Drug cheats in sport could benefit 'for decades', scientists find | Hacker News Reader

Drug cheats in sport could benefit 'for decades', scientists find

bbc.com

33 pointsLibertatea35 comments

I think there should be two versions of sport. One with free drug suplements snd one with out, it would be more honest. Think about the advances in results and human body enhancement drugs could benefit an aging population for example.

I know there's a lot of "drugs aren't that dangerous" and "certain currently illegal drugs are entirely risk free" sentiment on this site, and there's probably some truth to it.

However, organizing world wide sanctioned competitions in who can take the most drugs (the most advanced, the most risky, the largest volume) is bound to lead to horrible results for most of the participants.

> However, organizing world wide sanctioned competitions in who can take the most drugs (the most advanced, the most risky, the largest volume) is bound to lead to horrible results for most of the participants.

It's already happening in most competitions, you just don't know about it. When there's money at stake, ways to improve your performance drastically and very little chance to get caught, you have the right conditions in place.

Hmm, let me try to make my point clearer.

What's happening now is a competition in taking the most drugs while avoiding getting caught. The possibility of getting caught limits what you can do. Isn't the idea here to remove this limitation, to open up for experimenting with more things? This is certainly a good way to find out how to manipulate human bodies with drugs, but it does seem to be at the (cynical) expense of the guinea pigs.

> The possibility of getting caught limits what you can do.

What I'm saying is that the possibility of getting caught is very remote to what you can already do nowadays. There's much more effort and investment done at improving the drugs and hiding them than efforts to detect and prevent the abuses. And the subjects are willingly taking drugs anyway, so we are all just being a bunch of hypocrites when we celebrate "clean" sports because everyone involved know that 99% of athletes are taking drugs heavily.

It's like pro wrestling: it's all fake, but everyone pretends otherwise.

When they started testing out EPO illicitly on cyclists in the early 90ies, a number of young men died of heart attacks in their sleep, because their blood got too thick.

Having some rules and regulations doesn't mean no one dopes, but it does curb how much goes on, which likely is beneficial to everyone's health: not even the dopers can take all they would were there no rules.

There can be rules, but let's stop pretending no one takes drugs. It's just ridiculous to believe that any athlete is not doped at this stage, except for certain disciplines where muscular mass or stamina has no advantage whatsoever.

I think that's highly unfair, and defamatory towards those who do compete fairly.

Like anything in life, there are some bad apples, some honest people, and some in the middle. The rules help keep the honest people honest and give them a fighting chance.

Yeah, life is unfair, that's big news. Many athletes who retire and move away from the competition have revealed over the years what's happening behind the scene. Unless you consider everything they say is BS, it's really a small minority who is not taking any drug.

The ones who have doped obviously want to justify their actions by saying "everyone else is doing it too!"

So yeah, to some degree what they are saying is BS, which is kind of what you'd expect from cheaters.

At some periods in time in some sports, it's probably less BS, because many of them were doing it.

It's a long and complex discussion, without, clearly, much chance of getting accurate data.

But there are guys out there competing clean.

> The ones who have doped obviously want to justify their actions by saying "everyone else is doing it too!"

There's a non negligible chance they are telling the truth, too. What's the point of saying that everyone does it instead of continuing to pretend the said sport is clean? This is rather a behavior indicating they realized something was wrong.

And I'm not really convinced that, in cycling, for example, it's realistic to have cyclists run through hundreds of kilometers of mountains day after day and still being as fresh as ever. But hey, believe what you want.

I don't doubt they're mostly telling the truth about themselves, but beyond that? It's more difficult to say.

> And I'm not really convinced that, in cycling, for example, it's realistic to have cyclists run through hundreds of kilometers of mountains day after day and still being as fresh as ever. But hey, believe what you want.

Ah, "it's tough, so it can't be true!". Those guys are the best at the world at what they do, and the ones they show on TV, are of course in the lead, so by default the ones in good shape. If you go see a bicycle race in person, you also get to see the ones lagging behind, some of whom are suffering a great deal. Truth be told, so are the ones in the lead, they're just going faster.

