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This thread is to discuss doping and the issues around it: - What people are using - How they are doing it - How people are trying to stop them - Why extraordinary performances just aren’t believable anymore Doping has been around pretty much as long as sport. Give any elite competitor and option to gain an edge and they will take it if whether it’s equipment, drugs or hiring someone to smash your opponents knees with a hammer. Athletes are ruthless, that’s why they are at the top of their sport and why we enjoy watching them. In the good old days there was a mix of alcohol and amphetamines to numb the pain and let you push harder but today with the amount of money in sport and the internet meaning poo poo that wouldn’t be allowed to be given to animals is freely available on the internet we have reached a critical point. What’s even the issue? just let them dope. This is a common argument and one I argue strongly again. Fundamentally what we want to see as sports fans is the best, most talented athletes winning. Doping doesn’t allow this for two reasons: - People don’t respond to doping the same - Sport becomes a financial arms race The latter point is already an issue with wealthier countries being able to provide better facilities, more staff and world class development from younger ages but this will only get worse if doping was allowed. Enhancing performance is an incredibly sophisticated process now and the countries with the most money will buy the best drugs given by the best doctors leaving a trial of injured, disabled and dead athletes in it’s wake. Who wants to get up and take their kid to the athletics or cycling club on the weekend when they’ll just get creamed by the kid who’s parents have got in on it early (which in some cases already happens)? The first point is imo crucial. Some athletes will respond to doping better than others. Doping doesn’t level the playing field it just skews it in favour of those who respond to it further and that’s not necessarily the athletes who do the best with conventional training. If you try and regulate it we’ll be going round in circles and people will just cheat to dope more. Test people to make sure they all have the same V02 max? then what’s the point of sport? Spec series suck poo poo. Look at flo jo’s races in the Olympics, during one of athletics darkest periods she obliterated the field and her performances remain a stain on the record books despite the attempts of people who’ve pissed hot giving it their best shot to beat her. Overall this though is the health of the athletes. People are dying from doping already and will do so in much greater numbers if it’s permitted. Instead of hiding doping sports governing bodies with be trying to hide the body count. Leagues with doping problems with doping have seen problems. La liga has had a host of young players dying of heart attacks. The premier league has seen several blood clots. Cyclists of the late 90’s had blood so thick they had to set alarms to wake up in the night and do some exercise so it’d keep getting pumped round the body. Ronaldo’s knees exploding constantly due to abnormal muscle developed. Worryingly athletes have started testing positive for a research compound that was so horrendous due to the rapid development of cancers all over the body the drugs companies stopped testing it even in animals. Anyone who follows big pharma should recognise how hosed up this poo poo must be if they did that. There’s no doping in my sport because it’s skill that decides matches. This is total bullshit and often cited by fans of football and tennis. Elite sport is incredibly draining, even ping pong. Being fitter then your opponent gives you a clearer head at the end of match, that extra yard of pace and the ability to maintain your skill level for longer. Tennis in fact is almost the perfect sport to dope in. Rapid bursts of pace with short recovery times are ideal for steroids which have long lasting effects which can be taken out of competition. Combine this with one of the most laughable testing regimes in all of elite sport and huge financial rewards for success and you have a perfect storm. Why the believable just isn’t believable any more Sports science is pretty loving good. As it’s progressed we are getting closer and closer to the limits of human ability and gains become harder and harder to reach. If you run faster your air resistance increases exponentially so big gains are incredibly hard to come by in elite sport and quite frankly astonishing performances should rightfully raise eyebrows. There is a reason teams spend millions in wind tunnels looking for tenths or hundreds of a second here and there. We are fundamentally human which means there is a limited amount of power we can produce doped or not. The harder you work the shorter you can do it for. While there is always some reserve due to pain preventing you from producing a physiologically perfect effort if someone is able to produce a huge effort at the end of a race that implies a very large reserve.  