View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Gabe Baida is a 15 year anti-doping professional. He was previously at USADA, where he served as the director of UFC and Premiere Sport. He is now the Executive Director of InnoVero.
Episode highlights:
(25:52) No fault period: a period with no consequence, athletes need to have the opportunity to learn the rules, six months of no fault for education
(37:25) Solving anti-doping in ultrarunning: putting aside businesses and funding, it’s not rocket science, ultrarunning is missing a unifying entity but mapping an anti-doping plan is not hard
(1:07:27) When to get USADA involved: UFC and cycling examples, the sooner the better, stay ahead of the ball, crossover athletes and organizations help to spur action in ultra-trail
Additional resources:
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Gabe Baida is a 15 year anti-doping professional. He was previously at USADA, where he served as the director of UFC and Premiere Sport. He is now the Executive Director of InnoVero.
Episode highlights:
(25:52) No fault period: a period with no consequence, athletes need to have the opportunity to learn the rules, six months of no fault for education
(37:25) Solving anti-doping in ultrarunning: putting aside businesses and funding, it’s not rocket science, ultrarunning is missing a unifying entity but mapping an anti-doping plan is not hard
(1:07:27) When to get USADA involved: UFC and cycling examples, the sooner the better, stay ahead of the ball, crossover athletes and organizations help to spur action in ultra-trail
Additional resources:
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the CoopCast. As always, I am your humble host, coach Jason Coop, and this episode of the podcast is the final in a series of podcasts that I have released over the last four weeks about anti-doping efforts in the trail and ultra running community, and I'm leaving y'all off with a banger of an episode, and a banger of an episode that is in my new recording studio. So if you happen to be watching the YouTube version of this, hopefully the aesthetics are a little bit better, more appealing to the eye. But that is neither here nor there.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast, gabe Baida, who is a 15-year professional in the anti-doping arena. Over 10 of those years were with USADA and, in particular, gabe was one of the most influential people for booting up USADA's anti-doping efforts within the UFC. Now, what does mixed martial arts in the UFC have to do with trail and ultra running? It's not just because I'm a fan and I'm fascinated with that sport. It is because they introduced anti-doping at a time where it didn't really exist, or it existed in a fractured nature, and that is the exact same position that we are in in trail and ultra running right now. So I brought Gabe onto the podcast today to discuss what he learned from that effort and how we can take those learnings and apply it to the sport of trail and ultra running. If you are a key stakeholder in this, if you're an elite athlete, you're a race director, you're a coach or you're a brand manager, pay attention to the words that Gabe has throughout the course of this podcast, because we don't want to repeat the same mistakes that were made in the UFC and we have a good blueprint for how to implement this, based on the program that they actually implemented. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but the future will always repeat, even though it might not exactly rhyme.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, with that intro, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Gabe Bida, all about his experience in implementing anti-doping in the UFC. Thanks for coming, man, thanks for having me. This is you're popping the cherry here, popping the cork on my new setup here. I appreciate you putting up with it. I figure nobody better than you, since we've known each other for a while to get this setup. All said and done. So for the people that are watching the YouTube version, this is all new. It's usually just my face and now I actually have a guest. I don't think you knew you were getting into that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm happy to be the guinea pig, All right sweet. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the UFC. Yeah, and the longtime listeners of this podcast will recognize that I do make a lot of UFC references, and mainly because I'm a fan. But more importantly for this podcast, it's because I think that there are parallels within what you have done with the UFC and with USADA from an anti-doping perspective and what we can learn about that experience, as ultra running is trying to figure this whole thing out. But before we talk about that, just to set the table on what you currently do and maybe to break the ice a little bit with the listeners here, I want to go back to the Sochi Olympics, which is probably one of my favorite sporting things of all time.
Speaker 1:So the Sochi Olympics were known, or one of the things, unfortunately, that the Sochi Olympics were known for was this gigantic doping scandal that happened at the behest of the country of Russia and Vladimir Putin and their state-run sporting organization and everything that came out of that. Everything came out of that. You had athletes that were clearly doping. You had athletes that were not doping. You had everybody get caught in the cross hairs and it all kind of unfolded like a spy novel really. There were any number of different articles that were written, which I'll link a few of those in the show notes about them. The movie Icarus, one of their primary characters, was a central figure in this whole thing and he's still now in witness protection.
Speaker 2:I think right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of crazy, but one of the one of the key figures in that whole ordeal wasn't a person, it was actually an object, right, an object that you have now started kind of a business around trying to replace it, and that was the urine sample collection bottles. One of the things that happened, as a product of the Russians trying to cheat the system, is they were swapping out dirty urine for clean urine, all behind the scenes, all unbeknownst to WADA, all unbeknownst to many of the athletes that were competing. But the athletes that were involved obviously knew, because they had to give clean samples. At one point they went underneath some sort of doping program and then at some point, those urine samples were swapped out in this elaborate scheme. And so Gabe, sitting here across from me, raises his hand and notices a business opportunity in that, which is what you currently do. So why don't you describe to the listeners like what you currently do for a living and why I had to give this elaborate?
Speaker 2:yeah, background on the sochi olympics. Yeah, certainly, I mean spot on. I mean it was a wild scandal that you know, quite frankly, rockeded the sports world, particularly the Olympic movement and the whole anti-doping system, and shined a bright light on, I think, some inadequacies that were present. The founding of our company, innovero, which we basically were born directly out of that scandal and it really came together from a New York Times article, I think in 2016, where literally urine sample collection bottles were on the front page of the New York Times and they were at the center of that whole scandal.
Speaker 2:And it made it really difficult for national anti-doping organizations like USADA, professional sport leagues like Major League Baseball and some select other kind of North American groups to go to their athletes and their biggest stakeholders and say, hey, you can have trust in this system, it works, it's great, the collection equipment's good and it just rang really hollow right, like you can't have the industry standard, trusted kind of piece of equipment that you know the highest profile athletes in the world rely on to protect their careers, be at the center of a scandal and have people trust that system. So you know, people, organizations started looking at alternatives and quickly found there wasn't a really good, solid alternative out there that they could put their trust in and have their athletes put their trust in. So you know fortunately for me, you know the likes of USADA, the US Anti-Doping Agency, and Major League Baseball pulled some resources together and founded Inovero to develop state-of-the-art, high-security sample collection equipment to better serve their athletes and the world's athletes.
Speaker 1:And I think it's a good illustration on a couple of fronts. One is just entrepreneurship at its best. I mean the way that you describe it. Hey, this was on the front page of the New York Times, right? Yeah, this is on the front page of the New York Times. Let's make a business to try to bring some competition into the marketplace.
Speaker 1:But I also think that it's interesting from an anti-doping perspective, because we think a lot of times that these processes are very simplistic in nature, are very simplistic in nature and this is part of the conversation that I had with one of your former colleagues, tammy Hansen, a couple of weeks ago where an athlete pees into a cup or a sample collection bottle. They pee into a cup, that urine turns red or green. It's either hot or cold. We actually use that vocabulary. Somebody pisses hot and then everything magically works out the way it should have. But even the sample collection bottle right? Something that's fundamental. Right, somebody's putting their biology into it. Right, they're putting something that is being excreted out of their body into it and it's getting transported to a lab. Something as quote unquote simple as that needed re-engineering and innovation. Right, to use your word, to add integrity. Right, or to bring back integrity to the whole system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not unlike any other industry, like I've always said. You know, as we've looked at kind of the marketplace through the lens of Innovero, like the moment you have stagnation, innovation stops and you need innovation to continue to be competitive. And you need to have innovation in order for you know the market to move, so to speak, and to continue at kind of that forefront of kind of the industry. In that way, and in order for you know athletes to have trust in a system and not have massive scandals happen. Your equipment needs to be changing, your processes need to be changing. In the training. You know ultra marathon training world, I'm sure your training schedules constantly have to be training, so it's just stagnation never leads to anything overly good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really appreciate that sentiment in all industries, right, and not just in sport. Okay, so with that table set, I always love that story. You, out of a lot of the people that I come into contact with and a lot of my colleagues, you have the best stories and that's just one of them. We're going to. We might talk about a few of them throughout the course of this podcast.