It's really hard to know exactly what's going on, but my whole point is that there are at least a few guys who compete clean. Saying they are all doping is extremely demeaning to those who do compete clean.

Have you considered that those rules and regulations will cause people to optimize PEDs for undetectablility rather than effectiveness leading to people taking even more dangerous drugs than if they were legal? You see a similar thing with recreational drugs where people can't get a hold of or can't risk a failed drug test for relatively harmless illegal drugs so they use much more harmful legal substances.

Look at Pride Fighting Championships(basically japanese UFC) which was around for 10 years without any doping tests. Where were all the problems we're supposed to be afraid of? Or hell, look at pro wrestling. The fear mongering over PEDs is absurd.

Athletes who know they will be tested who are on PEDs will often try to down-cycle before being tested. If PEDs are allowed, no such down-cycling would occur. This is maggit's point: even if people are still on PEDs with restrictions, they are more likely to be on even more PEDs with no restrictions.

It's like the speed limit. Just about everyone goes 10 - 15 mph over the posted limit as a matter of course. One reason some people don't go faster is the threat of getting caught, and the resulting consequences. (And one reason some others don't go faster is they don't feel safe at faster speeds.) But if we removed the posted speed limits, it's likely people would go even faster.

And for the record, I don't think the possibility of getting caught is remote. In professional MMA, fighters are getting caught every month.

>This is certainly a good way to find out how to manipulate human bodies with drugs, but it does seem to be at the (cynical) expense of the guinea pigs

From the athletes perspective the "drugs" aspect is totally incidental. There are plenty of sports where people and up pushing there bodies to extreme and dangerous limits without drugs. The athletes always have to end up finding a balance in risk, and the need to find this balance wouldn't be abandoned with the introduction of a "drugs OK" domain, as far as I can tell.

The need to find the balance would remain, but it would change what is being balanced.

And this is different than current practice how?

Are you aware, for example, that in the nba you are subject to 4 drug tests per year? And there is no reason you can be given a fifth? So the very second you get that fourth test, hopefully well before the tail end of the season and the grueling after season, these ultra competitive athletes have free reign to do as much hgh and steroids as they can get in their bodies.

And steroids will help you heal and deal with the effects on your body of competing at those levels. Low supplementation, particularly under a doctor's care, is probably all to the good.

I'd bet most of this is already going on.

An addendum: and we all know it.

Look at the muscle Barry Bonds put on in an off-season in his 30s.

Look at Kobe Bryant, going for surgeries (and what else) abroad, coming back from torn acls and a 3rd degree torn achilles, commonly a career-ending injury. At age 34 and the 14th highest minutes every played.

Look at Ray Lewis and his fucking miraculous recovery from a torn triceps.

Look at Adrian Peterson tearing his acl and mcl, then coming back within a year to break a 28 year old rushing record.

What do all these guys (and there are dozens more examples) have in common? Incredibly rapid recovery from horrific injuries. Late in life jump in muscle. You pretty much have to have your head buried up your arse not to be aware of what's going on.

I don't consider it a sport (as the evaluation is not performance based), but professional bodybuilding is as you describe. Events are untested, unless specifically advertised as tested. The untested events include the most famous ones you've heard of.

There are already two such tiers: Pro and amateur.

Nope, plenty of lesser doping goes on in amateur sport.

The definition of what is a "human body enhancement drug" is itself interesting: some are what people would obviously consider to be drugs, like steroids; and at the other end, the substances found in regular foods such as vitamins would not be, but what about dietary supplements and the various other types of "food optimisation" that people do? I'd say they certainly have an effect on performance too, so could they be considered a form of unfair advantage? This sort of reasoning leads to the conclusion that to eliminate all these factors the athletes' diets should be strictly regulated. Then you still have (as this article shows) their history and probably other factors down to how much they've trained, the climate they're in, etc... it's really quite a subtle issue to define what is "fair" in sports.

