Worth reflecting that cycling isn’t the only professional / mainstream sport to have a problem.
Link below to UK track and field athlete who’s Tokyo silver medal is now likely to be stripped.
The article cites Ostarine and S-23 to which a quick Google search says are SARMS which apparently work like steroids in some ways but not others.
I would have thought taking this stuff means if you were serious about your cheating then being ‘careful’ about ensuring it was eliminated from your body by the time you entered a competition was a ‘PED users 101’ basic step to ensure you took?
I remember a thread on twitter recently where someone said if a pro athlete gets bust the first thing they do is spend $50k lab testing every supplement on the market hoping to find some contamination. Not sure how true that is …
It seems incredible to me how many people (claim?) to do so much meal prep to not have negative experiences when traveling that a professional athlete would just eat something random off the street.
Of course, as I am typing that, I am reminded how Usain Bolt had chicken nuggets right before breaking several records, so who knows (or maybe he just said that to mess with people).
Personally, I know I am clean. I am pretty sure some people I race against aren’t, but I would never accuse them because it is a feeling only. I only care about how I feel on the race course and I know that even if everyone was clean I still wouldn’t be winning so I am not worried about it.
Watched a Seinfeld interview a few years ago in which he says humans are basically vile creatures…but every so often we do something amazing and he gets sucked right back in to believing humans are good. What’s the deal with that?
I could imagine a particularly cunning athlete getting ahead of all that by finding and stashing tainted supplements first, and then doping with the specific substances found in the supplements.
Then miraculously, if they get caught, “OooH loOK iT wAs ThIs suPpLemEnT!!”
I honestly doubt that anything found in a supplement could turn up in a blood test. We’re talking aboit fractions of traces here. What’s more likely is that you can’t fully exclude the idea that some of it might get detected (however unlikely), so you can’t prove it’s not from there.
I do wonder if the lack of racing/competitions last year made a good few athletes use stuff they wouldn’t normally take, because the chances to get tested were so much lower.
Plenty of people wondering that with the Olympics - after a sustained period of global travel ban and without real fear of surprise testing we have a phenomenal spike in world records and that’s even without the official Russian juice squad attending. It would be a tempting opportunity for some.
I think that for accidental/incidental contamination during manufacturing this is likely true. What I have heard in other discussions of tainted supplements (I think more aimed at bodybuilders) is that some supplement manufacturers deliberately put drugs in them that are known to work simply to make the supplement actually work. If you want your ‘muscle gainer’ supplement to actually gain muscle, then adding some steroids will make it work better.
I don’t think this is the situation for Katie, but that discussion did give me a different perspective on just how ‘contaminated’ supplements can be.
Yes, but selling steroids (or other drugs) in this manner is illegal (at least in the US), so that is why it must be hidden. From the manufacturer’s point of view it absolutely is the active ingredient, but it has to be kept secret for legal reasons, so from the purchaser’s point of view this is a contaminant/unlisted important ingredient. The only way this stuff comes out is some kind of criminal investigation.
This is true. A friend of mine did her bachelor thesis testing supplements that were labelled stuff like ¨performance boost¨ and such things. Mostly advertised to…lets call them gym-bros. HALF of them contained significant amounts of illegal substances. (This is also consistent with literature as far as I remember) Stuff like amphetamines and such. Dangerous stuff.
It wasn’t that long ago that the “gym bro” formulations weren’t even illegal. They were sold openly at vitamin stores as “pro hormones” or “natural steroids”. In 2004, Congress banned over-the-counter steroid precursors in the US.
It wasn’t that long ago that the “gym bro” formulations weren’t even illegal. They were sold openly at vitamin stores as “pro hormones” or “natural steroids”. In 2004, Congress banned over-the-counter steroid precursors in the US.
