8 ms·

Honestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics, if not for performance, then at least for recovery. It's completely arbitrary what's legal and not an

• rocqua 9y ago
  The argument I've heard against this is about safety. Firstly, you don't want athletes needing to push the limits of safe pharmaceutical use just to win. This forces all competitive athletes to dose the maximum amount allowed. Moreover, though perhaps less of an issue, it forces those who seek an illegitimate advantage to push even further than they need to now. Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely. In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx. There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.
  • eadmund 9y ago
    I don't think that argument really holds up. After all, athletes already push the limits of safe exercise in order to win; all competitive athletes are forced to exercise the maximum amount allowed, and exercise is not purely positive: it has negative as well as positive effects.
    • bo1024 9y ago
      I don't follow you. You seem to be saying that since athletics is about pushing the limits of the human body, it's already unsafe, so there's no problem with making it much less safe. I strongly disagree. For context, I'm thinking mostly of athletics (track and field). Pro athletes generally strive to achieve excellence at some task the human body is adapted for -- running, jumping, throwing. But it's within the limitations imposed by their own human bodies, which are very well-adapted for keeping themselves safe while accomplishing these tasks. They know that going overboard risks burnout and injury, so their incentives are generally aligned with staying healthy. Chemically tricking the body into doing something long-term unsafe in return for short-term performance is a different ballgame. (Of course there are a few outlier sports like American football and sumo wrestling which are just clearly unhealthy. Even for those, I don't see why we should make matters worse by sanctioning unhealthy PEDs.)
      • mikekchar 9y ago
        I believe there was an article posted on HN a while about about whether or not humans could improve the speed of a fastball in baseball. If I recall correctly, the suggestion was that one of the ligaments can not stand the stress above a certain speed. There are many sports (especially in track and field!) where we are meeting the limitations of normal humans. Can you be a world class sprinter if your body is not aligned to it at birth? If you are disadvantaged at birth, how reasonable is it that after sacrificing most of your life to training you are going to accept inevitable failure? What if a PED can push you over the top? One of my favourite quotes of all time is from the Simpsons: "Cheating is the gift man gives himself". With billions on the planet and hundreds of millions who are rich enough to pursue sport, the pool of people who have the drive and are willing to dedicate everything to being the best at their sport is HUGE. What is sport at that point? Filtering for genetic freaks? But then, looking at it another way, should we then see it as a technological challenge? Let's look at cycling. Whether or not we accept the premise that doping and PEDs in the pro peloton are a thing of the past, it's hard to argue with the success of Sky's "marginal gains" strategy. The margins of victory in large stage races are so minute that even a 10 watt difference could be meaningful. I kind of look at this as an F1 style of sports. Those with the access to money for research will win (as we see with Sky in cycling). If we include PEDs? Well, then money for research becomes even more important. Now, I actually like F1 racing (even while not really liking cars -- I'm complicated ;-) ). I like pro cycling. I like a lot of things. But, I honestly don't think this is the direction that sports should go. As someone who participated in track and field in his youth, I'm highly disillusioned with current trends -- competition for medals, the need to beat world records, people sitting on their sofa watching 10 minute vignettes of "life drama" with occasional intermissions of some guys running. Sports for me is 50 year olds getting together for a game of soccer; jogging in the morning every day to get ready for the 10 km "marathon"; riding in a "sportive"; softball; hockey; kendo; whatever you enjoy doing. Watching people at the top level is awesome, but we don't need to enhance it. We don't need to embellish it. We certainly don't need to pay someone the GDP of a small country so that we can have bragging rights at the office the next week. Especially if a PED makes the difference between a struggling athlete bagging groceries for a living or living the life of a super star.
      • charsifood 9y ago
  • jakubp 9y ago
    Athletes in many high paying and highly respected disciplines were caught on short and long term use of forbidden drugs. This includes top names e.g. in tennis and cycling. These sportsmen dont seem to care about safety too much. They just probably want to win. If professional orgs would ban athletes for life, there would be little doping, but somehow nobody does that. Why? Perhaps money from sponsors is much more important than safety and fairness?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • rocqua 9y ago
      Is it fair to punish people so harshly? Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down. And yet, such harsh punishment is generally frowned upon.
