The Future of the Enhanced Games

This july fourth at Lowe's, get up to forty five percent off select major appliances. Plus, save eighty dollars on the select Charboyal Performance Series gas Grill, now two hundred ninety nine dollars. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's Heos, We help you save Valid through seven A, while supplies last, selection varies by location. Silos. com for more details Visit your nearby Lowes on Tonenell Avenue in North Bergen This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I'm going to be honest with you. I am online way more than I probably should be. And between me and everyone else at my house, we've got a illion screens going on at any given moment. So when my internet slows down, it is a full crisis. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need optimum famously fast fiber Internet Optimum fiber blows flaky five G out of the water and keeps it cool with the fastest and most reliable speeds that don't slow when things heat up. And right now, they have the deal of the summer, just thirty dollars a month for five years. So don't wait, call eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today Famously fast fiber for thirty dollars a month for five years. You can't beat it terms apply, see optimum. com for details Hey everyone, it's Kell Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book Club you've ever heard with my podcast, EarsSay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book Club for your ears Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audioobook Club On the Artartt Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts Fanest NYC returns to the Javbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. S stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Aaron Judge, John Cena, Jalen Brunson, Serena Williams and hundreds more. featuring more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. exclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sanatics games with two million dollars in prizes A full tailgate zone, and New York City's largest Indoorf FIFA World Cup fininal watchatch party. Fanatics Fest is the world's number one spports fan festival. Get your tickets now at fanaticsfest dot com dot That's fanaticsfest dot com d When I was in graduate school, I was trying to nail down a topic for my doctoral dissertation. At the same time, I had picked up endurance running as a hobby. and I went for a run with a men's team that I had known for about five minutes at this point. And one of these guys, like at mile like ten or something handed me this gel and just said, Ohh yeah, you should take this. It'll make it'll make you feel better And I did, like total candy from a stranger mistake. And you know, within like a couple of miles, I think I was like on the side of the road like Regurgitating the gel. Afterwards, I was sort of reflecting, on'm like, God, that was horrible. Like why on earth would I have taken something that some random person just handed me? And it got me thinking about, you know what do runners, amateur athletes, competitive athletes understand about performance enhancement and substance use and the policies around it, and that sort of led me to my first study for my doctorate looking at competitive runners in New York City and what they knew and understood about antiping policy and how that impacted their choices Fr Kaleidoscope and IyHart Podcasts, I'm Chris Gaymoi This is super humuman. If you've been following this series, you know the Enhanced Games raises a question that sounds simple, but turns out to be anything but. What exactly is wrong with doping To answer that, you need to understand how we got here How a set of rules built around Victorian ideas of amateurism became the global anti doping system we have today When we were researching One name kept coming up as the person to talk to about the history of doping someomeone who has spent her career studying exactly that Dror. April Henning. a professor at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh April walked me through a pretty fascinating and pretty surprising narrative. Starting with the first modern Olympics, to how we got to where we are today, somewhere between the strict, but perhaps more often than not failing Rules of the World Anti doping agency and the Enhanced games This is going to sound like a big all encompassing historical question. But you know, going back to antiquities, how long have athletes been doping for? and what did it look like back then? So that is a great good question. So What we know is that going back and everyone always starts with the original Greek Olympics and these things. And we do know that there is some evidence that they were using all sorts of things to enhance their performance. It was quite rudimentary at the time, but they were various forms of know mushroom or types of animal products that they were ingesting to try to improve their performance. So it does go back into antiquity. From there, it sort of falls off. So the sort of competitive sport, as we understand it, is really a fairly modern development. So it wasn't really until the end of the eighteen hundreds where we were seeing the development of sort ofn competitive sport and then the rise of doing for sport purposes. So before that, it was doping, but nobody called it doping. It doping is one of these concepts that it's really defined by the policy against it rather than it being a practice. So we tend to talk about doping in sport, but outside of that, we say performance enhancing drugs or performance enhancing substances or things like that At the initial Olympic Games, what we know is that Athletes were indeed using performance enhancing substances. What happened there is that we actually had the sort of very first rule against doping was at the Olympics and it was specifically for the marathon, which