This became widespread knowledge when the reporters noticed the GNC prohormones in Baseball slugger Marc McGuire’s locker and asked him about them. He explained that it was an unregulated, over-the-counter ‘supplement’ and he didn’t understand exactly how it worked. What he didn’t admit, was that he had used ‘real’ steroids in the past. I’m just speculating, but the prohormone might have been what he used for ‘plausible deniability’.
And to clarify, most other pro sports leagues did ban prohormones, just not baseball (which has a very strong players’ union that basically writes their own anti-doping rules).
So that raises a question. Are we only catching the idiots or the ones who just happened to mess up? I think the answer is yes. We’ve seen doping programs in the past that worked for many years without detection (LA). And that’s why this question keeps coming up over and over.
We can’t even get a relatively clean pro peleton with architecture set up to catch the cheaters. Granted, that architecture possibly needs improved and better funded. But it would only make sense that the situation is even worse in amateur sports.
Not to get too far off topic, but I’ve heard it said that in certain areas, such as India, you can’t even be competitive at the club level (in weightlifting at least) unless you’re on steroids. This makes it so anyone who potentially could be competitive at an international level is already tainted or ruined by their early training/doping. I was told that you probably have to be on PEDs just to get into the army in India.
Maybe that’s why a country with 1 billion people shows up so rarely on the Olympic podium. It would be nice if the anti-doping attitude trickled down to amateur athletics all around the world, so more people got the opportunity to be competitive.
Yup, I’ve read the same thing a lot. Someone comes out with a new mass gainer and puts some real but illegal (whether by law or in sports) anabolic agent in it so that they can gain popularity. Then they remove the agent because it’s illegal and expensive but by then every amateur bodybuilder bro knows that “Muscle Blast” by GetYolkedRX is the best so they keep buying and recommending it.
A good example is the old Jack3D (a preworkout) basically had a methamphetamine analog in it (along with a shitload of caffeine) and was basically legal speed so every one I knew in high school would buy it. Then they changed the formula to a more toned down (and much safer) version.
Having done a little bit of reading into the testing done on pro sports (big US ones at least), the testing is a joke and rarely if ever catches anyone and carries small penalties.
it’s never anyones fault, and they are always innocent. it was some random xyz food that triggered the result. rinse, repeat
personally, i view the sport of pro cycling as i do pro weightlifting or any other super competitive sport for that matter. doping is so prevalent that it’s better to just allow it all and be done with it. come out of the shadows. if you want to risk seriously shortening your life for the sake of a little fame, so be it. if you don’t do it, come out and say so and we’ll understand and admire you if you come in 4th to the top 3 dopers. worried about tainting the legacy of the sport, that the records of today won’t be comparable to those of yesteryear? i’ve got news for you, they already aren’t comparable. ppl in 1906 were running around in heavy cotton shirts and riding steel pipes with wheels. if they had a headache they just dealt with it and suffered. hear rate threshold? what’s that? vo2 max? what’s that? same with all other modern sports. technology is pervasive, even if it’s not obvious. put babe ruth in his prime out there today with only the tech he had available in 1910 and see how he does vs the modern players with their high tech cooling fabrics and laser cut bats/balls/gloves w/latex & polyurethane padding, medicine chests full of perfectly legal stuff to keep them on the field regardless of their ailments etc. or put a 1930s pole vaulter with his wooden stick up against today’s fiberglass/carbon fiber marvels.
or have any of the winners of the tdf from 1903 through the mid 70s or so out their with their bikes and gear and see what happens. they’d probably not even hit the cutoff times for any of the stages.
the point is, stop holding onto the sport (any sport) like it’s a time capsule. performance has increased exponentially, as has the demands put on the athletes. to compete, they will seek any and all advantages they can, regardless of cost. it’s pretty obvious there’s nothing to be done about it. mlb had a huge crisis years ago. you think everyone just suddenly stopped doping? lol ok.
there’s nothing that will ever change here unless we start to re-examine the rules. think different. ask the russians. their entire national sports program dopes and they dgaf about anything, just deal with it and applaud the “russian olympic committee” for their multitude of “clean” medals
