4 ms·

A combination of advances in nutrition, training programs, technology and, unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs. This last point is contentious but make n

by elteto 6y ago

A combination of advances in nutrition, training programs, technology and, unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs. This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.

tolbish 6y ago
You seem very certain. Any links for further reading?
- hellbannedguy 6y ago
  90’s baseball. I worked at Pac Bell park from beginning to opening day. When they all arrived in black SUV’s, I as shocked at the size of most of those guys, especially Bonds, and McGuire. Their heads were huge too? I had know idea about HGH, or steroids. I just thought they were fit, and strong. Bonds hit a practice ball over right field durning out work hours. It was so effortless. It was actually the first ball hit into the bay, and an electrician jumped into the water to fetch it. He wasn’t a good swimmer, so someone threw him a extension cord. It was a hot cord, and lucky blew the GFCI. (I still recall Dr. Dean Edell stating all the studies steroids/hgh show no correlation to athletic performance. Later he revised his statement, but didn’t point to new studies? I’m still not convinced. I still think Lance Armstrong won on the Placebo Effect.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Just read accounts of people who used PEDs first time and how effective they were. Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH. PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible. In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
  - joebob42 6y ago
    I think it's actually possible for ie bolt to be beating them without peds, I just think it isn't meaningful. Many peds (ie testosterone) are just extra dosage of something your body produces anyways, or cause your body to increase it's rate of some metabolic process. There is a lot of variance across people anyways: perhaps Bolt just produces an exceptionally high amount of testosterone naturally. In your example, it's not that it is impossible for people without supplemental test to compete with people that have it, it's that it's impossible for someone with dramatically lower test to compete with people that have it, regardless of whether they got it naturally or by supplementation. I would think that for sports to be as fair as possible, the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that. Obviously that's a bit of a crazy idea and is not likely to happen, though.
    - spaetzleesser 6y ago
      "the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that." that's basically how a lot of doping testing works. They don't know where the testerone comes from but assume that people will be within a certain range. In cycling they called Bjarne Riis "Mr 50%" because his hematocrite level was always exactly at the maximum allowed level. Read Tyler Hamilton's book. It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into how doping works.
    - hcurtiss 6y ago
      I agree with this. What's interesting to me is when you start viewing athletics as a proxy for an innate quality like endogenous testosterone, the sport loses a lot of the romance. Of course, raw athleticism (strength/speed/agility) carries more weight in some sports than others.
      - spaetzleesser 6y ago
        “ athletics as a proxy for an innate quality like endogenous testosterone,” That’s what top sports is. It’s people who won the genetic lottery and then also worked hard.
- bartread 6y ago
  Cycling. The year after the Festina doping scandal of the late 1990s the Tour de France, won by Lance Armstrong, was the fastest ever. Yes, the bikes were getting better. Yes, nutrition and training were both getting better. But they didn't get that much better in only 12 months, and so one might have expected - with the elimination of doping - that the race would have slowed somewhat. But it didn't, because probably just about everyone - and especially the winner - were all on drugs. Here's a list covering the period up to and include 2019 of confirmed cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin... There is a more than strong suspicion that the majority of dopers have never been caught and that, in some cases (including Mr Armstrong), governing bodies and authorities may have covered for and protected them. Every now and then somebody is fed to the wolves so it looks like effective action is being taken. As a recreational activity cycling is fantastic. As a sport it's a complete joke.
  - morei 6y ago
    That's a strange metric to pick. The Tour de France is a team race, with lots of strategy involved. It most definitely isn't about getting the lowest time, only a lower time than the competitors (very much not the same thing!). e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes. So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies. It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable. There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
    - jhayward 6y ago
      The TdF has many iconic sections, mostly climbs, some time trials. They don't change often. Times are compared from year to year not over the entire 21-day race, but section by section.
