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Thank you for sharing this. I'd be curious to hear anyone's response who disagreed with the following:
Pacquiao’s line is obviously just an emotional plea that will perhaps play well with his fans. Unfortunately for Manny, it just isn’t true. He already agreed to the more stringent rules and regulations than the boxing commissions, a position he now supposedly finds too reprehensible to consider.
We repeat: He agreed to blood and urine testing by the USADA. He simply demanded a window where the testing would end. When he did that, the debate over the appropriateness of such testing ended. It shifted to Pacquiao’s cut-off date, those 24 days.
Why the heck would an athlete ask for a 24-day break in testing? Pacquiao’s camp has suggested Manny’s belief that blood testing too close to the fight would weaken him, a position that defies all scientific knowledge, sporting precedent and common sense.
At the Olympics, doping agents do daily sweeps of athlete housing, drawing small amounts of blood and taking urine samples sometimes just hours before competition. At the Beijing Games swimmer Michael Phelps gave on the morning of one of his events. Mayweather and Mosley just went through USADA’s testing plan to no ill effects.
A 24-hour window would be more than sufficient for Pacquiao to “recover.” Twenty-four days is a huge gap of time, so big that it renders some of the testing moot. There is plenty of time in the non-testing period to run a sophisticated doping regime and still get it out of the system prior to a post-fight test.
Also too long, for that matter, is Mayweather’s proposed 14-day stop date.
Consider a blood doping agent such as erythropoietin (EPO), which will increase red blood cell counts and improve stamina. Many doctors say it can be flushed out of a body in two to five days, which means the proper way to deter it is to allow testing within a few days of the fight and then immediately after.
This is why I considered Mayweather’s proposed 14-day window such a major concession. It also says to me that he isn’t actually all that concerned with Pacquiao doping and that this was just a way of running a head game on his opponent.
Pacquiao’s line is obviously just an emotional plea that will perhaps play well with his fans. Unfortunately for Manny, it just isn’t true. He already agreed to the more stringent rules and regulations than the boxing commissions, a position he now supposedly finds too reprehensible to consider.
We repeat: He agreed to blood and urine testing by the USADA. He simply demanded a window where the testing would end. When he did that, the debate over the appropriateness of such testing ended. It shifted to Pacquiao’s cut-off date, those 24 days.
Why the heck would an athlete ask for a 24-day break in testing? Pacquiao’s camp has suggested Manny’s belief that blood testing too close to the fight would weaken him, a position that defies all scientific knowledge, sporting precedent and common sense.
At the Olympics, doping agents do daily sweeps of athlete housing, drawing small amounts of blood and taking urine samples sometimes just hours before competition. At the Beijing Games swimmer Michael Phelps gave on the morning of one of his events. Mayweather and Mosley just went through USADA’s testing plan to no ill effects.
A 24-hour window would be more than sufficient for Pacquiao to “recover.” Twenty-four days is a huge gap of time, so big that it renders some of the testing moot. There is plenty of time in the non-testing period to run a sophisticated doping regime and still get it out of the system prior to a post-fight test.
Also too long, for that matter, is Mayweather’s proposed 14-day stop date.
Consider a blood doping agent such as erythropoietin (EPO), which will increase red blood cell counts and improve stamina. Many doctors say it can be flushed out of a body in two to five days, which means the proper way to deter it is to allow testing within a few days of the fight and then immediately after.
This is why I considered Mayweather’s proposed 14-day window such a major concession. It also says to me that he isn’t actually all that concerned with Pacquiao doping and that this was just a way of running a head game on his opponent.
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