of course, was only men able to run this event. And this stated quite specifically that they weren't allowed to use anything to enhance their performance. And then there was no testing for this. So it was just a rule that wasn't really going to be enforced very well And so at that Olympics, what we saw was the winner, the eventual winner was helped along to the finish line by a hefty dose of strychnine and brandy bothoth of which at the time were thought to be performance enhancing. What is the alleged benefit of using strychni as an athlete? Yeah, so basically it was believed to have stimulating properties so that it would, you know sort of Increase your energy. that was the perceived benefit of it And what about brandy in this context? So this was I'm not completely clear on the brandy. There's a bit of a conflict because this is a downer. We wouldn't think that alcohol. But if you think back, you know, brandy was sort of used as one of these curatives. So you know, if you're feeling faint, they give you a brandy to wake you up. sort belief around that having some stimulating properties, which of now of course, we know that you know, you shouldn't take Stict nine, Brandy isn't going make you more alert But I think part of it was there was just no concept of the sort of dehydrating effects of alcohol and particularly mixed with poison So that was sort of the sort of our first known or first recognized modern instance of doping, particularly at something like the Olympics And as I understand it, that marathon was sort of a mess, right? It was unusually hot and you were only allowed to drink water at one place. So the sort of heat and the lack of water, this is a recurring theme in endurance sport and in dorain. We didn't understand hydration. the way that we understand it now, we didn't understand nutrition. know, if you look at modern marathoning or modern endurance sport, there's a table every couple kilometers or every mile with water with electrolytes, everyone carries their little gels. We understand that part of it better. At that point, there was, I think only one stop on the course where you hydration was available And it's a hot day, right? It's a summer Olympics. It's in Europe. It's gonna to be hot So this sort of pushed this idea that maybe we need a boost. you know, like this is, you know, sort of how we get people to finish From this moment, there's a sort of delineation between what sort of is seen as a accepted enhancement and what is a little bit more on the verbotan side. What sort of early themes start emerging from this moment of the marathon or finishing the race and him having this stuff in his system versus hydration and water and like why is that acceptable versus the other stuff that he was using Yeah, so this is a bit of a philosophical question that lots of us have wrestled with. So if we think about things like what the Olympics was at this point, the sort of first modern Olympic games, amateurism was the name of the game. So actually training itself was revolutionary technology. This was performance enhancing because lots of these people, they were gentlemen They were not working class, they were privileged. and the idea was that you just turn up and do these things. Now of course, at the same time, there were professionalized sports where people did make money from them. And this sort of amateurism is the thing that delineated where substance use was permitted. So the professionals, there's a great paper by my colleague Ask Vest Christ Jansen. The title of it is something like, We are not sportsmen, we' professionals And the idea is that they're professionals, they're not amateurs, they're not just in this for the sort of love of the sport. And so that sort of embolden them or they felt enabled them to go ahead and use some things that wouldn't have been allowed under sort of the Olympic values When we're talking about doping or performance enhancement, what we're talking about is moving beyond that baseline where accepted food, water, hydration, nutrition, we're actually moving beyond that and we're looking for sort of boost that takes us out of that sort of normative territory In terms of competition and using something enhancing for an athlete, it seems like there's this real idea here about class. Can you talk a little bit about this class element to it and where it comes from in terms of doping Yeah, so sport and particularly what was then sort of elite Olympic sport was really the sort of province of the gentleman class. If you sort of look at the people who organiz the first few iterations of the modern Olympics, they've all got titles like Sir, Prince Duke you know, these aren't working class heroes as we like to think of modern day Olympians. So the idea was that if you're an amateur, you're competing in a sport simply for the love of it, that it's about pure competition, it's about sort of seeing what the body can do Whereas once we move into sort of professionalized sport, the idea is no longer about these ideas And again, these are sort of ideas, constructions of what pure sport, and I really don't like these terms because they have no meaning really. This balance between it's no longer pure sport, this is sport for a competitive outcome. This is to win. this is to earn money. This is to do something besides just enjoy the competition or to put on a show, something like that So that's really where that tension comes in And this sort of idea that one would engage in sport for pay was very much looked down upon by this gentleman class If're if you're a working class individual who wants to compete in sport, you're either doing this at the same time that you're trying to earn a living, which reduces your ability, your chance. and it was all self funded at this point. So all of the travel to the games, all of the training, so this excluded a whole segment of