If that someone is a 16 year old female swimmer who comes from nowhere to beat the time of the men’s champion in the same event then it is absurd to claim that is legitimate. It is simply not possible without some enhancement. How do you catch dopers? So I hope we’ve agreed it’s a problem and one that’s universal amongst elite sport. So what do we do about it? There are a couple of general principals we need to think about first. When a person takes any drug there will be a period where it is absorbed into the blood, distributed around the body then it needs to be metabolised and excreted. Drugs are most commonly excreted via urine but pretty much anything leaving your body will contain some portion of things that have appeared in your blood stream at some point. Urine is an easy target, we produce a lot of it and collecting it is pretty cheap. Most drugs are excreted in it so it’s a pretty logical starting point. There are issues though. Only a portion of the drug in your blood will be excreted therefore any test needs to be able to pick up small amounts. As the blood level drops so does the urine and we reach a point where it’s no longer detectable. This can be extremely short for many performance enhancing medications so athletes may only have a tiny amount of time where they are likely to test positive in their urine despite getting the benefits for much longer. Urine tests make up the vast majority of doping tests because of their cost Blood is better. I like blood tests, I do them every day for a huge range of things in my day to day job as a doctor. Blood tests allow you to detect much smaller amounts of a drug then you can in the urine which gives you a bigger window to catch someone. They are more expensive, invasive and you still need to catch the athlete in the window in which their plasma level of drug is detectable. When the blood test for EPO was developed athletes rapidly started microdosing (smaller doses more frequently) which made it much harder to detect. Another point to consider is that athletes spend the vast majority of their time training rather than competing. If you are only testing in competition you have no hope of ever catching anyone but the most retarded of dopers. Regimes can easily be tailored to defeat the most sophisticated of tests if you know when they’ll be done. A significant performance advantage from doping also occurs due to its ability to let you recover quicker and train harder than your competition. By the time you rock up to the start line you can have 0 trace of anything elicit in your body and still have a colossal advantage over anyone who’s clean. So to summarise anti-doping should be: - Largely out of competition - Have a high number of blood tests - Random but also targeted at the best performers Don’t the dopers just move onto the next compound when a test is developed? Yes and this is a huge problem but is also where one of the most exciting developments in anti-doping has happened recently but let’s talk a little about tests. All tests have problems. Almost every test I perform as a doctor will have a mixture of true and false positives as well as true and false negatives and is a huge headache when developing an anti-doping program. We want to catch all the dopers but we don’t want to ban anyone who is clean. The problem is where to draw the line.  Trigger warning: statisticsA test is described as sensitive if it picks up everyone who has the condition A test is described as specific if a low percentage of people who test positive are false positives. In general we sacrifice one for the other. We can see that with doping test we would want a highly specific test so we don’t ban someone who’s innocent but this likely means we have to accept that people who test negative may well still be doping. Because so many tests are being performed we need something that’s really loving specific. If our test is 99% specific (and that’s loving amazing in medicine) and we perform 1000 tests in a year you would expect 10 false positives. So we are going to have to sacrifice a lot of sensitivity to reduce out false positives Basically there are lots of negative tests. So it’s hard to detect the substance, they change what they are using anyway and the tests are often crap. What do we do? Stop testing for the substances Ok not quite, we still want to test for the big hitters but in 2009 the first blood passport was introduced which was a huge step forward. Instead of looking for a banned substance we look for it’s effects. The body is a beautifully fine-tuned machine and any time you take a drug there will be an effect you can in theory detect as the body adjust the stimulus. Oxygen vector doping (EPO and blood transfusions) is a great example. If you take EPO your body produces more blood cells, your haematocrit rises and the ratio of new to old cells (which we test for in medicine all the time) changes. Transfuse blood and your body detects that it doesn’t need to make any more of it’s own and so your new/old blood cells ratio goes the other way. By watching these trends over time and comparing them to what we’d expect in a normal body (for example your haematocrit going down over a long tournament) we can bust someone for doping without ever knowing exactly what they’ve done. This is beautifully illustrated below. In the early 2000 cyclists loved EPO so we see a high proportion of new blood cells. When they switch to blood transfusions after the EPO test comes out we see a reduction in new blood cells. Out comes the blood passport and haematocrits drop leading to noticeably better and fairer racing shortly after it’s introduction. The problem of wanting to avoid false positives remains but imo this is the way to go for anti-doping.  So, I think that’s enough for my first post. Over the next week I will be discussing the drugs used at the moment including some of the incredibly frightening ones, some case studies of doping and the abuse of things like TUE’s. I’d like this thread to be a sensible, scientific discussion of what is a controversial topic. Please don’t thread poo poo as there are plenty of people who want to learn. Drive by accusations of particular athletes or teams don’t belong here unless it’s part of a well informed discussion. If there are any questions people have or any topics they’d like me to cover I’d be happy to answer what I can Reading
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Jun 27, 2014 15:57
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What a good thread. Would you say doping in cycling is on the rise again as teams finds ways to avoid the passport?