Speaker 1:We'll see how many of them actually bubble up to the surface because you've got the best ones working with the UFC. So we're going to go back several years and the reason that we're doing this to kind of lay it out for the listeners a little bit, because this is going to be a trip down memory lane is that several years ago the UFC contacted USADA to come in and create an anti-doping program for them, when one didn't really exist, or at least a fractured system existed at the time. And the reason that story in your experience is important is because trail running is in a very similar situation and I think that a lot of listeners will start to hear these analogs as you walk through a little bit of that experience. But before we get into this, I'm going to brag on you a little bit because you're an experienced person in the sphere. You worked for USADA for almost 11 years. Nearly five of them was within this UFC program. Five of them was within this UFC program and having done that for that long of a period of time gives you scope for the beginning, the middle and now the end of that UFC USADA relationship, which we're not going to get into too much, and I think that is extremely important to see all aspects of that. So we're going to start at the beginning.
Speaker 1:I've been a fan of mixed martial arts way before they were on ESPN, back, way before they were even on Fox uh sports, when they were on spike TV way back in the day, and I remember this whole.
Speaker 1:I remember this whole storyline quite well. From a business perspective, the UFC was trying to become a quote-unquote legitimate sport. They had a very clear directive in front of them they wanted to grow their audience size. They wanted to grow their market size. They wanted to be on ESPN. That was one of their gold standards, one of the pieces of that not certainly the only piece, but one of the pieces and one of the ways that they were trying to legitimize this cage fighting sport, which was ridiculed in a lot of sporting, a lot of sporting world, certainly is illegal in a lot of States. One of the key components of that was bringing anti-doping into that, into the sport itself, from a very, not from an early stage stage, but at least the middle part of their middle part of their business development. So they contact usada you're working at usada at the time, you have worked at usada at the time. Take us through how that initial conversation in that initial planning process actually started, and looking at this new sport and how are we going to solve for this sport.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to have to jog my memory because it was a number of years ago, but there had been ongoing conversations between the two organizations for months about what a potential anti-doping program could look like for the promotion and the sport and I think there was a pretty healthy learning curve on both organizations' parts to understand kind of what it would look like if the two got into bed with each other. You know, I think USADA came from that kind of relationship, from here's the anti-doping programs that we've run in the past, mainly in the Olympic space but also had dabbled in kind of the professional boxing space a little bit. So there was some familiarity with the combat sports space and kind of the dynamics and relationships that existed with some of the state athletic commissions that regulate. So you know, I think the conversations continue to get more and more productive to the point of it made sense, goals aligned.
Speaker 2:And I think, looking at it purely just from USADA's perspective at the time this was an organization that was looking to do the right thing for their athletes and to really set out to clean up their sport and we're able to get to a point where had very productive conversations on what the rules were going to be that their athletes were held accountable to, and once we reached agreeance on the rules, obviously there was a financial component to it as well. But then it was really what does it look like to implement a program for this? And that's where I came in and I was, fortunate enough, I was pretty early on in my career and the powers that be at USADA asked me to kind of transition over to run that program and I saw it as a really awesome opportunity and, you know, went in kind of headfirst to it and started the launch and rollout of that program.
Speaker 1:All right. So we're going to talk a lot about what you did, but let's set the table even further, because this is where the parallels actually start. So, previous to USADA coming in and running the UFC's anti-doping program, they had this very fractured system to where the state athletic commissions handled various components of this. So the Nevada state athletic commission, california state athletic commission, new York now, as it stands, the races are the key stakeholders in this. The races all decide. This is the rule framework that we're going to use.
Speaker 1:We're going to communicate that rule framework across the athletes in this manner. Some of them are going to borrow from WADA standards, some of them are going to make up their own. Other ones are not going to borrow from water standards. Some of them are going to kind of make up their own, other ones are not going to have kind of anything at all. And I want you to take, like the listeners, through what you, how you eventually started to look at that fractured landscape within all of the different state athletic commissions, just to get your feet wet into in terms of what was actually happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's spot on. It was very fractured in that different jurisdictions mainly the states that had these state athletic commissions that regulated the sport all had slightly different but slightly similar rule sets and it was very inconsistent from, I think, the athlete's perspective and from the UFC's perspective from the promotion and, when you've got some states that have marijuana, for example, the UFC's perspective from the promotion and when you've got, you know, some states that have you know marijuana, for example, as a prohibited substance and other states that don't, and have athletes be subject to a penalty in some states for a substance but not, you know, subject to that same penalty in a different state, just based on purely the rules and regulations that existed in that jurisdiction. I think.
Speaker 1:Or the law, or the law. Yeah, there was certainly that part of it, as well.
Speaker 2:But you quickly got to a point where you saw the inconsistency from state to state and you saw the need for kind of a harmonized rule set that all athletes, regardless of where they were competing, needed to be kind of held accountable to. And that's really where, you know, I think USADA came in to be able to help assist and develop. You know, that rule set that could be applied across all the jurisdictions, although there was certainly some, you know, dynamics at play with the state athletic commission's rules still very much applied. But to have kind of this overarching rule set that all athletes were subject to made education very much applied, but to have kind of this overarching rule set that all athletes were subject to made education very kind of. I don't want to say easy, but we could take a consistent approach on what we had to educate on so athletes could go be successful regardless of where they were going to fight.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, speaking of athletes being successful and where they're going to fight, it's beyond the US, and this is another parallel that we've got with trail and ultra running. So the UFC, at any one point in time, has about 600 fighters on their roster all over the world. All over the world US, brazil, asia, europe, africa, you name it. They've got them everywhere, all different languages. And here's Gabe raising his hand in the USADA offices just a few miles from my house, right here, saying I want to figure out how to implement a rule set and anti-doping across all those athletes in every single country.
Speaker 1:And not only that, there's also an ecosystem baked around all of the athletes. In most cases, they have a coach, they have a trainer, they have a nutritionist, they have any sort of other gurus you know kind of in their surroundings that are now influencing the athlete on any number of different things supplements, training, diet, nutrition, sleep patterns, all these other things. And that's a job that I wouldn't want. But yet you raised your hand and you wanted a big part of it. I don't even know where to start, because the athletes themselves and where they are located is enormous in and of itself. So you can have the floor, because you went through the entire process. Where did you like start to communicate the rules? What are the rules? How are we going to go and implement them? What are the some of the initial things that you had to take on to solve for this problem?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, there's something good about being young and naive, I think right Like you don't know until you know, right Type of approach.
Speaker 2:But what a fun challenge, right, like to look at that program and not fully appreciating kind of the scope and breadth of what it ultimately was. But know, I don't have the exact numbers, at one point I did I think there was athletes in 46 different countries speaking 18 different languages. Um, that came from various like educational backgrounds. Right, like you look at some of the athletes that we had to educate, like some of of them didn't, you know, read or write past an eighth grade level. So how do you take, you know, complex, intricate anti-doping rules and communicate it to an athlete who has never even heard of anti-doping and then allow them to be successful in that program?
Speaker 2:That was a really big challenge and that was kind of front and center in our minds as we started launching that program. We knew once the rules were established, like education was a paramount part of that program and being able to educate as many athletes as we possibly could was the first kind of key piece that we needed to tackle when implementing that program and, as you know, we hashed out kind of our implementation plan. You know we had to tackle when implementing that program and, as you know, we hashed out kind of our implementation plan. You know we had to get in front of athletes, so like we sat on the road, like we literally were on a traveling roadshow for the better part of like six to nine months and when we hit every major gym in the U S, every major gym in Brazil, I think we were in Japan, australia all throughout Europe.