socioeconomic classes that were just never going to be able to do this So that's part of that sort of traditional divide where we really saw this as being So somethinghing for the gentlemen and then this other stuff was maybe for the working classes if they wanted to enter or compete for money, but that was not meant to be part of the Olympics initially. The design of the original modern Olympics was that these were meant to be an amateur thing and that this amateur ethos would carry through. and this was what we're going to build our values around. And that was really the underpinning for the very first antid doping rules within the Olympic movement I wanted to jump to the nineteen sixty Room Olympics and that cycling race, which was such a pivotal moment in the history of all of this. Yeah, so the nineteen sixty games were actually quite pivotal in the sort of development of anti doping and the push for the IOC to take this seriously and to actually do something So what happened at the nineteen sixty games, so this is the Rome Olympics, is that we have a summer games in Rome and Rome is hot in the summer So we have a cycling race and we have the Danish cycling team is competing. and one of their cyclists is the twenty one year old Nude Eemark Yansen And Yensen is competing in the heat of the day. So afternoon, it's four degrees Celsius. hundred one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit And With inadequate hydration, inadequate fueling the way that we would consider it now and traragically Jensen dies in the course of this race Now, when he comes off his bike, he's attended to by the medical personnel, They bring him into the medical tent to try to revive him, to try to give him medical attention. And unfortunately, the medical tent was even hotter than the afternoon air in Rome. So this was probably closer to fifty degrees Celsius one hundred and ten plus degrees Fahrenheit. which actually just exacerbated things and likely made things worse They were unable to revive Yensen, so he did end up dying. And in the wake of this, his national team coach was interviewed about what happened in this race. and he mentions that his team had been given this drug called Ryanical, which is a vasodilator, which was intended to help enhance their performance This was actually picked up by the media and misrepresented as being an amphetamy And once this made it into the media, even though it was incorrect The IOC and others who were already predisposed against the use of performance enhancing substances and sport took this and ran with it So this linking of Jensen's death with amphetamines led this push to we must do something, we must do something to address the issue of partarticularly amphetamine use in sport, but also just doping in general So what this ended up? turning into was the development and the establishment of the IOC's Medical Commission in nineteen sixty seven, which was tasked with coming up with a set of rules around performance enhancing drugs and doping Now, the interesting bit of this is that because this was all based on a mistake Yensen, it wasn't revealed until the two thousands, when the Danish media did a deeper dive into what actually caused Yensen's death, where they looked at the autopsy report and found that actually Jensen didn't have amphetamines in his body So his death wasn't actually caused by any drug. It was likely caused by the conditions of the day, inadequate hydration, poor fueling, and just bad luck But This one mistake was enough to change the course of sporting and antidping history in that the IOC appoints this medical Commission that laid out the framework for antidoping that we still see today under the advisement of the World Anti Doping Agency. So this whole approach that was laid out in nineteen sixty seven as a result of cases like Yensen's is actually the system, basically the framework for the system that we still have. When we talk about sort of like you know testosterone and steroid use, can you talk about the first instance that that sort of became prevalent in the sport Oh, so this is really unclear. And there is some disagreement about where the development of synthetic testosterone really came from. What we do know is that it was during the nineteen fifties and that the sort of alleged story that is again, controversial was that there was a weightlifting coach who was visiting the Soviet Union and noticed that the athletes there were using a sort of synthesized testosterone to improve their strength and decided that they was going to bring this back to America and we were going to try this And when that happened, it started within the weightlifting and particularly the bodybuilding communities. and it's generally associated with the West cooast of the US, California, Venice Beach, spepecifically Muscle Beach. Muscle Beach, where for thirty dollars a year or three dollars a day, you can join a club and look like this. Musle Beach is the only gym of its kind in the world The place to be better is tell for you, Muckle Fet All the greats have worked out here. Mr. T, Arnold, Hulk Hogan And this was right at the time that we saw the sort of shift in what male bodies looked like And as we progress through the nineteen sixties, when this really started being used into the seventies and eighties, we see the rise of bodies like that of the most famous bodybuilder of all, which is Arnold Swarzenegger When you come down here to muscle peach And the Venice Beach platform and you train for that many decades like I have and pumped up the body and got tanned and win the championships, and eventually build a building to have you on a building, a picture of my winning pose. and that's right here. P How about that, huh? his body is still often held up as the sort of the perfect symmetrical male Bnie Builder Once these things start being used, even in these sort