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Doping in sports is so much more complicated than most people think it is. For starters there’s so many performance enhancing substances, and entire undergroun

Doping in sports is so much more complicated than most people think it is. For starters there’s so many performance enhancing substances, and entire underground industries for developing and producing them. All of these drugs would be banned by the blanket prohibition on unapproved substances, but in practice many of them don’t have any screening procedures, so won’t turn up in any tests. There’s also the fact that many performance enhancing substances are biologically identical to substances your body is naturally producing (like bio-identical testosterone for example). The only way to test for these is to test the ratios of certain metabolites (with a margin for error to avoid false positives). In practice this basically means any athlete can do steroid cycles, as long as they are only boosting their test levels up to that of a genetically elite outlier. You also have the therapeutic use exemption, which allows for legitimate therapeutic use of banned substances. Testosterone replacement therapy is a legitimate therapeutic use of steroids, and some sports are known for abusing TUEs for this usecase. Testing for PEDs is way less precise than a lot of people think it is, and any motivated athlete can get away with PED use to some extent, no matter how much testing you subject them to. There’s good reason to be suspicious of a lot of athletes. One massively suspect category of athlete is all of the ones in/near their 40s who somehow manage to maintain physiques as good as/better than they had in their early 20s.

notknifescience 3y ago
I would be very much interested in reading more about this, do you have any good articles you could point me to?
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  This paper is a bit out of date, but gives a reasonable overview of the challenges of testing for testosterone supplementation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657495/ Paper on challenges of detecting growth hormone https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830297/ Testing for both of those substances has improved, but still leave plenty of room for abuse. Use of "unknown" or the constant stream newly developed substances is naturally not rigorously studied, but here's a couple of articles referencing the challenges they pose. https://thetruthaboutforensicscience.com/undetectable-performance-enhancing-drugs-in-sports/ https://thetruthaboutforensicscience.com/undetectable-perfor... https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1955231-undetectable-the-new-ped-that-could-be-in-the-olympics-nfl-and-mlb-now https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1955231-undetectable-the... UFC is notorious for testosterone TUEs, but that's mostly because they regulate things differently to most other sports https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10500652/therapeutic-use-exemptions-testosterone-mma-outpace-other-sports-lines-finds https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10500652/therapeuti... Top flight soccer is another sport that's constantly garnering attention for TUEs, but most of the coverage of that is speculative, because other than high level statistics the TUE process is naturally not very transparent (and most of the recent coverage on the topic has been replaced by controversy relating to trans athletes).
galenko 3y ago
In my personal, anecdotal experience... Once you get far enough in ANY sport, you start considering tradeoffs between risking long term health and improving performance. If you are a competent adult, you can evaluate your drivers, consider risks. But without fail, in ANY competitive sport, you realise that you have to risk health in order to achieve that next performance tier, there is no other way. Once you get into that 1-10%(depending on sport) elite level, you realise that there is no way you can compete without PEDs. I've participated in (taken myself) and have been a witness to this in weightlifting(olympic and strongman), soccer, cycling and swimming. Starting young. Real young. Coaches of different sanity levels are trusted to make the right choices and not often questioned by busy or absent parents. Everyone cheers on when medals are won and records are broken, without consideration for how it happens. I personally had no idea I was taking hormone modifiers until about 16, it started at 11. My coach just gave me what he said were vitamins and I never questioned it, he was the closest thing to a father I had, his authority was absolute. At 16 I found myself in a hospital yellow as a banana on the brink of liver failure, that's when I found out. Everyone on our team took what the coaches gave. Once a while we'd see a parent get into a shouting match with one of the coaches about something we didn't understand and that kid would never come back again. Some of the guys I trained with went on to become highly recognisable names in their respective sports. One even has a supplement brand. Those I've kept in touch with continue PED use, that is the price of being at the top of the game.
PleasureBot 3y ago
Depending on the substance and quality, the time it is detectable can be as short as 12 hours to a few days. There is a reason lots of athletes refer to drug screenings as "IQ tests". Only the dumb or careless get caught.

notknifescience 3y ago

I would be very much interested in reading more about this, do you have any good articles you could point me to?

AmericanChopper 3y ago
This paper is a bit out of date, but gives a reasonable overview of the challenges of testing for testosterone supplementation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657495/ Paper on challenges of detecting growth hormone https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830297/ Testing for both of those substances has improved, but still leave plenty of room for abuse. Use of "unknown" or the constant stream newly developed substances is naturally not rigorously studied, but here's a couple of articles referencing the challenges they pose. https://thetruthaboutforensicscience.com/undetectable-performance-enhancing-drugs-in-sports/ https://thetruthaboutforensicscience.com/undetectable-perfor... https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1955231-undetectable-the-new-ped-that-could-be-in-the-olympics-nfl-and-mlb-now https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1955231-undetectable-the... UFC is notorious for testosterone TUEs, but that's mostly because they regulate things differently to most other sports https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10500652/therapeutic-use-exemptions-testosterone-mma-outpace-other-sports-lines-finds https://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10500652/therapeuti... Top flight soccer is another sport that's constantly garnering attention for TUEs, but most of the coverage of that is speculative, because other than high level statistics the TUE process is naturally not very transparent (and most of the recent coverage on the topic has been replaced by controversy relating to trans athletes).

galenko 3y ago

In my personal, anecdotal experience... Once you get far enough in ANY sport, you start considering tradeoffs between risking long term health and improving performance. If you are a competent adult, you can evaluate your drivers, consider risks. But without fail, in ANY competitive sport, you realise that you have to risk health in order to achieve that next performance tier, there is no other way. Once you get into that 1-10%(depending on sport) elite level, you realise that there is no way you can compete without PEDs. I've participated in (taken myself) and have been a witness to this in weightlifting(olympic and strongman), soccer, cycling and swimming. Starting young. Real young. Coaches of different sanity levels are trusted to make the right choices and not often questioned by busy or absent parents. Everyone cheers on when medals are won and records are broken, without consideration for how it happens. I personally had no idea I was taking hormone modifiers until about 16, it started at 11. My coach just gave me what he said were vitamins and I never questioned it, he was the closest thing to a father I had, his authority was absolute. At 16 I found myself in a hospital yellow as a banana on the brink of liver failure, that's when I found out. Everyone on our team took what the coaches gave. Once a while we'd see a parent get into a shouting match with one of the coaches about something we didn't understand and that kid would never come back again. Some of the guys I trained with went on to become highly recognisable names in their respective sports. One even has a supplement brand. Those I've kept in touch with continue PED use, that is the price of being at the top of the game.

PleasureBot 3y ago

Depending on the substance and quality, the time it is detectable can be as short as 12 hours to a few days. There is a reason lots of athletes refer to drug screenings as "IQ tests". Only the dumb or careless get caught.