Speaker 1:I think we were in Japan. I think we're in this country across the ocean. It was all a blur at some point.
Speaker 2:It was literally just from one country to the next to educate and get in front, of course, the athletes, but also encourage athlete support personnel to come To your point, the nutritionists, the coach, the trainers, whoever else touched the athletes or had an impact on athletes' lives and careers. We wanted to make sure they were educated, or at least had the chance to be educated, on what this new program was going to look like. So the education piece was so important to building a strong foundation to, I think, ultimately set that program up for a certain level of success that we saw.
Speaker 1:So one of the things with the education piece that you and I and some of your colleagues and I have talked about is because it's new to the athletes. You expect to receive a certain amount of pushback on any component of the system, the framework, the actual doping controls themselves. You know the atom system and the whereabouts system and the band substances and the band methods and things like that about system and the band substances and the band methods and things like that. I wonder if there's an easy way to kind of encapsulate just some of those types of pushback that you were getting from the community as you were going on this like epic roadshow around the world to educate these athletes and their teams that are around them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there was an anticipated level of hesitation. You know, with the program we went to gyms and you know, kind of had our standard deck of education materials that we would run through and talk to athletes about. But you know, more importantly, I think, tried to keep it very conversational and open it up for questions and I think the question we most commonly got was well, how does this impact me? Right, like this new program, these new rules, like how does it impact me? What's it going to do to my career? What happens if I test positive? What happens if I inadvertently test positive? Like all these different questions, I think started to get, you know, the wheels turning and a lot of fighters and coaches and trainers heads of, okay, how do we map out a plan to success for our athletes with that? So you know, I don't recall any like specific kind of items of pushback, like the whereabouts piece is always a little bit of a concern for athletes. Can you describe that before you?
Speaker 1:go forward, just so everybody understands what that means.
Speaker 2:In the Olympic space as well as in the UFC program. You know athletes were required and are required to provide their whereabouts 365 days a year, 24, seven, and I think at face value. And by whereabouts I mean like, where are you going to sleep at night, what are your training locations, what time are you going to be there? And then if you're going to jump on a plane and you want to go to Arizona for training, you need to update and tell us that. Or if I want to go on vacation with my family to Mexico, you need to update and tell us that. So like and the purpose of that is. The purpose of that is to be able to locate athletes anytime, anyplace, for no advance notice testing, essentially. So this is probably one of the biggest burdens that are placed on athletes that participate in a pretty thorough anti-doping program is having to provide their locations 24-7. Like it's a huge burden and no one's really figured out a good way to get around that yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the athletes are just like chip me, Literally Put a GPS chip on me and then you know where I'm at Exactly.
Speaker 2:And as technology, you know, continues to evolve and develop and obviously our smartphones are great tools, you know, for that but we've yet to see like a full-blown GPS tracking solution out there that allows athletes to just say you know what, I'm going to opt into this and let you know the person who's supposed to test me, find me with, based off the whereabouts app, like that I think is ripe for opportunity, but we're not there yet. And back to kind of your original point of gives more context on whereabouts, like it's literally providing your location 24 seven. And that comes with some teeth on it. If you don't do it, and you don't do that three times in a 12 or 18 month period I can't recall exactly what the window is at this point but you could be subject to a suspension. Yeah, so it's a really integral part of those anti-doping programs, but it comes with a huge burden on athletes.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's interesting also because some athletes previous to being subject to any sort of doping control will literally go off the grid for their training. As part of effective training, I just want to go and isolate myself in the mountains and train like a monk, right, and I don't want anybody to talk to me. I don't want to have any contact intentionally and other athletes will want to do that to dope Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's a really fine line and I can think of instances. You know, with a global program that we were running, I can think of examples of in Russia in particular. We're trying to show up to test athletes in Russia and it was a town in Russia that you've never heard of and they literally were three miles up a mountain in some mountain hut training and their point was I physically can't provide a location because no address exists here Right, so like it's that fine balance of looking at this from one a sport perspective and where athletes train and live, and not everything is us centric too Right, like we don't all have a physical address.
Speaker 2:That's one, two, three, four main street and you can find me here 24 seven, you know. I got to imagine in the kind of ultra trail running space, like you're literally off the grid for days at a time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sometimes I mean and once again to your point where not everybody has an address, that's quite common in Europe, right? How do you go and track somebody down? So certainly a point of consternation. Okay, so you're going in and you're traveling around, you and your posse, you and your you saw to posse you're going and traveling around to all of the gyms and to all the fighters and to all their networks around the entire world and all of these different and all of these different languages.
Speaker 1:One of the things that that I found interesting and unique about the program rollout that I think is worth discussing is this period of no fault that I don't know what the origin story of it is and maybe you can actually, maybe you can actually clarify this for me. But there was a period of time that USADA was going through their anti-doping program, just like they would with their entire roster of athletes, but there was no consequence to it. Why don't you explain, like how that originally formed, like what the idea of that is and what the everybody learned from that? Both USADA and the fighters and their teams learned from that whole?
Speaker 2:process. Yeah, I mean, I think at face value it was just it was a huge like this is going to be a fair program and we're going to put athletes' interests first. Like it is, we didn't want to be in a situation where we were leading lambs to the slaughter right and I think that was really important. In that the education component was critical, in that you can't have athletes subject to a robust anti-doping program without them knowing the rules very well, or at least having an opportunity to know the rules very well, and they need to know what can they put in their body and what they can't put in their body. They need to know the risks associated with dietary supplements and risks with being associated maybe with a certain medical practice or whatever it may be. So that period of no fault was primarily for us to give us a little bit of a runway to get all the education we needed done in that initial kind of six months of the program launching.
Speaker 1:That's a lot. That's kind of what I was getting at Like. It's six months. It's not only you and your team traveling around. It's this six month no fault program that you had all in an effort to initially educate the athletes and the people around them. Now I'm going to ask you this next question is Gabe being removed from it with some sort of clarity?
Speaker 1:now that you've kind of seen it transpire. Was it enough? Was all of that effort, was it enough? And if it wasn't, are there areas where you would have gone back and said I wish we would have done X, y or Z?
Speaker 2:differently Was the six months enough.
Speaker 1:The whole thing, the education and the no fault piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question to think. So, yeah, like being six years removed from that program and that job and looking back at, you know, the level of effort was made to educate athletes and give them that that period of time to kind of assimilate to the new rule set, I think was adequate and I also think you should appreciate that it was also a stair-stepped approach to the implementation of the testing. And that's where the teeth of a program really come in right. The rules are really important but the rules don't do a whole lot if you're not out there doing testing right and then getting results back from a laboratory.
Speaker 2:So while we spent a six-month period educating, when we started implementing the actual testing program, it wasn't zero to 60, it was, I think we just started primarily like in competition testing, so at events, and you'll hear a lot kind of in the anti-doping circles. Well, in competition testing is kind of an intelligence test in in some ways right, like you, even even when it was before that you had the state athletic commissions testing primarily in competition. So you always knew the possibility that you could be tested in connection, you know, with that. So you know, I think, by way of focusing on education for six months and then taking a stair-stepped approach to implementing a full program. I think it was close to 18 months before we had a full-blown program in place that we were contracted to do.
Speaker 1:And that context is really important. That's a big commitment. It's not turning on a light switch all of a sudden from one side to the other, like you don't have a program and then one month or one week later you have a program, a program, and then one month or one week later you have a program. You all, being the experts, are deliberately taking this to use your vocabulary, a stair-stepped approach, in order to make sure that everything is fair and also to give opportunity to work some of the kinks out within any number of different places where that's just going to happen.