of fringes But it becomes clear that they are effective, they make their way into sport. And frankly, when these first started being introduced into sport, there weren't explicit rules against them And there was no test, there was no mechanism for regulating these or for catching anyone. So you know, amphetamines in some ways made a lot of sense for antidoping because developing a test for an amphetamine is pretty straightforward. Developing a test for an anabolic steroid was much more difficult, partly because there's different ways of synthesizing them, there's different ways of testing for them, there's different ways of using them, and how sensitive tests could be at that point to actually detect steroid use. quuite a bit of time after these became used in sport before antidoping was able to develop any form of useful test for steroids Going to the sixties specifically, I was struck in reading around how elaborate some of these like national doping programs were, specifically like the East German one. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that program and how it fits into the enforcement issue So the East German program was extensive. It included a huge number of athletes, tens of thousands of athletes, and it was effective So at the time, East Germany began a program of doping And these included athletes that were considered developmental athletes so those that were on their way to becomingational international level. So this was directed by the state. so this was state sponsored doping. But they determined that athletes were going to be given anabolic steroids as well as a list of other things to enhance their sporting performance Now they The issue there are many issues with what happened in East Germany. One is around the issue of knowledge and consent of the athletes that were included So there appears to be a range of consent that and understanding amongst the athletes themselves Some of them knew what was happening and went along with it. someome of them didn't. Not no what they were being given, you there are reports that have come out and some of the victims themselves have actually spoken out, become academics themselves written about this, but that some of them became aware that they were getting something that wasn't just a vitamin. when they started developing side effects U So so clear, you know, sort of what we would think of are human rights violations, you know drugging people without consent The other part of it was the sort of shocking effectiveness of this regime. So East Germany really punched above their weight in terms of their metal hole So East Germany was actually quite a small country, notot very populous. It wouldn't have been predicted to be on par with countries like the US, with the Soviet Union, with its West German counterpart Oftten we understand that population size and economic strength actually are great predictors of how well you do at international sporting competitions and they were doing extremely well So this did raise red flags as well as some of the appearances of many of the athletes and particularly the women athletes. This is a side effect. side effect. Yeah, what kind of things were we saying? So the women themselves, when they would turn up at competitions, there were often comments and comments that would be picked up by the media, from spectators, from other athletes about how masculine it looked. So large muscles, what they perceiveed to be very square jaws Basically having a sort of what we'd understand to be sort of a masculine look to them Now the actual side effects that these women were experiencing are what we still see in women who use anabolic steroids. So things like deepened voice, growth of facial and other body hair, the sort of enlarged clitoris, acne, all of these sort of effects on sort of their secondary sex characteristics, there are masculinizing effects to using these substances, particularly in the types of doses that some of these women were getting You know, the East German government wasn't giving them small doses. They were giving them the highest doses they could get away with. within the men, it's a little less obvious because Generally speaking, they were using synthetic testosterone. to get these effects And in men, it sort of amplified the things that we already think of as being masculine and men, so it have made their muscles bigger, maybe made their voices deeper, may have increased facial hair acne, all of the same things It can also lead to some side effects and these are just general side effects of using anbeloxerids, can lead to gycomastiia, which is the sort of growth in breast tissue in men, can lead to impacts on testicular size So all of these things were occurring in the men. It was just a bit more difficult to see it so clearly within the men than it was in within the women After the break, the nineteen eighty eight Summer Olympic doping scandal that changed everything Sonanics Fest NYC return to the Javbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. S stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Eron Judge, John Cena, Jlon Brunson, Serena Williams, and hundreds more, featuring more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. Eclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sonatics games with two million dollars in prizes, A full tailgate zone, and New York City's largest indndoor FIFA World Cup final watchatch P party Sonanatics Fest is the world's number one sports fan festival tickets now at faneticspest. com. That's feticspest dot com Every sale comes down to a single second, the one between byy now and maybe later PayPal is built to help your business win that moment with a checkout experience that feels certain, reliable, and familiar with a global two sided network and hundreds of millions of buyers who already know us All to keep you in control however