    - nl 6y ago
      > the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it. Actually, the jump in TdF average speed (not total race time) during the early 1990s is fairly often attributed to EPO (and other drug) usage. The average speed in earlier events was lower because of the inconsistency - cyclists would ride much slower on days before (or after) a big stage, and this would drop the average speed for the entire race. EPO and other drugs improved recovery so cyclists would ride hard everyday. It's hard to know how true this is - it also corresponded to increased TV coverage for full stages, and more money in the sport. But the average speed jump after 1989 is significant.
- klenwell 6y ago
  Here's a pretty good one from 20 years ago on cycling: In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that “the bloke was clean.” Mottet had, in many people’s view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked “the wherewithal to make it happen.” In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the soigneur’s conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-test https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-te... It ends up inevitably being about Lance Armstrong. This was 10 years before he owned up to doping.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Thank you for actually posting a link. I was hoping to see something like an article on the kinds of PEDs used, across various sports.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  There's a long, multi-decade cat and mouse game between grey area drug manufacturers and regulators. Once labs start testing for one drug, or if a drug is banned, manufacturers develop new ones, and so on.
- elteto 6y ago
  The Icarus documentary starts exploring PEDs and their detection but veers off into the Russian doping scandal. Regardless, it clearly shows that evasion is entirely possible with the correct guidance. I highly recommend it.
- stevegalla 6y ago
  I assume you’re referring to this part: > This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind. If you’re looking for links out of curiosity, below is a quote from an article where athletes were stripped of medals in 2016 for 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. “The IOC, which stores samples for 10 years, reanalyzed more than 1,000 samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics with improved techniques that can detect the use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.” [0] Wikipedia has an entry [1] on stripped Olympic medals with references to the announcements. If you’re looking to refute that statement, I can offer up an anecdote in support of the statement from a panel discussion with the former head of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) I attended during the 2010 Winter Olympics [2]. Playing baseball in my youth we had coaches who played division 1 college baseball. The phrase we were told between the ages of 14-16 was, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not competing”. That’s the college baseball wisdom that was brought back to Canada. It’s not hard for me to imagine how that can move on to taking PEDs. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-doping-retests-1.3868113 https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-d... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_medals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_med... [2] https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-technology-with-richard-pound-and-guests/ https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-tec...
  - tolbish 6y ago
    This is very informative, thank you. That said, they disqualified about 10% of the athletes they tested. While significant, and while I'm sure that only catches a portion of offenders, it's not as high as others make it seem.
    - curryst 6y ago
      What percentage of medals went to the 10% they disqualified though? It doesn't really matter what percentage are doing it if almost everyone who wins a medal is doing it.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind. Won't detection solutions catch-up eventually? Can't they keep samples in storage and test them again years later, and at least shame the doping athletes at that time? I suppose this isn't serving as an effective deterrent today, but it's not obvious to me why.
- hobofan 6y ago
  I don't know about what's currently used as state-of-the-art PEDs, but in theory there could very well be PEDs that are near impossible to detect, by being very quickly absorbed by the target tissue from the bloodstream. If they then also completely metabolize the drug to substances that occur normally in you body (and at non-suspicious levels), it would be very hard to detect.
  - fian 6y ago
    The focus has switched to pushing the limits of therapeutic exemption drugs. It is amazing how many top swimmers and cyclists are asthmatic and _need_ to take the most hard core pharmaceuticals available to treat it.
    - Leherenn 6y ago
      Even if they are legitimately asthmatic, then it means you pretty much need to be asthmatic now to compete at the very top level. Anyway you look at it it feels wrong.