Speaker 1:A worldwide system where you've got so many different moving parts and also the consequences of the results are very high as well. Results meaning a lot of different types of results the athletic results, the results of the anti-doping program, the results of the monitoring system, kind of everything gets lumped into that. A lot of people will come up with the criticism or have the impression that it's just too much, it's too complicated. Why don't we just test for EPO and testosterone and then give lifetime bans for everybody? Why does it have to be that complicated? For the people who are thinking that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a fair question. I think it's a fair thought thinking that. Yeah, I mean it's a fair question, I think it's a fair thought, you know, as someone who's spent most of their career working in anti-doping, you know I think I'd probably understand and appreciate kind of the intricacies and ins and outs of the system better than the person probably listening to the podcast. Right, you know, and I think the answer is athletes, or and not only athletes, just people that want to exploit the system, can find a loophole and a small loophole and they can drive a truck through it quickly if they want.
Speaker 1:So I think Russia brings the KGB in.
Speaker 2:Right, right, they're going to find a way. We're going to find a way.
Speaker 2:So I think you know, from an overall system perspective, like you need to keep it as tight as possible, but you have to balance that with the athlete fairness piece and it's this constant kind of balance and song and dance of in order to have a super strong, robust anti-doping program. We have to have X, y and Z, but the impact of that is often man, that's a huge burden on athletes. And then you know, I think there's the impact of that is all often man, that's a huge burden on athletes. And then you know, I think there's the the kind of value proposition component to it as well, of you put all these resources, you put all this money, you put all this effort and you get, you know, less than 1% of athletes that typically test positive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the criticism. That's the criticism of it.
Speaker 2:Right, but it's you know, I think it's, it's something that will never stop being asked, and the moment it is when the market becomes stagnant and people are saying, oh, we're good, we can be complacent.
Speaker 1:I remember. So I remember once again I'm a fan. I'm going to come at this from a fan perspective. I remember when this rolled out to the UFC and the criticism across the first six or 12 months of the program was if drugs are this big of a problem because that was kind of part of the pitch, right, the culture is rotten. Everybody's on testosterone and steroids and everything else. We're going to come in and fix this. If the culture is rotten and USADA comes in with the you know the superhero cape, you should catch some cheaters. And I think within the first six months of the program there were like two positives.
Speaker 1:It was a very small handful, and the criticism that emanated from that was one of efficacy, right, you're not catching people, and I kind of look at it as you know what. They did a good job educating the athletes in advance and weeding everything out so that the you know, so that people didn't get caught up in the system like later on the down the road. But I get both sides of that Right and so I just remember, like I said, I just remember that unfolding in real time as being a criticism, but it is something that you have to balance, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly, and I think as we looked at that program, we wanted to catch intentional cheaters in that process. It doesn't do USADA any good, the UFC any good any organization that's running an anti-doping program to go out and just pick off every unintentional cheater right Like. And that's where I think the criticism of it was in part because we took six to nine months to educate and it gave athletes an opportunity to change a behavior right Like. If and we heard obviously all the rumblings coming in it's a dirty sport. Athletes are intentionally cheating and again I go back to we didn't want to be in a situation where it was lambs to slaughter, it was. We need to be fair and measured in our approach. We need to give athletes an opportunity to know what the rules are and we need to give athletes an opportunity to change behavior.
Speaker 1:Change behavior, meaning they're using a prohibitive substance beforehand and now they need to not use it. I mean, I hate to like cut through it that sharply, but that's literally what you mean, that's literally what I mean.
Speaker 2:So so you need to change that behavior right, and you couldn't do it just necessarily overnight. So so I think, yeah, wrong or otherwise, was it harshly criticized? You know, six, nine months in of where all the positive tests, why have only two people been caught, you know? So you know, I just hope that gives some context. As far as you know, we took a very fair and athlete friendly approach as we tried to implement that program.
Speaker 1:I think the learning lesson from that is is you always have to take a long-term viewpoint with these things. You can't evaluate it off of 12 months of success or 18 months of success or even 24, you got to look like five or 10 years out on the road and everybody always holds cycling up as the example. But it actually is a good one. Inothingham telling me this years ago the solutions to it are never perfect. They are always going to be met with some level of imperfection and the pathway through that imperfection to use your vocabulary again is to stair, step up or ratchet up what you are doing over periods of time. You're using an iterative process to solve for this problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I mean, there is no perfect system. I think it's the pursuit of that perfect system that we're all focused on. And you look at the vocal critics of anti-doping out there now, not from kind of the outside looking in at anti-doping, but people that are, you know, career people within anti-doping, that are always constantly trying to improve the system and trying to improve the governance and trying to improve, you know, the prohibited list or whatever it may be Like. There's this constant focus on continuing to improve, continuing the hands to make it a more fair, more just, more athlete-friendly system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize that goes on behind the scenes. Usada has always been a great advocate towards WADA in changing things like that, whether it's procedurally, or things on the prohibitive list, which get changed every year.
Speaker 1:Every year and normally USADA has a little bit of a thumbprint on those types of changes and I think that that should absolutely be recognized. Okay, so let's try to solve for this problem. Right, we've gone through your experience and now we get to kind of publicly pick your brain on how we can solve it for ultra running. You know a little bit about the sport. You and I have conversed a little bit. I've also had a conversation with my colleague, who you have, who you've now been introduced to in current Malcolm, who's head of the professional trial runners associations anti-doping working group, at a conversation with her and a podcast that was released last week, mainly on kind of the business side of it. So how do we solve this as a business?
Speaker 1:So we're going to leave that side of it out right, we're going to wave a magic wand and we're going to fundraise $5 million or whatever it is. It's not that much. At the end of the day, it's manageable within our ecosystem, but we'll put that aside just for conversation sake. So let's say we have the money, just for conversation sake. So let's say we have the money. We have a chosen anti-doping entity to manage it. Let's just call it USADA. It could be the AFLD, it could be anybody else, but they're going to kind of operate with a similar blueprint. What happens next? If I were to hire Gabe away from your current business right now and said hey, dude, like, solve this for us. Knowing what you know about the community and about how the races operate and where the athletes are located and what the coaches are dealing with, and all of my personal gripes that I've brought to you over the years, how would you start to solve for this?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's rocket science. I think the blueprint is there In my mind, the piece that seems to be missing is kind of this unifying body that brings kind of athletes together and races together and is able to put together a rule set that everybody can agree to on that and then from there I think it's not hard to go out and find the service provider to be able to administer. That program is how I understand the space, based on my conversations with you and based off this conversation with Kareem. So I just what does it take to get?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's so easy, why don't we have it yet? Come on man, Come on bro.
Speaker 2:I don't know the space well enough to you know, wage my wagwan and snap my fingers to say, voila, it's done. But yeah, I guess I question back to you is like what would it take for that to happen? And then I think the anti-doping piece falls into place fairly easily and there's a real well mapped out kind of pathway and blueprint to follow when that happens.
Speaker 1:Well. So what has gone on in the background? And I think a little bit what you're alluding to is I've spent a few days with your former COO, matt Sticchio, mapping this very thing out, and it didn't take us very long. To be quite frank with you, we came up with a framework in I don't know, two or three different brainstorming sessions that maybe took 90 minutes apiece with a couple people in the room, and that framework is. It's not perfect, right To alluding to what I was discussing earlier. It's not perfect, but it's reasonable to start with.