buying happens next New markets, new AI powered selling services. A whole new agentic era where you decide how your business will show up and stand up PayPal is built to help your business come out ahead We're built for payments, built for growth buuilt for Agentic PayPal openen, built for all business Visit payPaloppen d. com to get started. That's payPaloppen dot com Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of EarsSay, the Audible and I Heart Audioobook Club. This week on the podcast, I amm sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary, massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. and it's like, okay, yo, yeo, yo is this indulgent? And I really thought about it and I was like, No, at this point it would kind of be betraying the trust, the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't G through it. There's places in this book deeply emotionally affected me And I left it on the mic. That's great. ' it served the story peopleople will say like, oh my god, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude me, too. Listen to EarsSay, the Audible and I heart audioobook club On the Arhart Radio app or wherever youre getting a podcast. Aging is real, and so are the benefits of New Vital proteins Collagen spparkling Water Because around the age of thirty, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up. So get your daily glow up now in three fresh flavors, strawberry blossom, lemon lime, and blood orange Improved skin health in as little as thirty days thanks to collagen peptides? Cheers to that, so you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vitalproteins. com to learn more and where to buy. Thesements notinistration. thisu is not intended dagn st to or prevent any dis I wanted to ask you about like, okay, after the Shermans, you, the Olympics start testing athletes, do you remember which games these were specifically? So the first test for anabolic steroids was actually developed in the mid nineteen seventies, nineteen seventy four. seventy four, what games would have been seventy six, seventy eight? And this meant that the International Olympic Committee among others could formally prohibit these So they had been on the list of things that you weren't supposed to do, but without an enforcement mechanism, there wasn't a lot that could be done apart from catching somebody in the act of using them And the first tests were fairly rudimentary. They basically could say whether or not there was the presence of a metabolite. When these were rolled out, this meant that those who were using these to change their MO to avoid getting caught So in a country like East Germany, what this meant was that they started pret testing their athletes before they sent them to competitions to ensure that they wouldn't flag a doping test. Now this also meant that the science of substances clear the body progressed rapidly. They had a fairly good idea about how long it would take for the sort of metabolites to become undetectable based on the current testing because they were subjecting their athletes to testing ahead of time Now this led in some cases to being at competitions where we would sometimes see athletes drop out of events on short notice or with no notice. They just wouldn't turn up for an event if they it was sort of understood that there was going to be testing But because it was limited to the in competition testing, it was still fairly easy to get around the test. So you know, these policies are rolled out and testing is instituted. did it actually help keep competition fair? It depends what you mean by fair in the sense that everyone was going to be tested at the competition under a sort of systemized way, then yes If it meant that everyone had equal opportunity to use stop use and avoid testing positive during those tests, then also yes. If it meant that people were actually put off of using these substances, then no. We know that was not the case. And this became very clear in possibly the most pivotal scandal in sport doping history, which was Ben Johnson at the nineteen eighty eight Olympics Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that, like what happened and what that sort of did for the rise of the anti doping movement? Yeah. so the Ben Johnson case, which I will say first, in my view, is one of the great miscarriages of sport justice, not because he didn't do anything wrong, but because of the way that the story has been framed historically So basically in nineteen eighty eight we're going into the summer Olympics and of course, one of the perennially most popular events at the summer Games is the men's one hundred Mer Final. Go into nineteen eighty eight, there was actually quite a rivalry set up that had been hyped by the media between Ben Johnson, who's a Canadian sprinter and Carl Lewis, who is the very well known American sprinter. This moment Par Lis starts his quest For four gold medals. A chance to succeed and to walk where no other athlete has ever been or to fail and fail magnificently So we get into the final and in news that will shock no one, both Ben Johnson and Car Lewis were there. We're really fortunate here that you have two men absolutely in their prime in the Olympic final. Uually Now the race goes off start Ben Jhs And the thing that did shock everyone was that Ben Johnson beat Carl Lewis. know it's Ben Johnson. Ben Johnson Json again. Unbelievable And there are some really great images that you can find of that race where after they cross the finish line, you see this very triumphant Johnson. and then just over his shoulder, we see this very confused and shocked Carl Lewis, who cannot believe he didn't win this race I just don't know how he does it or whether he gets a hypnotist or something, but he does something to stimulate him in the finals Now, immmediately after this, Ben Johnson and others in that