      • jakubp 9y ago
        This doesn't seem an adequate analogy to banning someone from sports: if a burglar was sentenced to death we would be taking all he has and also permanently punishing his loved ones. By banning a sportsman we take away his career, but he is free to pursue anything else and continue life in his community, contributing to it. We may consider taking back some of the winnings as punishment. Removing someone from a circle of trusted athletes is not really a punishment -- it's a punishment for that community to endure such misconduct.
        • rocqua 9y ago
          My point is that the efficacy of a punishment as a deterrent isn't sufficient reason to instate that punishment. There needs to be proportionality between the offense and the punishment. So, just because lifetime bans would be an effective deterrent doesn't mean that we should instate lifetime bans.
          • jakubp 9y ago
• EpicEng 9y ago
  The problem there is that you are then encouraging people to use substances which are potentially detrimental to their long term health. In fact, they'd have to use them to be competitive. Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that we're already at that point, but I don't know that sanctioning their use is the right thing to do for the governing bodies. I don't know what the answer is, but I agree completely that they should be illegal in the eyes of the law.
  • autarch 9y ago
    As opposed to playing football or hockey, which is super good for your long term health! Admittedly, those two are at an extreme in terms of destroying your body, but they're not alone. Gymnastics leaves people in rough shape in their later years. I'd imagine figure skating and tennis are also pretty hard on you too.
    • ceejayoz 9y ago
      Sounds like an argument for better safety measures in those sports, not fewer.
      • maxerickson 9y ago
        With American football there is a paradox; modern safety equipment makes the big hits possible.
        • eru 9y ago
          Rugby and Australian rules football are good controls.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
      • Bjartr 9y ago
        Boxing too, was made to be more harmful long term by the introduction of safety measures (the gloves). Previously headshots were less frequent to avoid damage to the hands.
• Spooky23 9y ago
  The problem is that the worst coaches exist too. The reality is that you're going to have kids with even worse chronic long term problems after they play through.
• sergiotapia 9y ago
  I wish there were a sport where anything goes performance enhancement wise. Full-on hulks just roiding out and showing PEAK human performance. Is there anything like this in the world?
  • burger_moon 9y ago
    PRIDE fighting in Japan explicitly does not test for anything.
    • lp251 9y ago
      they haven't been around for a while. I don't think ONE championship tests, and if they do, it isn't very rigorous.
      • icpmacdo 9y ago
        In MMA the UFC is way way more strict than any of the other orgs. You very rarely see champs or big celebs pulled off card ever like you in the the UFC under USADA testing
      • ablation 9y ago
        Rizin FF[1] is the new PRIDE, in essence. It too has a 'relaxed' stance on PEDs. [1]: http://www.rizinff.com/en/ http://www.rizinff.com/en/
        • lp251 9y ago
          And a 'relaxed' stance on stupid matches. Not a fan of the org after the Gabbi Garcia shenanigans
          • ablation 9y ago
            PRIDE has its fair share of preposterous exhibition matches though, to be fair. But no, I'm not a fan either.
  • 9y ago
• stevenwoo 9y ago
  There was a periodic survey of Olympic athletes asking "would you take a PED that guaranteed a gold medal and shortened your lifespan to five years?", more than half said yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma The update in that wikipedia link point to changing attitudes in more recent years.
  • kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
    "It would kill you five years after you took it", that's quite more drastic than reducing your life span by 5 years.
    • stevenwoo 9y ago
      A somewhat recent update (delayed release) with anonymous survey shows around 50% to be the actual number of admitted dopers. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-study-revealing-wider-usage-published-after-scandalous-delay https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-s...
• cc81 9y ago
  How would you regulate it? If you decide some things are dangerous and forbid their usage then you are back to testing athletes because they might use it anyway if it is still effective.