Speaker 1:And finding the organization certainly isn't the linchpin right, or finding the service provider certainly isn't the linchpin. I think there's a small hurdle in finding the funding for it, and mainly it's not the total amount of funding, because the industry is big enough. There's enough economy going around that if we whittle the pool down to 100 or 150 people, which is probably what we're talking about, that's not that much money. It's the multi-year commitment piece that is the biggest deal, because I think you have to look beyond three or four years. You've got to look five, six, seven years, and having a secured source of funding is a lot scarier when you look that far down the road.
Speaker 1:But the thing that I kind of keep coming, and certainly the willpower is there. The athletes want it, the race directors want it, the brands want it, the coaches want it. I'm raising my hand. That's why I've been doing this for the past few years. I certainly want it. So the willpower is there. There's a coordination effort that I think is really lacking. There needs to be a person or a few people in a leadership position to galvanize all of the different stakeholders in the community to make actually everything happen, not just theorizing it in meetings and coming up with frameworks, like I've done, and things like that, like actually sitting down and doing the work. And the difficult part in that is is somebody has got to raise their hand and volunteer to do it, and that's a hard person or people to find.
Speaker 2:Sure, do you think it's the chicken and the egg in that, and we're not going to talk about the business side of it? If the funding was there and you said, hey, in year one we've got $250,000 that is going to go towards standing this up, like if you hire the right personnel, would it happen?
Speaker 1:That would be. That would reduce a barrier to entry If you had funding for people to actually work instead of be volunteers for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That would be that that would reduce a barrier for entry. I don't know if that's the biggest one, though, because at the end of the day, you can look through the window a little bit and see how this can play out. It's a self-appointed position for all intents and purposes. That is probably. Even if you do some fundraising for it, that's probably pretty poorly paid or not paid at all. If you don't get fundraising for it, that is rife with controversy, you get all of the criticism and very little of the kudos, and not a lot of people are going to stand up and raise their hand for that. There's a lot of people that should because there's people in the community that will, you know, do any different number of things to bitch and moan about stuff, but for the people to actually take action, I really hate to cast a shadow of a doubt on the community, because the community is actually quite wonderful, but to find that person is not an easy thing, or for that person to emerge is not an easy thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's a certain component of it. It's kind of thankless work in some ways. Like you, better be comfortable being a bit of a punching bag for the first year 18 months.
Speaker 1:You sound like you're coming at it from personal experience.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's fine and it's good because it's the right thing to do. And I think you can be principled in your approach. You know, as you look at that type of opportunity Like it's a selfless job, in that you're doing it for the good of the sport and for the good of sport as a whole, not just trail running and to draw parallels back to previous experience, you want to do what's right for athletes and you want to see the best athlete win.
Speaker 2:And if performance is being artificially enhanced. Does anyone want to see that person win?
Speaker 1:Who's your analogy?
Speaker 1:then, Does anyone want to see that person win? Who's your analogy then? Like, if we go into the trail and ultra space, do you need a team of people that travel around the world to all the training venues and like, get in front of people to educate? Like, what does that piece act? Cause I think that's important, yeah, something that you've mentioned, that's something that Tammy's mentioned, that everybody, every time I have this conversation occurring theme is we have to get in front of athletes somehow to tell them that these are the rules, here's how they're going to be implemented, here's what's coming down the pipeline. Be ready for it, because ultimately, it's your responsibility, a strict liability. How does that emerge in this space? Because here's the difference, where you have to kind of put your brainstorming hat on.
Speaker 1:In the UFC analogy or with any other NGB, it's the NGB saying you have to play a part of this. Sure, you have to, you want it, you want to be a fighter in the UFC. This is the deal. Sorry, bro, sorry, sorry ladies, this is a part. This is absolutely a part of the deal. It's baked into the entire system here. Sure, we can determine a pool, but there's gotta be a committee that determines who the pool is and that that I guess that institutional way of getting an athlete into the right organizational system doesn't exist. So how do you, how would you think that this group solves for that?
Speaker 2:I think you've got to find a starting point and you and I've had enough conversations where you know it's probably not going to happen overnight and you're going to take some baby steps to slowly get to the point where you'll be able to consider a bigger, more robust program. And there's certainly some high profile races now in the ultra space and trail running space that pay really good money. What are the anti-doping requirements or drug testing requirements from these races that are, you know, well-sponsored, well-funded, you know, probably PE backed?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know so you know I?
Speaker 2:just at what point do the races start? Really, you know, caring about? We want the people that are competing in our race to be clean.
Speaker 1:Can the races do that? Can the races say, hey, listen, we want to do out of competition testing for this group of athletes coming into the race.
Speaker 1:I mean, certainly that's not the most complete solution, but would there be any anything prohibiting a race? Let's just say the Pikes Peak marathon. Right, you saw it. It does the Pikes Peak in competition drug testing. But could they raise their hand and say you know what, if we're going to pay for, you know, gabe Bida's entry, we're going to test him for the six months leading into this race and whatever other athletes that we're going to give entries to. Is that prohibitive anyway? Or is that a reasonable starting point that races could actually once again waving the magic financial wand here?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I'm not a lawyer so I can't really answer that. But I'm trying to think back to some of the other similar experiences that I've had, where, you know, we've had private groups that came to us while we were at USADA and say, hey, we're going to contract you for like boxing for example, and we're going to enter an agreement with you and we're going to enter.
Speaker 2:We're in agreement with you and we're going to. You're going to do the in competition testing at the fight, but you're also going to do 12 weeks before you're going to run out of competition testing so so I suppose, and they're telling you who the people you're actually testing are yeah, they're determining the pool essentially the person you're contracting correct, it's these people you don't need to get involved in figuring out who these people are.
Speaker 2:We're going to tell you that so maybe there's some parallels there with individual races where you know, we know the athletes that are going to be running in our race and, as part of you know the agreement we sign as an athlete to run in that race, the jurisdiction applies back x number of days, x number of weeks where they can be subject to, you know, various anti-doping procedures, like I also think about the state athletic commissions in both boxing and the UFC space where I think as soon as the state athletic commission licensed the fighter in their state, they had jurisdiction to test them, type of thing.
Speaker 1:so not apples to apples but not far off is kind of my thinking there since we're kind of on this subject, I wonder if you can explain to the users when there is a private contractor who determines who in the pool is getting tested, right, so we know who the pool is. It's 600 tested, right? So we know who the pool is. It's 600 fighters. Ufc sign on the dotted line. You're now subject to this. Yeah, how does it happen that fighter A gets tested 10 times a year and fighter B gets tested twice a year and fighter C gets tested one times a year? How does that transpire?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean at USADA we had a pretty robust kind of risk assessment tool that drove a lot of that. There's some probably behind the scenes things that I can't necessarily talk about, but a lot of the biological data that you get from results obviously drive future testing plans.
Speaker 1:So you're looking at an athlete's biological profile and saying this looks funny, or you have a program that says this looks funny or this doesn't look funny and you apply more resource to it.
Speaker 2:Here's an abnormal result that we got. It's not a positive test, but here's an abnormal result that may trigger some follow-up testing. As a result of that. I also think, as you look at the UFC program in particular, but probably some parallels to the trail running space how often is an athlete competing? Are they running one race a year? Are they fighting once a year? Are they fighting five times a year? Three times a year? Whatever that number is right. You know, there's something that went into kind of driving our testing plans that coincided with how frequently was that athlete competing as well In the UFC program in particular was. You know it was really important to make sure we had athletes tested in advance of them being like be fighting and having results back as well, because, being a combat sport man, it was a ton of risk with. If you've got an athlete that goes and fights and then you get a positive test and that athlete inflicted serious bodily harm to another person, there's a liability element to it as well.
Speaker 1:So you have to get the test back and potentially adjudicate it in a reasonable enough time to clear an athlete to fight another opponent. Is what you're saying?