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Jun 27, 2014 16:29
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Wow what a great read. Amazing stuff OP
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Jun 27, 2014 17:59
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You are not from America and therefor I do not trust you. Can a real american please corroborate these facts?
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Jun 27, 2014 18:05
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Tennis is disgustingly doped, which is probably because the head of the ITF's anti-doping program constantly says that tennis is skill-based, and doping would not help at all. Meanwhile, Spain (who have a national doping problem) keeps getting better and better, and the average age of tournament winners keeps climbing and climbing, since doping has historically helped athletes stay competitive past their natural primes. Of course, if you ask tennis fans about this, their conclusion is that the next generation of players is just really bad. The big 4 are almost certainly doped, and Rafa Nadal is the most obviously doped athlete since Lance Armstrong.
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Jun 27, 2014 19:21
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Should I do loads of tren and test op? What are the best stacks these days.
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Jun 27, 2014 19:32
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I would say morally I agree with almost all of your opinions. Doping is bad and it ruins sport. However it appears to me that there already exists a large grey area between what constitutes doping and what is understood as advancements in medical science. I mean obviously some things are clearly one or the other but I think as certain medical fields advance it will prove difficult to determine which is which. I'm not suggesting we stop testing for stuff or punishing dopers. Only that it seems we are long overdue for a serious debate on if sports can realistically prevent becoming medical arms races.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:10
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Another reason the "just let them dope" argument is a bad one is because even if we accept that some players find the risks inherent in doping acceptable, by legalizing doping we force every player to accept those risks, whether they want to or not, as if they do not dope they will fall behind those that do. I wonder how big PEDs are in hockey. There have been few cases of hockey players being caught using banned substances, so a lot of people assume the sport is largely free of it, but that is a naive view point. It's likely hockey is as bad about it as any other sport but there is little if any discussion on the topic among hockey fans or media because there have been so few players caught doing it.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:23
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Major League Baseball really hosed up by letting the anti-doping message get away from "this is really dangerous to your body and could even kill you" to "holy poo poo this stuff will make you so good at sports we would have to invalidate your statistics"
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Jun 27, 2014 20:41
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peanut- posted:What a good thread. Would you say doping in cycling is on the rise again as teams finds ways to avoid the passport? Without actual corruption of the testing process I think fooling the passport would be very difficult. If it is looking for effects of doping rather than substances any effects which do not show up would, by definition, be ineffective no? Or is there some new and awesomely nefarious way to cheat the passports.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:05
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BWV posted:I would say morally I agree with almost all of your opinions. Doping is bad and it ruins sport. I'll try and go more in depth around this when I discuss TUE's and stuff like PRP.
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Jun 27, 2014 23:15
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DickEmery posted:Without actual corruption of the testing process I think fooling the passport would be very difficult. As I said before the issue with the passport is the desire to avoid false positives. I'm away from a desktop this weekend but will go further into it later.
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Jun 27, 2014 23:16
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I thought we already had a Michael Jordan thread
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Jun 27, 2014 23:17
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All the pro's in everything dope. Any athlete who is "clean" is simply spending huge wads of cash on anti test tech.
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Jun 28, 2014 15:44
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Tennis is disgustingly doped, which is probably because the head of the ITF's anti-doping program constantly says that tennis is skill-based, and doping would not help at all. Meanwhile, Spain (who have a national doping problem) keeps getting better and better, and the average age of tournament winners keeps climbing and climbing, since doping has historically helped athletes stay competitive past their natural primes. Of course, if you ask tennis fans about this, their conclusion is that the next generation of players is just really bad. No, you see, his "athletic style of play" simply takes a toll on his body, that's why he's constantly injured and has to retreat to his home base to drink some milkshakes, so he can return a couple of weeks later and win another 50 matches in a row. This thread is a good idea. Great stuff, OP.