  • KGIII 9y ago
    Over the past couple of dozen years, I've wondered if we could have a second set of competitions where we allowed participants to enhance their performance with the use of drugs. I admit, my curiosity was piqued by Mutant League Football, but I still think it might be viable. They can maintain separate records and petty much allow anything. One might even make another group that allowed body modifications.
• matt4077 9y ago
  "Regulating it" means creating new rules. Which would, once again be broken if athletes thought it would help their performance. And you'd end up at square 1, except everybody who was previously clean was now forced to take all the drugs the new rules permitted. And there's nothing really arbitrary about the rules, or at least no more arbitrary than almost any other rule you can find. Just because you can argue about the exact requirements to become a lawyer in Iowa doesn't mean that my hamster is as good a lawyer as the top graduate of Harvard Law.
• crispyambulance 9y ago
  > Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug Well, if you don't care, why do you bother to profess an opinion? There are plenty who do care about the well-being of athletes. I am skeptical, however, that doping will ever get under control unless the pressure behind the doping relents. The rewards in elite sports are perhaps too great. By the time athletes reach their prime mentally, the body is no longer at its peak, and they're desperately trying to compensate to finally reap the rewards of a career of brutal training.
• mr_tristan 9y ago
  Well, "legal" and "allowed in the sport" are two different concepts. Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright. Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics. In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.
  • lossolo 9y ago
    > Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland This is not entirely true. You will not be penalized for possessing anabolic steroids in Poland but selling without prescription is illegal. So without prescription the only way to get them is black market and there are tons of fakes on black market. So you don't really know what you are buying..
    • burger_moon 9y ago
      There's also testing kits you can buy and most of these markets the customers are posting results of the tests and blood work to verify the source is legitimate. It's actually a quite reliable and honest economy because of how much scrutiny people have over putting vials of oil in their bodies. It's an interesting market dynamic considering it's completely unregulated and illegitimate.
    • mr_tristan 9y ago
      The point is that the athlete isn't considered a criminal for possessing them in Poland, whereas in the US, they are.
• amelius 9y ago
  That would probably change e.g. a bicycle race into something like Formula 1 racing.
  • daxorid 9y ago
    The irony of your statement is that Formula 1 places a huge list of engineering limitations on teams (engine displacement, weight, dimensions, even ECM firmware), and any "performance enhancing" outside of these parameters has historically led to scandals in the sport.
    • Lio 9y ago
      So does cycling. Everything from wheel size, tube profile, saddle angle even down to the basic double diamond shape is regulated. The entire modern sport of cycling is based around the idea that riders sheltering behind forward team mates or rivals burn much less energy pushing through the air. Without the rules governing bike design riders would probably gravitate to the use of fully faired recumbent bikes and the team dynamic would be lost. We'd be reduced to what amounts to individual time trials. This is one reason why we have individual and team time trials on slightly less restricted designs to separate the desciplins.
      • ablation 9y ago
        The UCI is relaxing some of its aero rules, though: http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/uci-set-to-scrap-rule-limiting-aero-bike-design-281563 http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/uci-set-to-scr...
      • tzs 9y ago
        Isn't air resistance still the limiting factor even on a fully faired recumbent bike? A cooperating team should still handily beat a soloist.
• callmeed 9y ago
  Do you only mean professional athletics? My only issue is that athletics start at a young age for most. For some sports, people routinely go pro in their teenage years (tennis, baseball, etc.). We would have parents PEDing up their kids just to get the college scholarships or drafted out of high school. Feels like that would do more harm than good.
  • _pmf_ 9y ago
    > Do you only mean professional athletics? The vast majority of Olympic athletes are not professionals.
