Doping In Sport

Offsideagain

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The Cycllsts didn’t break any rules or laws but that doesn’t make it right. The Arsenal team of the 1930’s Imthink took supplements including Monkey Glands. I played Rugby Union for twenty years and I was considered to be quite big at 6’2” and fifteen stone. Nowadays, I would be a midget. I know the professional players train hard and eat well but also take protein supplements and there have been a fair number banned for steroid use. Look at the size of them and it’s frightening. It won’t be long before someone is killed .
 

Andrew~

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Who is shocked? :lol:

Everyone in here (apart from a few delusional Team Sky apologists) are just glad Team Sky are being seen for what they really are: cheats like the majority of the dominating teams throughout cycling's history.
Fair. I don't think calling them cheats is fair either. More or less everyone in elite sports is on drugs. They are just playing by the 'rules' of the game.

I mean, the moral posturing about being clean by them is a little annoying, but hey-ho.
 

Rams

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Team Sky & Wiggins are being accused of using TUE’s not for medical purposes, but in order to gain a competitive advantage. That’s one very serious accusation, if true a clear violation of the rules and totally unacceptable. The problem for the authorities is how do they prove it?
It’s easy to take the moral ground when accusing others, but we all don’t like to deal with the uncomfortable truth when our own are cheating. This whole sordid
saga has put a large dark cloud over British cycling and team GB’s achievements during the 2012 Olympics. I’ve lost all faith in Team Sky and I hope they get kicked out of cycling.
 

Kag

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I remember the day Chris Froome powered up the Ventoux with the quickest clean time in history. That was funny.
 

Zen

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Doping happens in every sport as far as I'm concerned. Never surprised when these reports come out now...

Just let them all juice up and we can see what the human limits are!
This guy gets it. Bring back the 90's, Lance vs Pantani, Sosa vs Mcgwire......and random mavericks clearly on mind altering drugs for added entertainment. What an era.
 

Classical Mechanic

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Team Sky & Wiggins are being accused of using TUE’s not for medical purposes, but in order to gain a competitive advantage. That’s one very serious accusation, if true a clear violation of the rules and totally unacceptable. The problem for the authorities is how do they prove it?
It’s easy to take the moral ground when accusing others, but we all don’t like to deal with the uncomfortable truth when our own are cheating. This whole sordid
saga has put a large dark cloud over British cycling and team GB’s achievements during the 2012 Olympics. I’ve lost all faith in Team Sky and I hope they get kicked out of cycling.
These accusations are vanilla in the world of doping. The Fancy Bear hack revealed load of athletes (including footballers) that used TUEs, it is good that our government are looking into their uses in sport but as far as I'm aware no other country gave a crap.

Are they clear breaches of the rules though, it looks that they are more ethically questionable measures to push the rules to their limits?
 
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Mrs Smoker

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What a convenience loads of bollocks.

If you have asthma being a professional cyclist is probably the last thing you should be doing.
Norway had 6,000 doses of asthma medicine for their sportsmen and women at the recent Olympic games.


It was a huge success, broke the record of number of medals. :cool:
 

Mrs Smoker

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It appears so. https://www.nrk.no/sport/olympiatoppen-har-sendt-over-6000-doser-astmamedisin-til-ol-1.13880280

Athletes who actually have asthma brought their own medicine.

Wada from around year and a half ago:

""Although giving asthmatic drugs to non-asthmatic athletes is not a violation of anti-doping rules, Wada believes it is inappropriate for athletes to take such medication without a well-documented median condition over time," said Wadas communications manager Ben Nichols to NRK."
 

Classical Mechanic

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It appears so. https://www.nrk.no/sport/olympiatoppen-har-sendt-over-6000-doser-astmamedisin-til-ol-1.13880280

Athletes who actually have asthma brought their own medicine.

Wada from around year and a half ago:

""Although giving asthmatic drugs to non-asthmatic athletes is not a violation of anti-doping rules, Wada believes it is inappropriate for athletes to take such medication without a well-documented median condition over time," said Wadas communications manager Ben Nichols to NRK."
It is a vanilla PED though. I use Salbutamol for allergy induced asthma. I need it to sleep sometimes and do take it before running and playing sport. It only enables me to run about without my airways closing up. It doesn’t make you feel any different, any stronger or more energised.

This study claims no significant effect on performance

http://thorax.bmj.com/content/56/9/675

Makes you wonder if it is used as a masking agent.
 

Hansa

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Norway had 6,000 doses of asthma medicine for their sportsmen and women at the recent Olympic games.


It was a huge success, broke the record of number of medals. :cool:
The case for the defence, signed the head of Olympiatoppen (Olympic center of exellence), chief doctor of the same organization and the chief doctor of the Norwegian athletes in PyeongChang.

https://www.nrk.no/ytring/ol-fjaera-som-ble-til-fem-astmatiske-hons-1.13947216

TL;DR snippets:

* Norway the only country with full disclosure of every medical detail. No other country provided such information except the use of a single substance (Ventoline).
* Number of inhalators brought to South Korea: Norway 12, Germany 30, Sweden 10, Finland 10 (based on NRK's own information).
* Only one athlete and one staff member used Ventoline during the Olympics. 99% of the medicine returned back home.
* Norway made no applications of substance use on medical grounds.
* If full transparency is being used against Norway, maybe it's time to reconsider until other nations follows Norway's example.