by elteto 6y ago

tolbish 6y ago

You seem very certain. Any links for further reading?

hellbannedguy 6y ago
90’s baseball. I worked at Pac Bell park from beginning to opening day. When they all arrived in black SUV’s, I as shocked at the size of most of those guys, especially Bonds, and McGuire. Their heads were huge too? I had know idea about HGH, or steroids. I just thought they were fit, and strong. Bonds hit a practice ball over right field durning out work hours. It was so effortless. It was actually the first ball hit into the bay, and an electrician jumped into the water to fetch it. He wasn’t a good swimmer, so someone threw him a extension cord. It was a hot cord, and lucky blew the GFCI. (I still recall Dr. Dean Edell stating all the studies steroids/hgh show no correlation to athletic performance. Later he revised his statement, but didn’t point to new studies? I’m still not convinced. I still think Lance Armstrong won on the Placebo Effect.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Just read accounts of people who used PEDs first time and how effective they were. Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH. PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible. In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
- joebob42 6y ago
  I think it's actually possible for ie bolt to be beating them without peds, I just think it isn't meaningful. Many peds (ie testosterone) are just extra dosage of something your body produces anyways, or cause your body to increase it's rate of some metabolic process. There is a lot of variance across people anyways: perhaps Bolt just produces an exceptionally high amount of testosterone naturally. In your example, it's not that it is impossible for people without supplemental test to compete with people that have it, it's that it's impossible for someone with dramatically lower test to compete with people that have it, regardless of whether they got it naturally or by supplementation. I would think that for sports to be as fair as possible, the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that. Obviously that's a bit of a crazy idea and is not likely to happen, though.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    "the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that." that's basically how a lot of doping testing works. They don't know where the testerone comes from but assume that people will be within a certain range. In cycling they called Bjarne Riis "Mr 50%" because his hematocrite level was always exactly at the maximum allowed level. Read Tyler Hamilton's book. It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into how doping works.
  - hcurtiss 6y ago
    I agree with this. What's interesting to me is when you start viewing athletics as a proxy for an innate quality like endogenous testosterone, the sport loses a lot of the romance. Of course, raw athleticism (strength/speed/agility) carries more weight in some sports than others.
    - spaetzleesser 6y ago
      “ athletics as a proxy for an innate quality like endogenous testosterone,” That’s what top sports is. It’s people who won the genetic lottery and then also worked hard.
bartread 6y ago
Cycling. The year after the Festina doping scandal of the late 1990s the Tour de France, won by Lance Armstrong, was the fastest ever. Yes, the bikes were getting better. Yes, nutrition and training were both getting better. But they didn't get that much better in only 12 months, and so one might have expected - with the elimination of doping - that the race would have slowed somewhat. But it didn't, because probably just about everyone - and especially the winner - were all on drugs. Here's a list covering the period up to and include 2019 of confirmed cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin... There is a more than strong suspicion that the majority of dopers have never been caught and that, in some cases (including Mr Armstrong), governing bodies and authorities may have covered for and protected them. Every now and then somebody is fed to the wolves so it looks like effective action is being taken. As a recreational activity cycling is fantastic. As a sport it's a complete joke.
- morei 6y ago
  That's a strange metric to pick. The Tour de France is a team race, with lots of strategy involved. It most definitely isn't about getting the lowest time, only a lower time than the competitors (very much not the same thing!). e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes. So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies. It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable. There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
  - jhayward 6y ago
    The TdF has many iconic sections, mostly climbs, some time trials. They don't change often. Times are compared from year to year not over the entire 21-day race, but section by section.
  - nl 6y ago
    > the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it. Actually, the jump in TdF average speed (not total race time) during the early 1990s is fairly often attributed to EPO (and other drug) usage. The average speed in earlier events was lower because of the inconsistency - cyclists would ride much slower on days before (or after) a big stage, and this would drop the average speed for the entire race. EPO and other drugs improved recovery so cyclists would ride hard everyday. It's hard to know how true this is - it also corresponded to increased TV coverage for full stages, and more money in the sport. But the average speed jump after 1989 is significant.
klenwell 6y ago
Here's a pretty good one from 20 years ago on cycling: In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that “the bloke was clean.” Mottet had, in many people’s view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked “the wherewithal to make it happen.” In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the soigneur’s conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-test https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-te... It ends up inevitably being about Lance Armstrong. This was 10 years before he owned up to doping.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Thank you for actually posting a link. I was hoping to see something like an article on the kinds of PEDs used, across various sports.
heavyset_go 6y ago
There's a long, multi-decade cat and mouse game between grey area drug manufacturers and regulators. Once labs start testing for one drug, or if a drug is banned, manufacturers develop new ones, and so on.
elteto 6y ago
The Icarus documentary starts exploring PEDs and their detection but veers off into the Russian doping scandal. Regardless, it clearly shows that evasion is entirely possible with the correct guidance. I highly recommend it.
stevegalla 6y ago
I assume you’re referring to this part: > This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind. If you’re looking for links out of curiosity, below is a quote from an article where athletes were stripped of medals in 2016 for 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. “The IOC, which stores samples for 10 years, reanalyzed more than 1,000 samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics with improved techniques that can detect the use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.” [0] Wikipedia has an entry [1] on stripped Olympic medals with references to the announcements. If you’re looking to refute that statement, I can offer up an anecdote in support of the statement from a panel discussion with the former head of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) I attended during the 2010 Winter Olympics [2]. Playing baseball in my youth we had coaches who played division 1 college baseball. The phrase we were told between the ages of 14-16 was, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not competing”. That’s the college baseball wisdom that was brought back to Canada. It’s not hard for me to imagine how that can move on to taking PEDs. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-doping-retests-1.3868113 https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-d... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_medals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_med... [2] https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-technology-with-richard-pound-and-guests/ https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-tec...
- tolbish 6y ago
  This is very informative, thank you. That said, they disqualified about 10% of the athletes they tested. While significant, and while I'm sure that only catches a portion of offenders, it's not as high as others make it seem.
  - curryst 6y ago
    What percentage of medals went to the 10% they disqualified though? It doesn't really matter what percentage are doing it if almost everyone who wins a medal is doing it.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind. Won't detection solutions catch-up eventually? Can't they keep samples in storage and test them again years later, and at least shame the doping athletes at that time? I suppose this isn't serving as an effective deterrent today, but it's not obvious to me why.

hobofan 6y ago
I don't know about what's currently used as state-of-the-art PEDs, but in theory there could very well be PEDs that are near impossible to detect, by being very quickly absorbed by the target tissue from the bloodstream. If they then also completely metabolize the drug to substances that occur normally in you body (and at non-suspicious levels), it would be very hard to detect.
- fian 6y ago
  The focus has switched to pushing the limits of therapeutic exemption drugs. It is amazing how many top swimmers and cyclists are asthmatic and _need_ to take the most hard core pharmaceuticals available to treat it.
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    Even if they are legitimately asthmatic, then it means you pretty much need to be asthmatic now to compete at the very top level. Anyway you look at it it feels wrong.