• will_brown 9y ago
  I have recently suffered a traumatic brain injury (tbi) - not unlike what may be common in football, hockey and other contact sports - and not exactly pleased with the medical response that there is no real treatment other than rest, I began doing some research and came across an open letter from a Harvard PhD to the NFL commissioner regarding cannabis and concussions, CTE and TBI. They focus on the CBD heavy variety and suggest it acts as a neuroprotector. Then a little more research I came across an Israeli study regarding TBI improvements in rats using cannabis, I even thought I found an article saying the Israeli military uses cannabis for treatment of soldiers and enemy combatants with TBI but I can't seem to find it now. I'm not so sure about peds for competition or recovery, but if cannabis is considered a ped by various sports commissions and can be beneficial to brain injury that is a damn shame. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3gqe/the-nfl-should-combat-concussions-with-cannabis https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3gqe/the-nfl-sh... http://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-could-treat-traumatic-brain-injury-israeli-researchers-say/ http://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-could-treat-traumatic-...
  • bo1024 9y ago
    To me, this doesn't seem to fall under performance-enhancing drugs as much as medication for injuries sustained in the sport.
  • addicted 9y ago
    Cannabis is not considered a PED (anyone who has taken Cannabis can easily atttest to that). Cannabis is a problem due to other political issues which means it's illegal in most major sport playing jurisdictions.
    • 3131s 9y ago
      It might be performance enhancing. I say that partially because marijuana may be a bronchodilator, but mostly because I know many college and some pro athletes who use marijuana. I can run a sub 11 second 100m while very high.
    • bonesss 9y ago
      > Cannabis is not considered a PED (anyone who has taken Cannabis can easily atttest to that). Cannabis is very, very, much considered a PED. It is banned in competition by USADA and WADA. Anesthetizing effects, motor processing effects, lung performance, etc... I will agree that most people most of the time are not smoking and becoming super athletes. I do not agree that athletic performance is unaffected by it and that it's consequences are universally negative. Hence the ban against using it in fair athletic competition.
• ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  The problem is that sports competition is zero-sum: it doesn't really matter whether the fastest run takes 4 minutes or 3:59, but it does matter whether you're a second faster than your competitor. This quickly generates a "race to the bottom" where everyone has to pay absolute costs for relative advantages. This is less desirable outcome than is ideal, which is why there's room for making everyone better off through enforcement of norms against PEDs. It's a question of what everyone must do in order to be competitive. That said, there should be a conversation about whether the cure is worse than the disease. If PEDs are safe enough, the costs of enforcement and allowing the cheaters who make it through the screens to win will outweigh the benefits of having the bar for competition lowered.
  • addicted 9y ago
    "This quickly generates a "race to the bottom" where everyone has to pay absolute costs for relative advantages." I really like this framing. You've expressed something I've felt intuitively but never really been able to articulate (either to myself or others).
    • ThrustVectoring 9y ago
      As a side note: this framing is why I oppose subsidizing college in the US. Having a college degree is mostly a relative advantage, especially outside of STEM. We only need so many firefighters, so if we preferentially hire applicants with college degrees and subsidize college, it's kinda pointless. Better is making sure that economic opportunities remain available for those without degrees, when possible. Make it illegal to discriminate against those without college degrees unless it's a bona-fide occupational qualification.
      • greglindahl 9y ago
        Why can't we do both? Poor kids who would get a great benefit from college deserve as much help as poor kids who wouldn't benefit from college but would benefit from vocational training. If the object is to effectively help everyone, only doing half is a bad thing.
• _pmf_ 9y ago
  > Honestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics Well, it is regulated. What is not regulated is that for example steroids permanently modify the amount of myonuclei so that a steroid user will have better long term recovery (rebuilding from reduced muscle state) for decades after usage. Or take EPO: the effect of using EPO is the same as using a compression chamber and has the same dangers (arguably, using EPO is safer than subjecting your body to a outdated compression chamber sourced from the landfill), yet one is allowed and one is forbidden. Then there's steroid usage after injuries (why do teams have a dedicated physician? so he can give people steroids if they stub their little toe). You can either forbid (on paper) or completely deregulate; "some" regulation will not change very much vs. prohibition.