Speaker 2:Correct, yeah. And we had you know mechanisms built in where you could expedite adjudication processes to have you know a decision. You know right, wrong or otherwise, as far as you know whether or not that athlete should be able to compete. So the pool.
Speaker 1:First off, to kind of encapsulate my question and answer really quick, the pool is created by an external organization. In the UFC's case they say listen, this is the five or 600 fighters that you have jurisdiction over. Usada is then determining. Here's how we deploy whatever, however many tests you had budget for, right, we're going to use some intelligence to do that. We're going to. It's not going to be completely random. We're not throwing everybody into a random number generator and just drawing names out of hat. We're going to use some intelligence to direct those resources the most efficiently, in the most effective way, effective way possible. If you need to balk on this question, that's totally fine, cause I know there's a lot of stuff under the hood that you're not at liberty to talk about. But I was wondering if you can divulge a little bit of what goes into that intelligence. What directs? Johnny is going to get 10 tests and Susie's only going to get one test. Is there anything that would that the listeners would appreciate to know in that whole process that you can like elaborate on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think at a high level for sure, and I touched on a couple of them already, like competition schedule, how often you're competing. You know biological data that we get back on tests that have been completed and obviously each one of those tests is screened for a panel of you know prohibited substances, but also looking at you know various biological markers that may be indicative of performance, enhancing drug use. And if any of those you know kind of markers come back that we see that isn't enough to warrant kind of a actionable positive test or something to move forward with you know pursuing kind of a rule violation, then at a minimum it may trigger a follow-up test. So it's very strategic in that regard, in that it's not just you know thrown at the wall to see what sticks and saying, hey, we're going to test this athlete five times, this athlete twice and this athlete not at all. I mean, it's very kind of incremental in that we're obviously going to start with the first test and that first test may trigger another test and that second test may trigger a third test, and then, oh, this athlete is running or fighting in three weeks, five weeks, six months, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Oh, here's a marquee event coming up. It's the super bowl, for the sport is. You know it's a big money purse. Is there a higher incentive to dope based off of the financial reward that may exist with that? So all those factors play into what that kind of strategic testing plan is and looks like.
Speaker 1:Can I go back to the blood biomarker piece that you mentioned at the beginning of that answer and maybe I can come up with an analogy that you can either refute or confirm. So in the running world because I've heard of this done in anti-doping circles you'll look at hematocrit and or hemoglobin as potential for somebody using EPO. Sure, so you might not be able to detect the EPO, but you're detecting the hematocrit and or hemoglobin increases, which then gives you the ability to turn up the testing Is that a fair analogy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I'm not a scientist so I don't know the specific ins and outs with you know the red blood cell counts and the hematocrit levels and those you know type of measurements that they're doing. But yes, as you look at, I think the biological data that comes in it could trigger follow-up testing. For, as you look at, I think the biological data that comes in it could trigger follow-up testing for specific you know substances that may be thought that could be being used as a result of those.
Speaker 1:How much does the anonymous tip line fall into the equation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was actually really interesting during my time at the UFC, Like you had dynamics with, obviously, guys fighting each other and then you had competing gyms and competing. So you know our tip line was pretty active, it sounds like a very politically correct answer.
Speaker 2:Our tip line was pretty active, but you know that being said, there was a pretty well-established process where USADA has a team of investigators that would seriously look into those tips and determine whether or not they were actionable. So just because we got a tip didn't mean it was oh, we're throwing the kitchen sink, you know, from a testing perspective at this person.
Speaker 2:It was no, we'll put it in the expert's hands, we'll let our investigators look into it and we'll let them come back and say yeah, there was some actionable information here that we think you should follow up of, or? I think this is bogus and you shouldn't consider it seriously.
Speaker 1:But the fact of the matter is USADA gets a lot of valuable information from that anonymous tip line Like they. In all my interactions with them they have always encouraged people, if they know anything about anything, to go ahead and contact that, because they have resource set up to do just what you went through to filter through the nonsense, to get to something that actually might be actionable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think they get a ton of data from it. I mean, again, being five, six years removed from it. I'm not sure what it looks like today, but I I think it's an important piece of you know, providing not only athletes but people who may know of you know inappropriate activity going on that can report it in an anonymous way and not be kind of viewed as that snitch in some ways.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I imagine I'm kind of throwing the fighters underneath the bus. They're all typically very lovely people but I imagine that's at least a point of consternation because of the competitive nature of that sport and because of the personalities within that sport as well. They're absolutely going to think that there's a conspiracy theory against them, that they got tested, you know, six times in the last two months or whatever, because it's so-and-so in the rival gym that you know like bugging the anonymous tip line the whole time.
Speaker 2:It actually got to a point where you know we saw fighters wear tests as a badge of honor.
Speaker 1:It's like the more tests.
Speaker 2:I have I have, the cleaner I can demonstrate I am like, the more it's beneficial to, I think, their personal brand. So we definitely saw kind of the testing pieces, a badge of honor that athletes you know did kind of took upon themselves to make it that not by no means was it us promoting that we started to see this in the trial in ultra space.
Speaker 1:The last conversation we had I mentioned this is with the afld is uh, which is french anti-doping. They've somehow co-opted some of the elite french trail runners into their system like an athletics athlete, so like any other track and field athlete, and I don't profess to exactly know what the mechanism behind that is, whether it's like a club type of license, like we see here, usa cycling or whatever. But one of the interesting things that I've seen come about because of that is the French athletes that are now part of it are now putting that out on social media, just in the vein that you mentioned, which is as a badge of honor, like I've kind of made it, you know and like hey, listen, like this is part of the gig, Everybody get you know, kind of get in line yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2:I mean, I have always looked at kind of the collection process as an inconvenience, but I've seen just still, you know, following folks on social media of like people embrace it a lot more when they get that first test or that second test. It's like I have made it. I'm an elite enough athlete now to be drug tested and there's something like admirable about that, I think.
Speaker 1:I want to go down the road a little bit further now and we've talked about, like, the whole setup right, how to set it up, how to go and educate the athletes. You have to have a system. Everybody has to create, everybody has to kind of agree upon the rules, even though we might agree to disagree on some of them. We're going to have somebody implement the testing, somebody do the results management, but at the end of the day, athletes get caught and athletes get caught cheating. How did you like go around the gyms and like counsel the athletes on that particular process, like somebody in here, just as a proportion of math right is going to have to go through that process? Yep, like, what was that like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, nothing stands out really when we were going through that process of you know educating athletes on that process and we spent a good time, you know, educating athletes on how not to get yourself in that process.
Speaker 1:How not to get tripped up in the system. Yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 2:And again, we didn't want to lead lambs to the slaughter and we didn't want to catch unintentional cheaters or punish unintentional cheaters. I think is kind of the more important piece with that. But I think the important piece is there is a process in place that allows for a fair and just outcome. And if you took a supplement that was contaminated and it was relatively low risk, for example, there is a pathway for you to essentially get out of jail free card type of thing. And I think it's also important as you look at the programs, you know you always have the opportunity to go to an arbitration where you have an independent arbitrator. You know, hear your case.
Speaker 2:So it's not necessarily you saw to making the decision on that. Yes, they make the initial decision, but if the athlete doesn't agree with that decision, they have the opportunity to go have an independent arbitrator hear that where both sides can present their case and it's an independent person who makes that decision. And I think kind of the scales of justice are at play there, right, and that's the piece where you know we talked a lot about kind of the fairness of what that adjudication process looks like. In the event you do find yourself in that. But also, you know there was mitigating factors, there was kind of extenuating circumstances as well, that all played in into that. So you know there was a lot of time spent on kind of the intricacies of if you find yourself in this situation.
Speaker 1:Here's kind of the avenue and pathway that you're going to go through on that Within the UFC program. Is that something that USADA provided, which would be more analogous to how the how they have it with the NGBs, or is that something that the UFC provided for the fighters In regards to just the arbit, the arbitration?
