Juice Beast
This picture is from the women’s world sprint championship, as US skater Jen Rodriguez is passing Belarussian Anzhelika Kotiuga in a 500m race. Jen won The World Championship, and Kotiuga took second overall.
These flyers were all over the Utah Olympic Oval earlier this summer, celebrating Jen’s win. The graffiti on this particular flyer is the handiwork of Eva Rodansky. Jen Rodriguez is one of the nicest people you will ever meet, and would never say anything this nasty. Eva, however, never hesitates to fire the sarcastic machine gun of brutal honesty whenever she can.
The reason for Eva’s graffiti is that a random drug test had just caught Kotiuga with artificial Testosterone and norandrosterone in her system. The ISU just gave her a 2 year suspension. Here is the press release.
It’s funny, but if you look at Kotiuga’s career results, see if you can find the place where she might have started doping, I think it’s pretty evident. It’s worth noting that she was 31 and had already been on the world cup circuit for 7 years when suddenly there is this dramatic improvement in her results. Now maybe there is another reason, a different coach or training plan, or maybe it’s just circumstantial, but I find it kind of odd for a 31 year old sprinter who has been on the world cup scene that long, to suddenly go from pack fodder to almost winning the world sprint championships.
But she didn’t win, so there is some truth in the idea that nice guy/girls DO finish first, at least in the technique intensive sport of speedskating, what is depressing is that it took the ISU this long to catch a cheater.
Someone might point out that I started this sport at 31, and now at almost 35 am going really fast too, but there is a crucial difference, I have improved a very consistent amount ever year (roughly 1.3 sec a year in the 500), there has been no “sudden” drop of my times, and also, I am still friggin learning how to skate! every week or two I feel like I figure something else subtle out about technique. Kotiuga probably has been speedskating her whole life, and also that is likely why she fell victim to those internal demons of “winning at all cost”.
Filed under: from the coffee shop
Where do I begin????
This story of cheating saddens and angers me to no end on from so many angles. First it saddens me, because a beloved friend and someone I have the utmost respect for and who has taught me so about life is from the same federation was screwed over by them for not wanting to train under the same coach as Kotyuga (her husband) in Calgary, and is now stuck back in BLR training in subpar conditions, and this guy has real talent, and is a national record holder at age 21. It also sickens me, because this “woman” is a mother. What does it teach her daughter, and other children in the sport, which is another thing it saddens me about. Speedskating has been a clean sport for a while now, and this. Plus, why did the ISU wait so long to issue this press release on something that happened in middle to late Feb? Yes, I know there are two samples, but I know it doesn’t take that long for tests to come out, and you even mentioned that you guys knew about it this summer. And, in the end, you’re right, she didn’t win!!! But, I’d be pretty willing to bet that one weekend wasn’t the first time she “used”.
SO SAD… SO VERY VERY SAD!!!!
thanks for the comment steph, I should have said that I found that link to the ISU press release from your blog.. my bad.. steph is at http://texx.blogspot.com/
I have gotten a lot of emails from my folks about this post.. hmmm…
oh, and I want to make clear I don’t think for a moment that speedskating is a completely “clean” sport. There are always rumors, But what is good about speedskating is that technique is SO overwhelmingly important, that simply being juiced up is no guarantee of winning.. This is not the case in cycling, where the cardiovascular demands are so overwhelming, that doping leads to a situation of “two speeds” of racing, the doped and the not doped.. you could really see it in the tour in the mid-90’s, oh, and its worth mentioning, Lance’s times up Alpe d’Huez are minutes slower than many racers during that “doped” era..
Yes, some of the salt lake city crowd had suspected Kotiuga, due to her world class speed even with obvious technical flaws, and when the test results were rumored, there was lots of “aha!!” going around.
I look at Kotiuga with pity, and some compassion, the same way I would look at an aneoriexic or a heroin addict, as that there was something missing in her heart, those “demons” I reference, that lead her to make this choice… british cyclist David Millar was recently caught for EPO use, and he had won the world time trial championship, and he was quoted as saying something like he was in emotional agony, and that caused him to make the choice to cheat, and then when he finally did win, he felt worse, cause he knew it was false…
here is the link, and although this is not the original story I read, it gives an idead behind what what millar went through (still unforgivable, but there is a human side to most decisions)..
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/7242_912094,00180009.htm
I totally see what you are saying, and I think in sprinting that technique is much more important than in allround.
I also see the “human factor”, but in the end, I still feel like you should always do what is right in the end for the the sake of what is right. Ya know what I mean?
And thanks for the plug, although there really isn’t much excitement going on there these days. hahaha
BTW, and I like the excitement-less days sooooo much more than the other kind of days!!!!
Maybe we should think about our own skating rather than focus on other competitors’ business. We don’t know anything of the circumstances supporting this outcome yet everybody jumps all over it. Remember Lance Armstrong tested supposedly positive. I don’t see any ridicule or making fun of that incident.
Typical of Eva Rodansky. Nice pic.
when an athlete breaks the law or rules, and is thusly convicted by the authorities that be in said case, it becomes a matter of public forum, and it is important to publicize and have discourses about it; this is democracy.
if journalists, and bloggers, like andrew in this case, weren’t to help reveal the truth about drug abusers, and what happens to them [eventually] kids might, yes, get the idea that it ‘pays off’ to be a junkie…?
and andrew wasn’t ‘ridiculing’ anybody, dr. cool? can you not decipher a paragraph in plain english?
no speek english…but see picture. dum dum dum.
[…] ould actually experience a doper taking away something you have worked a lifetime towards. As I talked about in a previous post on this blog, the 2nd place finisher at world sprints behind you was caught do […]