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Jun 29, 2014 08:48
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Why isn't Barry Lamar Bonds in the HoF when he is the best hitter ever
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Jun 29, 2014 09:59
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Why do baseball players do steroids?
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Jun 29, 2014 16:14
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Charlotte Hornets posted:Why do baseball players do steroids? The place of steroids in baseball culture could probably warrant its own thread, but in short, the MLB hasn't been helping things. Up until fairly recently they didn't really do much enforcing at all--Bud Selig, the current commissioner, has made it sort of his personal crusade to shape his legacy around "ending steroids". Which, considering how long drugs have been in baseball, is a laugh. But as to why baseball players actually DO steroids, the actual medical reason is they help you recover from injuries faster--that's very important to a ballplayer since spending even a week or two on the Disabled List can lose you a huge chunk of the season. What steroids do NOT do is magically make you hit more home runs--but the problem is, that's what the media THINKS they do, and that stereotype has not been combated successfully at ALL by MLB. If anything, the opposite has happened, where they've been attempting to demonize steroids by casting their users as cheaters who magically get miles better at all aspects of the game just by shooting up. You can observe the whole Alex Rodriguez debacle for textbook examples of this--Rodriguez is legitimately one of the best ballplayers of the generation and it's not because he's shooting up, but that's the angle they've been pushing. As anyone who's observed actual humans in a competition could guess, this has just been making people MORE eager to use them. "Don't use them. They make you into Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron's secret lovechild. But don't use them, seriously. They're great. We'll make you sorry."
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Jun 29, 2014 16:50
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Jack's Flow posted:No, you see, his "athletic style of play" simply takes a toll on his body, that's why he's constantly injured and has to retreat to his home base to drink some milkshakes, so he can return a couple of weeks later and win another 50 matches in a row. What's funny is that since the slower courts across the board have made tennis more athletic, and arguably less skill-based, you'd think it'd help the younger generation, since they had an advantage over the older players in athletic matches going back, oh, the entire history of tennis. Of course, this isn't happening, and the same generation of players are dominating despite getting older and older. Tennis, and deluded tennis fans have simply decided that the reason of this is that the current generation are the greatest tennis players in the history of the sport, to the point where Nadal fans are trashing the generation of Agassi/Sampras/Courier/Becker/Goran/Chang as a goddamn "weak era". It is complete bullshit. Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 19:19
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Fag Boy Jim posted:What's funny is that since the slower courts across the board have made tennis more athletic, and arguably less skill-based, you'd think it'd help the younger generation, since they had an advantage over the older players in athletic matches going back, oh, the entire history of tennis. Of course, this isn't happening, and the same generation of players are dominating despite getting older and older. The press has been complicit in pretending as if it isn't a totally different game. so they can better sell contemporary stars as the best ever, all at once.
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Jun 29, 2014 19:38
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Incidentally, I hope the OP will do something about Spain's complicity in the modern doping scene, especially wrt Operation Puerto.
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Jun 29, 2014 19:42
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Charlotte Hornets posted:Why do baseball players do steroids? In addition, the baseball season is 6 games a week for 6 straight months, or more. Even if each game isn't as strenuous as other sports, that's still a long, long season. Any advantage you can get when it comes to recovery will help.
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Jun 29, 2014 19:58
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Alan Trammell posted:In addition, the baseball season is 6 games a week for 6 straight months, or more. Even if each game isn't as strenuous as other sports, that's still a long, long season. Any advantage you can get when it comes to recovery will help. I now understand why baseball players use steroids. They have to work wonders to reduce injuries from a schedule like that. If you pick up even the smallest injury you will probably never have a chance to recover and everything just gets worse and worse right?
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Jun 29, 2014 21:56
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Isn't the argument that 'bodies respond to drugs differently' as an argument against peds somewhat disingenuous? Bodies also respond to weight lifting and running differently. The people whose bodies respond best get an unfair genetic advantage over the rest of us. So truly what's needed is gene doping to level the playing field.
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Jun 29, 2014 22:32
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Incidentally, here's an article about how ATP tournament winners keep getting older and older, and no young players seem to be breaking through. http://www.changeovertennis.com/atp-dark-age-coming/ Unfortunately, in an example of how tennis has shut down discussion on doping, the author's conclusion seems to be "The next generation of players is really bad".