My own view? Although the cases of Sundby and Johaug have been a source of grief, Norway have always been at the forefront of anti-doping work. WADA is alive and well in Norway (and northern Europe in general), throughout the year, off-season included. Anyone trying to equate the use of asthmatics medicine to EPO and its like, is at best deeply dishonest. But the seeds have already been sown. You can barely watch a single Youtube clip of Norwegian successes without the word 'asthma' popping up in the comments. The odd thing is that no other national federation (as far as I'm aware of) has complained about Norwegian use of asthma medicine. Makes you wonder why.
 

Oo0AahCantona

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I think it was probably about 4/5 years ago I came to my own conclusions that the majority of my sporting heroes and people I admired are using. It’s just something you have to deal with really and not let it dent your own aspirations of what you hope to achieve naturally.

I was training over Christmas with a mate I haven’t seen for a long while, and who I had been training for quite a while longer than, who had been on a fair few cycles over the years and the difference between our levels in the gym was just something else. It’s too much of an improvement for people not to dope in high level sport, and i can’t imagine with that amount of money on the table it’s difficult to
Avoid being caught. You basically need to get dogged in mid cycle to be caught, it’s very easy to not get caught the majority of the time.
 

Hansa

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Avoid being caught. You basically need to get dogged in mid cycle to be caught, it’s very easy to not get caught the majority of the time.
The reality - just becoming a well known fact in the last ten years or so, is that doping is a great way to ensure future successes, no matter if you're caught doing it. At worst, you'll receive a two-year ban. However, the benefits you'll have had (training harder, not needing resting periods) is something you'll have in your locker once your suspension is over. A lifetime ban, with economic repercussions it the only way to combat this.
 
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Classical Mechanic

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Snowjoe

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They’re all on it. Don’t know how you’ll ever stop it either.
 

RedFish

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I dread to think the prevalence of doping at amateur level, those trying to make it into the pro ranks. Cycling an obvious example, but applicable to any sport really. The carrot of making it to the professional ranks likely means those caught at pro level, are just the tip of the iceberg.
 

baskinginthesun

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Netflix has been good about showing some of the doping docs. The Armstrong Lie is good as is Icarus.

What's crazy is how organized this is. The Russians seemingly have been doing this since the Olympics began (according to the documentary). Apparently, there is no way to tell.

I just wonder if cycling is "tested" more than other sports with all the scandals surrounding it. For instance, in a season how many times does a cyclist get tested vs a footballer? Or a tennis player? Didn't Murray come out and say a few years ago that tennis or WADA doesn't test them enough for doping?
 

Hansa

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I just wonder if cycling is "tested" more than other sports with all the scandals surrounding it. For instance, in a season how many times does a cyclist get tested vs a footballer? Or a tennis player? Didn't Murray come out and say a few years ago that tennis or WADA doesn't test them enough for doping?
Endurance athletes (in Europe at least) have to make their general whereabouts known at any time, in order to be available for random testing. One of the problems has been athletes suddenly going into hiding (or "training camps" as they'd call it - in some unknown, remote location), before emerging clean as a whistle and in top shape just before the Olympics/World Championships. The substances are no longer detectable, but the effects of drugged-up training is more than enough to carry you to the podium.

I think footballers definitely aren't tested enough. People arguing that doping isn't really all that effective in football haven't thought through just how much those extra sprints in the last 10-15 minutes could decide the outcome of a game. Cycling - the one sport synonymous with doping a decade or so ago - is (probably) much, much cleaner today, as evidenced by far less out-of-this-world performances. I think a watershed moment happened in 2007 when German tv packed up and left the Tour de France midway through after the umpteenth positive test. Once the money leaves, the sport has no option but to take it seriously. If advertisers and television companies pulled the plug at the first hint of cheating, any governing body would walk through walls to get rid of its dark sheep.
 

Hansa

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Great read

Thanks. I think at this stage, doping is probably more prevalent in amateur circles, trying to enter the 'big leagues' in various sports, than in the very top-level sports.

Just as a sidenote, here in Norway, any time there is a bodybuilding/fitness competition, which normally consists of everyday people with regular jobs who train hard, the police have a field day tracking them down (using or selling drugs/steroids is a criminal offence here). It's been pretty well documented that as soon as the officers enter the building, scores of contestants flee the premises. A public flogging would probably be the most efficient way to combat this.

As for the one guy I'd like to see endure a slow, painful, death by penis removal with a blunt object, it's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Mühlegg

He ruined an entire sport throughout the 2002 olympics (was caught the day after the closing ceremony). He ruined the careers of skiers trying in vain to follow him, running themselves into the ground in the process. Some of Europe's finest endurance athletes, training for years for this moment, had their Olympic dream shattered by a renegade, degenerate idiot. So what was the moment when I myself realized he was crocked? During the very first competition, when he made a mistake and stumbled head first into the snow. In cross-country skiing, this is almost akin to pulling a hamstring on a football pitch. Your entire body will react negatively to this disruption of the high-pulse, high-muscular intensity where you're always just a few seconds away from building destructive lactic acid. Instead, he just whizzed away, looking stronger than ever. It says a lot that he immediately after the first race had to answer serious questions regarding doping allegations. Anyone with half a brain and knowledge about the sport knew that this performance was way beyond what was possible by natural means. Feck him. I hope his apartment is invaded by cockroaches.
 

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Just watched Icarus on Netflix and that Russian doping system was completely ridiculous :lol: