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Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation
- yarou 10y agoNot really news IMO. It's quite obvious that most world class athletes use some form of chemical enhancement. The substances available today for doping are minor buffs, though. Mildronate[1] increases cardiac efficiency/ throughput, for example. However, only a really well-conditioned athlete would gain anything from these substances. Even then we're talking about a 10-15% gain in efficiency. What I'm personally really excited about are SARMs[2]. These are legitimate fountain of youth compounds that can increase bone density and possible muscle wasting due to age. We may finally have the tools available for viable life extension within this decade. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldonium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_androgen_receptor_modulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_androgen_receptor_mo...
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y agoSARMs are not fountains of youth. Life extension would reqiure very advanced tissue engineering.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoI'd really like to see more serious discussion of the drawbacks to life extension, e.g. the people in power when life extension becomes practical will tend to remain in power for the rest of human civilization.
- theparanoid 10y agoAmusing “We have to find those reasons why young sportsmen are taking doping, why they agree to be doped,”. I take peds for programming, Modafinil. it's a cold hard world, results are rewarded.
- ggreer 10y agoLike most jobs, programming is positive sum. If you take modafinil or caffeine or carphedon, you'll write more software of higher quality (hopefully). You won't reduce the amount or quality of software written by others. And the drugs you take don't have long-term disadvantages. For example, modafinil won't give you early onset Alzheimer's. Contrast that to doping in sport. Sport is zero-sum. For me to win, you must lose. And many performance-enhancing drugs can cause long-term health issues. Steroids can enlarge the heart and damage its valves. EPO can thicken the blood enough to cause embolism. If all athletes are doping, none of them benefit. They simply suffer more and die sooner. Doping regulations help solve this coordination problem among athletes.
- trevyn 10y agoIf all athletes are doping, none of them benefit. I would disagree; the more superhuman the feats, the more people are likely to watch. See, e.g., Cristiano Ronaldo.
- tptacek 10y agoWhat is "superhuman" if not a relative benchmark against our expectations of what humans can accomplish unaided? We watch the Olympics knowing full well a machine could trivially outdo the best athlete at virtually every event.
- smallnamespace 10y agoReally? I'd love to see a team of robots win at, say, soccer or basketball, but I'd bet that is still decades away. Not to mention figure skating, or gymnastics.
- wolf550e 10y agoCome on, you know he meant the stuff that measures "Faster, Higher, Stronger" like running and jumping and throwing. The team sports and sports in which you get points for aesthetics are harder for robots, but I think they can do bobsleigh if not soccer.
- Fezzik 10y agoI have always thought the anti-doping rage a bit odd - without writing an essay, Sports Illustrtated had a great op-ed piece around 2008 re what would you rather watch: steroid baseball or non-steroid baseball. The clear implication being that the value (entertainment/spectecle/super-human feats are excentuated by PEDs). It is, ultimately, another form of "nutrition".
- douche 10y agoBaseball has gotten very boring since the crusade to clean it up. I miss the days when homerun records were in jeopardy every season.
- kurthr 10y agoIf by "nutrition" you mean that it can cause a variety of disorders and premature death... It's hard to claim that all athletes who want to fairly compete should be also forced to use them, unless we really want to encourage death sports. Note also, that the race to find new steroids that are less detectable has not necessarily corresponded to finding those that are more safe and effective.
- somesortof 10y agoThis is so obvious that the majority of top athletes are using some sort of steroids. There is no shame in that.
- paulddraper 10y ago[citation needed]
- brianwawok 10y agoNot really. Sports in general and the Olympics in specific are very very very dirty. Enjoy watching it. Don't compare it to what you can do if you don't dope.
- Joky 10y agoWhile possibly true for some specific sports, I highly doubt this is a generality. So +1 to [citation needed].
- dpark 10y agoEvery so often there's a big scandal in another sport as pervasive doping is uncovered. It happened to baseball. It happened to cycling. It happening to sprinting. It's also happened to numerous elite individuals across nearly every sport. At some point it becomes unreasonable to believe that only some sports are subject to doping problems when they all have basically the same opportunities, the same pressures, and the same human nature.
- akytt 10y agoThere's a difference between balancing close to the boundaries of permissible and systematically exceeding those limits while pushing athletes to danger their health for political benefit.