Speaker 2:eventually, I think the UFC paid the independent arbitrator. I think there was an agreement.
Speaker 1:the financial sticking point in a lot of these negotiations is once you go to arbitration, your cost goes up like tenfold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it kind of gets ridiculous at that point. You see that argument a lot in the Olympic space with Cass and just how cost prohibitive it is from the cast in the court of arbitration for sport, yeah, so yeah, so I don't quote me on it, but I think the arrangement was the independent arbitrator had a separate agreement or the independent arbitration kind of committee had a separate agreement with the UFC on what that kind of ultimately looked like and the costs associated with that were.
Speaker 1:Because you had, I mean during the lifetime of that program, and we're not going to go through all of those because I don't want to give you any more gray hairs, gabe. There were several high profile instances of where they had to go through that adjudication process and that is never any fun because it's all in the public spotlight. The athlete brings it in the public spotlight, the anti-doping agency brings it into the public spotlight and here the agency that the athletes are competing underneath, which is the UFC, brings it into the spotlight as well. The conflicting points all come into the spotlight and it gets adjudicated both in the court of public appeal, which is always very tenuous and tricky, and it also gets adjudicated by a panel of experts or an expert, and those things inevitably come into conflict, which creates a lot of the consternation between the public and anti-doping and athletes and things like that. All of those arenas kind of overlapping at the same time with any one particular issue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was front and center, you know, kind of day in and day out of that program. Right Like the court of public opinion was quick to judge, as it always is, not just in, you know the UFC, space or sports, but even in everything anymore.
Speaker 2:It just moves so fast, you know, with that. But you know I think that process takes time, right Like it. You know, in order for kind, for kind of. Let's take, for example, if an athlete you know is claiming a contaminated product or a contaminated dietary supplement caused their positive test, well, it takes time to one, identify what it was to go, source it independently, send it off to a lab test, confirm it. Okay, that one wasn't it. Let's go through that whole process again. So so there's a lengthy, you, I think, process that needs to play out in order for a fair outcome to be reached.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here's the issue that I've always brought up with. That is that the people that are deliberately cheating and the people that genuinely have that happen to them and there are people in both of those categories use the exact same excuses. Both of those there are people in both of those categories use the exact same excuses.
Speaker 2:I didn't know I had a contaminated this.
Speaker 1:my food from whatever burrito truck was contaminated Like. It's the? It's no, seriously, it's the exact same thing. And in the court of, in the court of public opinion, with all due respect to the public it's impossible to weed through who is telling the truth and who is lying. Even when you get the group of experts in the room and you've seen the minutes from those meetings even when you get a group of experts in the room, they will still disagree on points, and these are people who have been doing it for 20 years and do it for a living. So, anyway, I don't know why I bring up that whole point, but I'm sure that we will encounter that as we start to unroll different processes, because it's inevitable that we have these two groups of people that are doing very different things. They're saying they're doing the exact same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the real challenge of the program, right? Like how do you differentiate between kind of those two claims? You know with it and that's where you know I think the adjudication process really dives into that and that's where you know I think the adjudication process really dives into that.
Speaker 1:But you know the public, 99% of people aren't going to go read a 40 page decision.
Speaker 2:It's dry, legalese and it's tough to digest. But, like, if you really want to get down to you know what drives those outcomes, you have to kind of read through those big lengthy decisions and they're tough to digest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is and, like I said, inevitably it's an inevitability, because every sport has a blueprint to where, or has the same storyline, to where they have to face. They have to come face to face with somebody that everybody loves. That is in this position the athlete is saying this and the court of opinion is saying that and the anti-doping agency is saying something slightly different, and who's right and who's wrong gets muddled with the personalities that are involved.
Speaker 2:I think you should leave it at that they get muddled with the personalities. How's that nasty process?
Speaker 1:I want to give you back the floor a little bit, because the whole purpose of this podcast was to use your experience as a blueprint for how the community can kind of get galvanized around this idea to you during that entire tenure that you had either before, during or now, looking at it on hindsight any like words of wisdom or any pearl, like nuggets that you can give the audience that's listening today to, to where they can take it and at least take some initial steps or, as we're going through it, relisten to this podcast and go oh yeah, gabe's told us that this was going to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I think, stepping back and looking at it from my six years of involvement and seeing where that program started from day one to where it was when I stepped away from it in 2017, 2018, whatever it was, you know, the program grew a ton in. Like with any new program, like you need to be flexible, need to be nimble, but you also have to be strict yeah, it's so confounding, and that's the balance, I think.
Speaker 2:But you know we saw it on the ufc program like we weren't afraid to change the rules when it was the right thing to do for the athletes in fairness of the athletes, in fairness of the sport.
Speaker 2:I think anti-doping as a whole is very rigid, right Like to your point. Like you and your, your comment is spot on of just the perception of you have to be strict. You have to be strict, yes, but you also need to look at this with a common sense approach from time to time, and it's certainly not a one size fits all approach, and I think there's certainly nuances within the trail running space that I have no idea about. That you probably do, and the people that are involved in it say you know, hey, here's what the UFC did, here's what WADA does, here's what professional sports do. There's probably components of each of that apply and work.
Speaker 2:I'd say, take a broad approach to it and focus in on what really matters from the anti-doping perspective. And obviously you want to have a strong, fair, robust program that protects the health and safety of runners, that protects the sport as a whole. It's clearly a growing sport that's gaining more and more momentum. It's attracting more big names. It's attracting more sponsorship dollars. The incentive to potentially cheat may only be getting higher and higher. So you know, I think finding a realistic starting point and building on that is kind of what I would kind of step back and say through my experience, like that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1:How important is the timeframe to get to the starting point? Cause you came in. Yeah, I once again. I went through my fan. Sorry, hit my microphone here. Once again I went through my fan journey with the UFC. I watched them on Spike TV on Fox.
Speaker 1:Sports, and then all the way through. Espn and USADA came in maybe towards the early part, but certainly not at the very beginning, but early enough, at least in my observation that you didn't have to unwind cycling's problem, right, right. So I wonder if you can kind of describe to listeners that like how important it is to get in early enough to where you're not unwinding all these like cultural problems and systemic widespread. You know things going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you certainly don't want to be late. Right to the party and they were almost late.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was kind of I think they're close, yeah and hence why they ultimately came to us.
Speaker 2:Right, they said they, they were really smart and they saw the writing on the wall of the direction the sport was heading, and no different than you know. I are sitting here having this conversation today. I think you're seeing where the sport is heading and probably hear the rumor mill circling within. You know the sport. You know the sooner the better. Right Like. Is there anyone that's going to make an argument that you know we put this anti-doping program in place too soon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, nobody's going to say that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So people will make the argument that it's not enough right off the bat? Sure, but to your point you can always start. It's always easier to start and escalate than it is to start and ratchet down. Yeah it down, because the issue you run into when you start really hot and heavy is you tend to paint yourself into a corner that you can't get back out of, because then you're viewed as is soft on doping.
Speaker 2:I think it's a lot harder to unwind perceptions and culture than it is to implement a program.
Speaker 1:So don't let the perceptions and culture get into it. I once again I've said this for the last three or four years you've heard me rant on it and any number of breakfasts that we've had together we still have a good culture. That's not static, it's dynamic, and if you get ahead of the problem before the culture changes, it's way way easier to change than when you have a rotten culture and you're unwinding all the education and all of the culture and all the bad actions and everything kind of kind of all at once. There's just fewer problems to have the earlier you get into the game.