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Jun 29, 2014 22:39
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Slaapaav posted:I now understand why baseball players use steroids. They have to work wonders to reduce injuries from a schedule like that. If you pick up even the smallest injury you will probably never have a chance to recover and everything just gets worse and worse right? Pretty much. That's how small injuries turn into big ones frequently in baseball and part of why every team has an elaborate lower farm system--call-ups are frequently made mid-season from the lower levels of play to replace players who get hurt or turn out to be awful. This, of course, can negatively effect these players' developments, but y'know. Working with what they've got.
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Jun 30, 2014 01:08
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Ginette Reno posted:I wonder how big PEDs are in hockey. There have been few cases of hockey players being caught using banned substances, so a lot of people assume the sport is largely free of it, but that is a naive view point. It's likely hockey is as bad about it as any other sport but there is little if any discussion on the topic among hockey fans or media because there have been so few players caught doing it. I choose to believe hockey doesn't out of some sort of unofficial honor code. Or they're on the Babe Ruth Patented Performance Enhancement Program of whiskey, cigars, and women.
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Jun 30, 2014 02:59
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Do hockey players still pop Sudafed like M&M's or did they get screwed over like the rest of us cold-havers because of *~meth~*
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Jun 30, 2014 03:52
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Slaapaav posted:I now understand why baseball players use steroids. They have to work wonders to reduce injuries from a schedule like that. If you pick up even the smallest injury you will probably never have a chance to recover and everything just gets worse and worse right? This season has been an excellent showcase of how injuries to key players can derail a season for a team. The Texas Rangers currently have 15 players on either the 15 day or 60 day disabled list, and the attrition has taken them from being in contention for the postseason last year to being in contention for the worst record in the league this year. The pressure to get back as fast as possible and try to turn things around is extremely high.
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Jun 30, 2014 05:11
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My favorite part about tennis is the part where they think it isnt mostly a stamina based sport
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Jun 30, 2014 09:18
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How do the match lengths currently compare with those back when Agassi/Sampras were playing? Seems like there are tons of really long tennis matches now
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Jun 30, 2014 09:30
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Jose posted:How do the match lengths currently compare with those back when Agassi/Sampras were playing? Seems like there are tons of really long tennis matches now I can't answer that, but I really like this article as a primer for how different tennis is now than it was in that era. http://grantland.com/features/court-surfaces-golden-age-men-tennis/
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Jun 30, 2014 10:03
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I want to instinctively say that the insane five/six hour finals are a very recent thing, but I can't really find data at the moment.
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Jun 30, 2014 12:51
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Slaapaav posted:My favorite part about tennis is the part where they think it isnt mostly a stamina based sport It's two people hitting a small yellow ball with unbelievable accuracy and power for 2 to 5 hours, often in the blazing sun. What would stamina have to do with that?! Here's a replay of an awesome lob. All skill.
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Jun 30, 2014 13:54
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No mixed martial artist has ever used performance enhancing substances.
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Jun 30, 2014 19:11
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Detroit_Dogg posted:No mixed martial artist has ever used performance enhancing substances. They're abusing the hell out of Tramadol, which while not illegal yet, is very dodgy.
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Jun 30, 2014 19:14
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WEREWAIF posted:I can't answer that, but I really like this article as a primer for how different tennis is now than it was in that era. Ah yes it's because of the courts they play on that matches are ridiculous marathons now, very good nothing to see here no sir
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Jun 30, 2014 19:42
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Vando posted:Ah yes it's because of the courts they play on that matches are ridiculous marathons now, very good nothing to see here no sir I read somewhere that the average point of tennis has increased from 4 shots to 11.
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Jun 30, 2014 20:45
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Vando posted:Ah yes it's because of the courts they play on that matches are ridiculous marathons now, very good nothing to see here no sir It's a significant factor. The slower courts emphasize a stamina-based game, and the stamina-based game is susceptible to doping.
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Jun 30, 2014 23:31
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What I'm taking away from the article is that versatility and adaptability have been de-emphasized by the homogenization of court conditions, favoring greater endurance. Since there aren't any substances that I'm aware of that enhance adaptability, it seems to me like this change provides the opportunity for players to gain greater advantages by artificially enhancing their endurance than they would have previously.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:02
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