Because there are thousands of skaters in the US alone who are skating at the Junior and Senior level and theoretically could end up getting sent to an ISU event of some sort and having them all be in the testing pool would be very expensive and time-consuming.
It should be all medalists from Worlds, 4CC and Europeans.
Did you read @ali55's message that explains it? All athletes at the "highest level of the sport" are in the testing pool. But they can remove themselves if they aren't planning to compete in the next 6 months.
Why?
Yes, and also because they didn't mark it as priority, which they should have.
Do they get to choose the hour, or is that dictated to them?
Not partly or also: entirely because they didn't mark it "priority." There have been no reports at all that those marked as priority weren't processed as priority, even in Sweden, where they decided to let the virus rip, and they reportedly were short-staffed.
Athletes decide for themselves. They often choose the morning when they will definitely be at home.
If the laboratory can analyze, for example, 100 samples per day, then if you mark 200 samples as priority, then they will not analyze more than 100 anyway.
Back when I skated it was all athletes who made it to Nationals. If you were in the funding envelopes or on the National team you were subject to USADA testing year round. For the skaters who made it to Junior Nationals, non-international levels, and made it without being a National team member you were only tested once: at Nationals itself. This meant even adult and collegiate synchro skaters were tested. I don't think they actively tested Juv/Int skaters in synchro, but they did for singles at Junior Nationals.
There were no examples where items marked "priority", presumably almost all of them for the Olympics, were not processed in time. All of the rest of them were put behind priority, and even Valieva's, which was at the end of the line, was processed just after the Team Event, by the third day of the Olympics.
How do you know how long the remaining samples were analyzed? We know about Valieva's test only because it turned out to be positive.
This is not the first time an athlete has been disqualified during the Olympics for testing positive before the Olympics.
And the specific circumstances were? There are several possible scenarios I can think of off the top of my head.
excerpts -- relevant to this thread -- from Irina Rodnina's interview with RIA Novosti Sport (links are posted in the Russian figure skating news thread here):
at "They just have better dentists." But all joking aside, how refreshing to hear a little honesty.
I thought she was referring to Trusova's skating quality - I can see it both ways.
I remember Gracie saying in an interview that she thought her competitive career would be over sooner rather than later, so I think she probably would have happily retired after Sochi with an Olympic bronze medal and went on to college. She would have had no sense of competing against futility and developed an eating disorder
Amazing line.
Possibly both? It sounds like Sasha is stubborn and that can be a good thing but can backfire. But the culture in Russian figure skating seems very toxic, as well. I mistook Rodnina'words, in that case. I age about the pipeline being extremely damaging psychologically to these girls. The constant interchangeable teenage prodigies hurt the sport as well
Indeed, more TEs. There wouldn't be any scandal if they had a better understanding of the system for getting TEs.
There's a lot of really insightful stuff in that interview, about why Russia has fewer TUEs and how the sports system there might be able to ACTUALLY support athletes instead of using and harming them. It's refreshing to read.
Antidepressants aren't banned by WADA, at least according to a quick Google search.
This is correct. Most if not all depression and anxiety meds aren't banned. The only one that is on any list is Wellbutrin, but it's not even banned, it's just in the monitoring program. I only know this because I was on it years ago and the WADA list came up when I googled it. But every other psych med that I know of isn't on the banned or monitoring program. But I'll say this, having been on many antidepressants, I wouldn't want to be on most of them if I were an active athlete.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Interesting. I wonder how widespread AD use in figure skating is, as it definitely can regulate performance anxiety. Not talking about the Russian team anyway, as mental health care in Russia is nascent.
Okay but you’re only looking at one specific side effect here, and most people find their “quality of life” increases on antidepressants.However, what they might find is that, in terms of certain aspects of quality of life, particularly for dopamine driven people,
in comparison to American or "Western" drugs,
A survey of sexual side effects among severely mentally ill patients taking psychotropic medications: impact on compliance - PubMed
Few studies have addressed the effects that iatrogenic sexual side effects have on compliance in the severely mentally ill. The objective of this survey was to assess the levels of self-reported iatrogenic sexual dysfunction within a sample of 51 severely mentally ill outpatients taking a...
Russia has the better drugs.
Effects of meldonium on sexual performance, sperm motility, testes morphology and blood biochemical markers in boars - PubMed
The objective of this study was to evaluate effects of long term (90-day) administration of meldonium [3-(2,2,2-trimethylhydrazinium) propionate] (mildronate, quaterin, MET-88) on sexual performance, sperm motility, testes morphology and biochemical blood markers in boars. Boars were treated...
