I read it last night and it was a good piece, and honestly there is little to find fault with in the reporting objectively speaking.
They included lots on correspondence as well as interviews to support the articles, emails, texts between coaches and clients, speaking with Luke's mother and his autopsy details, etc.
I agree that standards need to be changed, but I don't see how it will happen.
EDIT: It would have been nice to see opposing views, but with so few people willing to speak on the record how would that work?
I don't know man, other than a couple of small things, I think it's a pretty solid article.
It's b.s. to not mention Sandoe's death was suicide, but other than that, I don't know how you can say it's "very weak as far as concrete facts". They literally have exact drug protocols, email and text exchanges from coaches/clients, and direct quotes from basically everybody involved (that's still alive). This person definitely did their homework.
Edit: Hawkmoon beat me to it, ahhaaha.
I think the Sandoe thing rubbed me the wrong way the most. While I do agree there is some very dangrous coaches, and I gave my opinion in the past about a coach having clients die and having dangreous protocols and the craziest thing is that supposedly he is coaching 400 to 500 atheletes (which would mean he can dedicate under 10 minutes to a client per week... ridicoulus) only to have my posts and the threads deleted.
But back to Luke's case. Them writting:
Sally Sandoe, whose 31-year-old son Luke died in the United Kingdom in 2020, said it’s inexplicable that so many bodybuilders are getting sick and dying and no one is confronting the problem.
“It is an absolute free-for-all,” Sandoe said. “There’s just real destruction and devastation and destroyed lives. How is that fair? How can that carry on? It can’t. It has to stop.”
... "
A cardiac pathologist noted in a report that Sandoe had an enlarged heart with acute left ventricular failure and left ventricular hypertrophy.
“The underlying cause of his cardiac enlargement is likely to be his bodybuilding,” the report concluded.
And them not reporting that it was actually suicide, is very poor journalism. I've watched pretty much every podcast with Luke, and he has stated many times he did not have any relationship with his mother. To a point that he said he hasn't even spoken to her in years. And then after his death, his mom tried to blame Redcon, bodybuilding whatever she could without ever acknowleding the suicide. It seemed like she hasn't been in his life for years but all of the sudden she claimed to know exactly what had happened. I know at the end of the day a mother will always be a mother, and I could be 100% wrong here, but it almost seemed to me that she was looking to blame someone so that she could sue not because she truly believed it. But that has nothing do with the article, the article is poor for simply omitting the suicide aspect.
Then there is the Gearhart one where they say:
"the coroner’s office concluded that Gearhart died of cardiac arrest with a number of contributing factors, including caloric restriction, a thickened heart muscle, the use of steroids, diuretics and metformin, along with
covid-19"
So they just skip over the fact that she had Covid-19 and like thousands of others died from it, but instead focus on the caloric restriction and a thickened heart muscle (which all athletes have not just bodybuilders)
Lastly the Clarise one who basiclly complained that she was suffering
"sometimes working out two hours a day and eating under 1,000 calories" and then in June 2021
"she asked Heugly whether it was possible to add more muscle before the show and her coach texted, “Absolutely. All of our girls do. Obviously anabolics help a lot.” He later detailed dosages for the steroid Anavar, along with clenbuterol. She said she began feeling even worse and cut ties with her coach in late July." So I'm not sure about her dying to compete. She couldn't handle doing a workout and an hour of cardio. Didn't want to drugs and she
smartly decided to stop trying to compete.