final We're given an antidping test and The next day, Ben Johnson is told that his has come back positive and he's going to have his gold medal taken away Now this was a surprise to Johnson. Aain, not because he denied using steroids that he was convinced that he had stopped using them in plenty of time before the games that he shouldn't have tested positive And actually, the drug that he was found to have tested positive for He claims he never actually used. When this story broke, this was an overnight scandal, and this dominated headlines. But the main story of the night doesn't concern the spirit of competition, but a man who's judged to have cheated. Ben Johnson celebrated on Saturday as the Olympic one hundred Mers champion, the fastest man of the world fails, a drug test is stripped to the gold medal and leaves the Olympic city in disgrace. This was the biggest story around those Olympics. And because of the sort of size of this scandal and the profile of this event and these athletes, the IOC really could not not do anything about this. So after the games, you know, hees he goes back to Canada, and there is an inquiry opened by the Canadian government. And this was an investigation into steroid use, but also performance enhancement generally in Canadian sports And Ben Johnson cooperated. Basically what they found was that the use of steroids was absolutely widespread across Canada The Ben Johnson scandal also kicked off similar investigations in other countries. So Sweden had its own investigation that happened. There was something similar that happened in the US, not quite the same scale, but there was some talk amongst US sporting officials that actually maybe they should be doing better to keep up with the Canadians on this So what happened in Canada put pressure on other countries to start paying attention to how this how this was used. that actually it turns out that steroid use is much more widespread in sport than anyone thought Now, back to that original games where Johnson lost his medal The one of the Olympic officials, high level officials who was actually at the games was a gentleman named Dick Pound Now Dick Pound was tasked with guiding Ben Johnson in the wake of his positive test Dick Pound was also Canadian, he was a lawyer. So this did make sense Now, what happened as a result of this is that Dick Pound, I think, was quite upset that he felt misled by Johnson, who proclaimed innocence even in the face of this positive test And he actually committed himself to this sort of idea of anti doping It'sort of this fight against doping. So about ten years later, Dick Pound becomes the first president of the World Anti doping Agency. So the creation of the World Anti Dping Agency, what countries were on board initially? Was it all the Olympic countries or was it just a select view So in nineteen ninety nine, it was when water was created after the conference at Luzonne that was called by the IOC But really this came as a result of pressure from national governments following the Festina affair at the nineteen ninety eight tour de France. And this was where several teams, but particularly the Festina racing team, were found to be engaging in performance and enhancement, using all sorts of drugs and techniques. And it was this became a police action, French Pleice action. because it was actually a team official Willy Voitt driving a team car into France and he got stopped at the border and his car was searched and they found all sorts of doping paraphernalia, substances, things he wasn't supposed to have. But because it was found by the border police, it actually became a police matter So this meant the French government had to ev involved. So there were hotel raids, there were all of these things And actually, the cyclists themselves were really upset the police action So they actually staged a sitden protest at the beginning of the Tour de France against this sort of interference in the sport. Even though this was against the rules, it was sort of one of these open secrets within the sport that sort of everybody was doing it actuallyctually they now involved the police. Now as a result of this, every other country in the world said, we do not want to be in the position that France is in So the IOC needs to do something. They have to do something So the IOC at this point was the global policy making body for antidping and sport. And they felt that they had this pretty much under control. Yes, this was a scandal Here's what we'll do. We'll call a meeting, everybody will get together and lose on. We'll come up with some new ideas, and basically they expected to leave that meeting still in control of antidping What they did not expect was sort of the pushback from national governments who do not want a repeat of what happened in France So this ends up with an agreement to set up a quasi independent body that would be the sort of global policy maker for anti doping and sport. And this is where we get the World anntiping Agency Can you elaborate on Qasi a little bit So the reason that I say that is because The idea that you would have sports or countries making and enforcing anti doping policy themselves was a bit like the fox looking after the Henhouse, right? that really would they be willing to turn their own athletes in? or would the Olympics want that sort of negative publicity that they would have to give themselves by holding superstar athletes accountable So what they wanted was something that was a bit more independent than that, that would be a real regulatory body The problem is that to fund something like this, that money had to come from somewhere because antid doping is, it was and remains extremely expensive So the water budget was agreed to be covered fifty percent by the Olympic movement and fifty percent by the sort of member countries So in the past few years, there's been a