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Comment by ahi | Hacker News Reader

I replied directly to OP, but applies here as well. Cycling is far more specialized than other sports so the pay off for doping is greater.

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The incentive to use PEDs is almost certainly higher in other professional sports than cycling. For athletes in leagues like the MLB, NFL, NBA etc. the average career is quite short and you essentially need to make all of the money for your entire life in 3-4 yeas. Plus the step function of being in the league and making millions vs just missing a roster spot and making almost nothing is so extreme you'd be foolish not to take PEDs to give yourself the best chance at a payday.

Why is pay off greater in cycling than other sports? Salary of the top riders? Compared to say NBA players, pro cyclist make relatively little. Tadej Pogacar (best and top paid cyclist) makes about $8M (euros) in salary per year. Steph Curry (highest paid) NBA player makes $55M (dollars) in salary per year.

Not money. It's highly specialized in what physically benefits it, so even a small doping on that specific physical attribute leads to significant advantage.

Basketball isn’t as demanding physically as cycling. You need to be fit but not to the extreme degree cycling demands. I would expect doping to be most beneficial in sports where pure physicality is needed. Marathon, triathlon, track running.

There's a lot more money in basketball, though. And money is the number 1 incentive. Growth hormones might be used.

You can reasonably assume that some NBA players are using PEDs. However, the effect is different. To be an NBA basketball player you need to have several attributes, such as height and hand-eye coordination, that cannot be affected by PEDs AFAIK. If basketbally are using PEDs, it is probably to recover faster, which means coming back from injury or training more. More training can lead to a higher level of skill, but it's a second order effect. It's not like cycling where, for example, EPO directly affects performance on the bike.

yes, but those epo-esque drugs aren't exactly trivial to use these days. the testing process makes the doping process much more difficult for drugs that have these direct performance benefits.

recovery help is where it's at these days i expect, in most sports.

Look at all the incidents of blood clots or DVT in NBA players and it starts to look pretty suspicious.

have you seen the physiques and workloads that nba/nhl/mlb players are dealing with these days? these athletes have more incentive than cyclists to dope ($$$), and the testing in those sports is a joke.

there are obvious performance benefits for traditional endurance sports, but the testing infrastructure is pretty robust and the financial incentives are much less than those big team sports. it's harder to dope (and get away with it) and the financial pressure is less.

I totally believe that a lot of basketball/football/baseball players take something. But the effect won’t be as important as in cycling or marathon or 100 m sprint where you need pure physicality.

The effect doesn't really matter. If it gives you a 2% edge, and you don't take it, then you're 2% off the top. That may be the difference between having a career at all and thinking about what could have been at your desk job.

Sure, there's no drugs that will turn you into prime Messi. But there are drugs that will let Messi play like prime Messi for 90 minutes, 3 times a week, 48 weeks a year, which is incredibly valuable.

The "pay off" the commenter is talking about is the results in the sport, not the monetary gain. Cyclists are like the engines in an F1 car. Not saying there is no skill involved, but any skill differences are irrelevant if the other guy is putting out 100W more than you over 200km. So it really comes down to raw power to weight ratio.

That's not the same in basketball or most other sports. You can't just jump on gear, lift weights and suddenly become Michael Jordan. Plenty of people could beat Pogacar if they could use anything they could, though, just like manufacturers could build an F1 car that would dominate every race if they could circumvent the rules.

Because beside some skill needed in going fast during descends at 70-80-90km/h without dying (which is not easy but not extremely difficult either), a cyclist is basically an engine. Most other sports need physical fitness (speed, stamina, strength, endurance etc) AND coordination skills, and the latter is not easy to improve chemically.

I could agree with this. You do need some physical gifts as far as muscular endurance beyond the capacity of most but after that, its a very limited set of movements performed over and over again for hours. Plus a massive amount of will power and pain endurance. No amount of chemicals will turn even most gifted people into an NFL athlete.

> Compared to say NBA players

Basketball is highly skill based.

For a professional athlete it’s not hard to be in shape enough to run for an entire game. It’s just not a limitation.

For cycling, it’s nearly all physical ability.

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