Speaker 2:And I think you're a step ahead of. You know some sports in ways in that you've got crossover athletes that had competed at an elite level, that have been subject to Olympic style drug testing programs, that are now competing in in trail running or ultra and they're asking for it in some degrees, right Like we. We need this. We can see where this is heading If it doesn't happen. You also have a landscape where, yes, you have different kind of fractured jurisdictions, but you have the likes of AFLD and in France that's already doing something in the space. So there's a certain standard that you know athletes are starting to grow accustomed to. You know not to jump back into kind of the overarching regulator, but you know when does the AIU start to look at the sport and say, man, this is gaining some serious momentum. Do we need to have a part of this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a potential catalyst, the AIU being the Athletes Integrity Unit. Is that the right acronym? Athletes Integrity Unit? I always forget the last acronym like agency right?
Speaker 2:I always want to say something else.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I think you're right that it's ripe for somebody, for an organization that currently exists, to take over some of this. But I don't think that's all of the solution because of this fractured nature. I do think that a big part of it is taking that fractured nature and galvanizing it, and I don't know what the format of that is. I don't profess to have the answer here, but galvanizing that in somewhere. And what I mean by that is taking the brands, taking the race, the races, taking the elite athletes, taking the coaches, anybody who's a key stakeholder, and galvanizing that group together and saying, okay, this is what we all agree upon. You might disagree a little bit here. You might disagree a little bit here, but this is generally what we all agree upon. Let's go. Let's kind of go forward with that. I don't think we're kind of like close but far.
Speaker 2:I don't know how else to describe. Yeah, I I think you're probably spot on with that right, like you're starting to have the conversations, you're starting to think about it, which is great, but you're a long way from cup to the lip on some of that. So plenty of room for progress and growth. But yeah, as I step back and I look at kind of the various different sport organizations that have anti-doping programs, regardless of how robust they are, all have some kind of overarching unified body that say this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it.
Speaker 1:It's hard to do it without, because inevitably you're only as strong as your weakest link Sure. Inevitably you're only as strong as your weakest link Sure. And so the weakest link ends up getting exposed as some sort of difference in opinion on what the rules and what the sanctions should be. It's two kind of fundamental pieces of it what are the rules, how do you enforce them, and what are the sanctions? On the back end of it, even when you have an organizing system, those things come into conflict and typically get exposed the most. So you can imagine that if there's not an over over over, an overarching body that sets the tone for all of that, how much more of that consternation would actually exist.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of what scares me about the fractured nature right now. I recently we were remarking before the, before the podcast came on I had our intern, zach Fenske, shout out to you for doing this for me. I had him go out and survey the landscape of all of the races that have some sort of anti-doping rules or framework and there's no consistency between any, and nor would you expect there to be. I'm not doubting the efforts of those races to actually do something. I actually applaud them for doing something and not nothing. But when you line them all up, some of them do in competition testing. Some of them say that you're subject to out of competition testing. Some of them ban NSAIDs right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ibuprofen and things like that.
Speaker 1:Some of them adhere to the WADA code. Some of them adhere to both the WADA code and the WADA watch list, interestingly enough. So I don't know how they're going to test for that, but the things that maybe might be banned next year, they also test for that and that would be considered a prohibitive substance in that one particular race. And so my point with all of that is is, if we use that as a little bit of a blueprint for the fractured nature, my fear is is that fracturing continues to propagate where everybody's kind of got their own opinion and then nobody can keep track of the rules. That's why the overarching body is extremely important, so that everybody can play by the same set of rules, Because at the end of the day and you know this just as much as anybody else that's all the athletes want. They just want to know what the freaking rules are, so they can stay on the right side of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know the fact that athletes are starting to ask for that is, I think, a huge step right, like if you had the flip side of that, where athletes didn't want it, I'd be way more concerned about it ever happening right. Versus that, you have a concerted effort from a group of athletes that are starting to ask for it and push for it is a huge step in the right direction, and they'll be the ones who, I think, ultimately can drive it across the finish line.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ultimately, I do think that the athletes have to want it the most. And if I get any comfort in this whole process, despite all my misgivings and frustrations and things like that with the lack of progress, of which I've had a lot that I've expressed on this podcast and in in privately as well, I'm heartened by the fact that the athletes want it so much. They might not all want the right, not the right. They might not all want the same thing or the exact same thing, but they all still want something and I think that that will eventually win out.
Speaker 2:That will power will eventually win out that willpower will eventually win out Yep.
Speaker 1:Thanks, man, thank you. Thank you for your counsel over the years. By the way, we always have a fun time when we get together we do.
Speaker 2:There's no shortage of fun stuff to talk through.
Speaker 1:I'm sure this is just the first of many. Will you continue to be a resource for?
Speaker 2:me Gabe I certainly will be. Thanks, man, and if you would want to, I'm well, I have in the past and I continue, we'll continue to so. Thanks, man, anything else?
Speaker 1:anything else you want to leave the listeners with.
Speaker 2:Normally, I give the chance for people to plug their own stuff, but you already have a baked in audience with your business yeah, yeah, we're niche enough where I'm not sure it's going to resonate all that well, but no, I just appreciate the opportunity to be on and fun to talk through this stuff. Thank you glad I can lend my past experience to hopefully set ultra and trail running up for success in the future.
Speaker 1:We're going to figure it out.
Speaker 2:You will Hang in there.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it, there you go. Much thanks to Gabe for coming on the podcast today and, more importantly, gabe, thank you for all the personal counsel that you have given me over the years and thank you for the counsel that you have now given to the trail and ultra running community. As we mentioned throughout the course of this podcast, I do think that a lot of the learning lessons that Gabe experienced during his time at USADA and specifically with this program within the UFC are great learning lessons and a great blueprint for what we can do in trail and ultra running is going to take a little bit of willpower, a little bit of money and a little bit of everybody coming together to figure it out, but I do believe that all the elements are there to take some initial steps. So thank you for. Thank you, gabe, for coming on the podcast. I appreciate all the listeners out there for putting up with the last four weeks of podcasts that were all about the same thing. These are not going to be my most popular podcast, they're not going to be the most downloaded, they're not going to be the most liked, they're not going to be the most shared, and I don't care, because I think that they are the most important. That's one of the great things about not having to monetize.
Speaker 1:My podcast is I can kind of do whatever I want. My podcast is I can kind of do whatever I want. I do hope that if anybody out there and in particular, the key stakeholders, the elite athletes, the race directors, the brand managers and the coaches of elite athletes I do hope that you have taken all of the information over the course of the last four weeks to heart, because it is our responsibility to shape the community going forward, and we all play a role in that. There's something for everybody in all of that. Whether you're a coach, an athlete, brand manager, race director, we can all take something from what we've discussed over the course of the last four weeks and do something with it to push this thing forward. The learning doesn't stop, though. The learning doesn't stop, though Not yet, because the moment that this podcast gets released, I'm going to release a free edition of my research newsletter, research Essentials for Ultra Running.
Speaker 1:That is all about you guessed it an anti-doping theme. Every single month, the research team and myself we review three papers that are pertinent to the trail and ultramarathon space, and this month's issue is going to be all about anti-doping and it is going to be for free, unpaywalled. You don't have to register your email address. I'm not going to spam you after the fact. I want you to download it and send it to your friends, copy it, plagiarize it, do whatever you want to get this information out there. So please go to my website, jasoncoopcom.
Speaker 1:Forward slash research essentials for ultra running. It will be the very first thing that you see. You will not have to enter anything and I will not crawl and try to find you around the web in any way, shape or form, because all I want to do is I want this information to get out there in the public so that the future of the sport continues to be as healthy as it is right now, and even healthier once we get one of these systems in place. So y'all go and check that out. I hope that everybody has taken the information to heart that we have had over the course of the last four weeks. We will be back to our regular scheduled programming next week with another killer edition of the CoopCast. Appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you out there and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.