lot of tension between USAA and the United States. And water The reason that this becomes such a big deal is because as the U S threaten to do at multiple points isn't withhold their contribution to the water budget It's such a big proportion that actually it really constricts what Wada can actually do After the break We get into Wa's Legacy and April's thoughts on the Enhced games FS NYC returns to the Jabbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. See stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Aaron Judge, Sohn Cina, Jaylen Brunson, Serena Williams, and hundreds more. feeaturing more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. Eclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sonatics games with two million dollars in prizes. A full tailgate zone. and New York City's largest indoor Fiva World Cup fininal watchatch party. Fanatics Fest is the world's number one sports fan festival. Get your tickets now at fanaticsfest dot com dot That's fanaticsfest dot com d Every sale comes down to a single second, the one between byy now and maybe later PayPal is built to help your business win that moment with a checkout experience that feels certain, reliable, and familiar with a global two sided network and hundreds of millions of buyers who already know us All to keep you in control however buying happens next New markets, new AI powered selling services A whole new aentic era where you decide how your business will show up and stand up PayPal is built to help your business come out ahead We're built for payments, built for growth buuilt for aentic PayPal openpen, built for all business Visit payPalopen. com to get started. That's payPaloppen d. com Hey everyone, It's Cal Penn host of EarsSay, The Audible and IHart Audioobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traiter's Sun. It's a sci fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted. My first book was Divergent and when that came out, like Bez was so popular, I think it attracted like mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge U and I think It was like critiques of things I liked when I was like You know, I was twenty three and I wrote this book and it had all my like dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it. And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, steered away from those little thingsike. make you feel pleasure when you read. but I also was like saying no to these parts to myself that I then was like, sccrew it. Yeah So that's this book. Listen to EarsSaay, the Audible and IHart audiobook cllub on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts Aging is real. And so are the benefits of adding vital proteins collagen peptides to your daily routine. Because around the age of thirty, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up to help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. Available in the classic collllagen peptides, colloagen and protein shakes and new Vital Proteins Collagge in sparkling waters, so you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vitalproteins. com to learn more and where to buy These statements have not been evaluated by the Food Drug Admistration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat cure or prevent any disease Since the establishment of WadA, there have been at least two major scandals. And I'm thinking about Lance Armstrong twenty twelve, the Russian doping scandal in twenty sixteen. I'm curious for your take on like what WAa's legacy to this point is sort of looking like in your head water And antidping in the Olympic movement was initially extremely well intentioned The idea of keeping sport fair and safe I think are generally speaking positive things I think part of the issues with water and some of the issues for its legacy are around the way that they have decided to define that and the way that they have decided to implement that So in terms of the compleplete one hundred percent zero tolerance prohibition approach plability leaves no room for error This means literally that if an athlete makes a mistake and ingests something without even realizing they're doing it, they can still be on the hook if they return a positive sample Now there are some mitigations to that. But what we have seen is that actually it's really, really difficult unless you have a lot of money and a lot of very sophisticated legal support actually have A defense against a positive doping test That's a real problem because we also know that athletes are human, they're fallible. they make mistakes but it also leaves no room for Development or for innovation in terms of What people might use, what might be useful, what might even be healthy based on the sort of quuite conservative approach to water Now I think that has led to a quite a bit of backlash in some ways. So when we see athletes being punished for simple mistakes Or conversely, we see athletes that because we've been conditioned to not believe any of the reasonings for a positive test We see athletes who get off without much punishment at all and we sort of go, is that really fair? Is that really fair? You're not going to do anything about that. Is it because they're wealthy? Is it because it's that country? What is the reasoning around that and it set up a lot of mistrust in sports The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. but in this case, it really does seem that there could have been different choices made, there could have been a bit more flexibility or allowing a bit more of an athlete voice that hasn't been taken up And what sort of is the incentive for WAa in terms of like being permissive for say, Russian athletes competing? What is the sort of the incentive for them to allow those athletes to still compete under a slightly different flag, even though they have a zero tolerance policy, supposedly? This goes back to