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Comment by rmcpherson | Hacker News Reader

Do you know why that is? It seems possible that it could be because masters racers started doping back before testing was prevalent/sensitive and now can't stop without a precipitous drop-off in performance that would raise eyebrows. Just conjecture though.

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The difficult thing about anti-doping in amateur athletes is that the stakes are way too low to be testing that frequently, unless you are at the very top of the amateur range. And when you stop doping your fitness gains don't disappear if you continue to train. One of EPO's main benefits (as I understand it) is to improve recovery and allow one to train harder. So an athlete could use EPO for a year, training harder and more frequently than they otherwise would and then stop the next year and enter competition with a lot of their previous fitness gains carried over.

More likely because the masters guys have more disposable income and very little at stake if they get caught. With spare cash they've probably bought all the bike upgrades they can and are training as much as their spare time allows so doping is the easiest way to improve. Also, anything to slow the decline with age...

As I see it, the simple answer is just social status and, by proxy, social opportunity. People who are into cycling often place a ton of importance on how good of an athlete someone is. When I worked in the industry, I routinely saw people get hired or promoted simply because of how fast they were. We called the effect "speed goggles" meaning that you viewed the world through speed-colored glasses. So doping could mean the difference between getting hired or not or gaining stature among a group of peers. Of course no one I met in industry ever openly condoned the practice of doping -- quite the opposite. But their admonitions often seemed to ring hollow. You knew that everyone wanted to be faster. And you knew how much importance people tacitly placed on it.

Likely a factor of financial means as well. There's a lot of spare-no-expense weekend warrior types in the Masters ranks, whereas the younger open racers tend to be scrappier.

Also, it's probably somewhat of a "who cares anyway?" attitude. They're not gonna go pro, they're not getting tested, etc. Any kind of competition involves someone bending the rules, like it or not.

When younger athletes max out their training capacity, they either come close to pro level (where any doping would be out of scope for the question of the perceived age correlation in recreational doping) or they lose interest. They lose interest either completely, or at least enough to be fully aware that more training could make them so much better. It's easy to resist doping if you know that the amount of training is your main bottleneck.

Age groupers are much more persistent, they have their hobby permanently dialed in, they wouldn't even know where else to search for a sense of achievement. They are used to getting faster from a combination of better technology and better training, and to some of them doping might seem almost like a natural extension of carbon and training plans when those are maxed out. Fortunately, the deep end of both the training and the carbon is so far out that I am confident that it's still only a small minority who falls for the temptation (the very few testing that has happened on the amateur level concentrated on the top results, if doping works, that's where you will find the dopers)

(source: getting more carbon and more training as I get older)

For those not into cycling

carbon -> carbon fibre bike parts, which is way lighter and way more expensive but makes you go faster with less effort

If we're talking about road cycling, UCI rules already have a lower limit on bike weight so there are no more gains to be had there. Anyone with money can buy a stock 6.8kg carbon fiber bike off the shelf without swapping parts. To increase power/weight ratio further the rider has to lose fat.

Triathlon bike rules are looser, but most triathlon courses have less climbing so aerodynamics take precedence over minimizing weight.

the reason masters racers dope is because nobody tests masters, and nobody really cares if masters racers dope (except for the other competitors).

That makes sense. I was thinking masters might be tested even at the amateur level but I guess that's rare even at the high levels of competition.

super rare. race organizers hate paying for anything they don't absolutely have to, and the national anti-doping organizations don't test amateurs. The rules packets for most amateur races say no doping allowed, and threaten random testing, but in reality it never happens.

I know for a fact that an amateur cyclist in the UK was banned for 2 years for testing positive for EPO after taking part in a race. I believe he had been deliberately targeted for testing because of suspicions about his performance.

The race organiser does not pay for the testing directly. British Cycling takes a small levy for every rider taking part in a race and I imagine this goes towards paying for the random testing.

The UK anti-doping website has a list of all current and historical bans for drug test rule violations covering a wide range of sports:

https://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-...

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