8 ms·

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.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Bolt was fast when he was 10 years old, and probably was still naturally fast when he was 21. After any injuries though, it's likely he started peds. I was the strongest man in one of the Bay Area gyms for a while, all natural, but essentially that was the focus of my day for several years while I worked at home (next door to the gym) and I had 10 hours of sleep nitely. I went to a natural bobybulding conference once and all the pros were staring at me - I was huge. So it can be done while you're young, but under perfect conditions and until you get injured.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    From what I know you can go pretty far without PED but good genetics. But in world class everybody has good genetics and if some of them use PED you can't beat them without. So my rule is that if people in the world top 10 get caught taking something then the other guys (especially the number 1) must be on something too. Worked with Lance Armstrong who constantly beat guys who afterwards got caught. Just curious: How big were you? Did other people in your gym take stuff?
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > So my rule is that if people in the world top 10 Sure. Most of the time that's true. However you can go a long way in your 20s if you don't get injured and you maximize the benefits of sleep, water, massage and scheduling. And let me say it again, don't get injured! :) > How big were you? Junior sumo weight. I know from the dust on certain weights that nobody ever unracked those except me. A misconception is that roids are the most important thing, but nutrition/insulin are equally important, if not more. Mr. Olympias eat 10,000+ calories per day, some size monsters do 20,000 calories per day. They tend to blow out their pancreas though. I'm sure people in the gym used both. I mean, come on. A lot of my exercises were coincidentally the same as Arnold's (concentration curls), etc. that nobody else does now, so I would max out curl bars with 10x reps. (See Pumping Iron for great clips.) I was able to work in with pros (often the front desk would tell me as I was leaving, "Hey, you worked in with so-and-so.") Shrug. :) People (ok, dudes) in airports would walk up to me and start feeling my biceps. I was planning to do the Inch dumbbell lift, but never got around to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Inch#The_'Thomas_Inch'_dumbbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Inch#The_'Thomas_Inch'_... An interesting Russian technique is not to overload muscles to exhaustion so you can do more days. (I did 3x per week for a decade, but the Russian method could be 14x per week with less intensity.) Anyway, just some natural tips and anecdotes. Note that if you want to enter powerlifting competitions, the bench "starts" at 350 pounds, so that should be your goal if it's not just a hobby.
- wp381640 6y ago
  > Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. It's a really good book. I read it as somebody with no interest in cycling and the world it painted was fascinating.
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.

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.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Bolt was fast when he was 10 years old, and probably was still naturally fast when he was 21. After any injuries though, it's likely he started peds. I was the strongest man in one of the Bay Area gyms for a while, all natural, but essentially that was the focus of my day for several years while I worked at home (next door to the gym) and I had 10 hours of sleep nitely. I went to a natural bobybulding conference once and all the pros were staring at me - I was huge. So it can be done while you're young, but under perfect conditions and until you get injured.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  From what I know you can go pretty far without PED but good genetics. But in world class everybody has good genetics and if some of them use PED you can't beat them without. So my rule is that if people in the world top 10 get caught taking something then the other guys (especially the number 1) must be on something too. Worked with Lance Armstrong who constantly beat guys who afterwards got caught. Just curious: How big were you? Did other people in your gym take stuff?
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > So my rule is that if people in the world top 10 Sure. Most of the time that's true. However you can go a long way in your 20s if you don't get injured and you maximize the benefits of sleep, water, massage and scheduling. And let me say it again, don't get injured! :) > How big were you? Junior sumo weight. I know from the dust on certain weights that nobody ever unracked those except me. A misconception is that roids are the most important thing, but nutrition/insulin are equally important, if not more. Mr. Olympias eat 10,000+ calories per day, some size monsters do 20,000 calories per day. They tend to blow out their pancreas though. I'm sure people in the gym used both. I mean, come on. A lot of my exercises were coincidentally the same as Arnold's (concentration curls), etc. that nobody else does now, so I would max out curl bars with 10x reps. (See Pumping Iron for great clips.) I was able to work in with pros (often the front desk would tell me as I was leaving, "Hey, you worked in with so-and-so.") Shrug. :) People (ok, dudes) in airports would walk up to me and start feeling my biceps. I was planning to do the Inch dumbbell lift, but never got around to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Inch#The_'Thomas_Inch'_dumbbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Inch#The_'Thomas_Inch'_... An interesting Russian technique is not to overload muscles to exhaustion so you can do more days. (I did 3x per week for a decade, but the Russian method could be 14x per week with less intensity.) Anyway, just some natural tips and anecdotes. Note that if you want to enter powerlifting competitions, the bench "starts" at 350 pounds, so that should be your goal if it's not just a hobby.
wp381640 6y ago
> Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. It's a really good book. I read it as somebody with no interest in cycling and the world it painted was fascinating.

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.