Sports have never been fair and never will be. Why? Because fairness has no rigorous definition. It is one of those words like justice or intelligence; everybody has their own idea of what it means to be fair. No matter what sort of authority we create there will always be people who reject its legitimacy.

For those that are interested, there is an interesting article here [1] about how people beat drug tests. It talks mostly about crossfit but applies to a lot of sports.

[1] http://www.t-nation.com/steroids/beating-the-crossfit-drug-t...

Relevant quote:

While we can get a juiced athlete to test clean in less than two weeks, no noticeable loss of power has been seen for a month or more post cycle.

This reminds me of a friend I have. This guy pretty much skipped most of the first 3 years of his degree to lift and get huge, bodybuilding style. From a sub-120 lbs scrawny brainiac, he transformed into a ridiculously jacked 230 lbs monster, eating something like 8000 calories a day. And when he cut out carbs from his diet, he would cut down to 200 or so and be absolutely ripped.

Then he stopped: got serious about school, graduated and got a job, etc. Stopped cold-turkey. It was pretty funny, I met up with him a few years after he stopped and he was a normal (though funny to me)-looking dude at 140 lbs. Eventually, for old times sake, I convinced him to lift with me twice a week.

And my god, the progress he made off this was ridiculous. He started drinking milk again and eating to be full, not a crazy amount, but enough to sustain the lifting. The result? He shot back up to a relatively jacked 180 lbs in only 2 months. And he was able to maintain that so easily, even dropping back to working out once/week!

I realized something. Muscle memory isn't just real, but it may be a great optimization over one's life. Sure, my friend was a bit crazy for 2-3 years, ate 8k calories and slept half the day. But now he can put in an incredibly small amount of work and maintain a really enviable physique. I bet if one does the math of hours put into the gym, not to mention time spent eating to recover, even though he paid heavily for it for a few years, over the course of the next few decades he'll be getting more (physique) for less.

Gives me some ideas I probably shouldn't be having for graduate school ;)

I wonder how this compares against the long-term health benefits. Should I start micro-juicing?

HGH is generally awesome. If it was cheap, everyone would be doing it.

this is the real question we should be asking

what sort of quality of life improvements everyone could have if we all got off our high horse

What has stopped me from juicing so far has been potential negative health implications, but long-term muscle retention - or potential for - with short cycles has to be interesting

That conclusion was fairly foregone for someone taking steroids.

Excercises increase the body's ability in two ways by: 1. damaging cells (either muscle cells directly, or cells in the cardiovascular system), to which the body responds by making more cells to withstand similar stresses in the future; 2. depleting the energy store of muscle cells which causes the body to overfill them in response, stretching them to store more energy for next time.

Steroids directly impact the efficacy of the first method by improving the growth speed of the body, generating more new muscle cells with exercises than somebody doing the same exercises without steroids would generate.

So once you've taken them AND exercised with them, you've got a headstart over other people, and can maintain that advantage as long as you keep putting in the work.

Interesting finding, I was always surprised that former cheater do so well after being allowed to compete again, my hunch was that they found another way to cheat but this result seems more plausible.

Stopping this is always going to be a losing battle. Sport should embrace it instead, I think, especially given its current prevalence today - the olympics etc. are really just a competition to see who gets the best combination of drugs already - why not recognise that and credit their developers?

That would pretty much destroy the "drugsr'bad'mmkay" arguments that every politician uses (along with "it's for the children").

There's really only one sensible solution: make everything legal and leave it up to the end-user to decide how much they can tolerate. Those who are wrong take themselves out of the population. Those who are right will survive.

Extreme Darwinism. Next on ESPN.

It sounds like we should all be taking these drugs to stave off decrepitude.

Really. I wonder how much the often fake moral outrage at PEDs in sports has stifled quality-of-life advancements for the ageing. Take a step back and ask "Who benefits from the perception of a sport being 'clean?'"

Sports promoters have an interesting in maintaining the perception their sports are fair and competitive, and they contribute to a drug-war mentality.

Perhaps the public would just shrug and say "If you want to see real competition, go watch tennis at your club tournament." Draining big money out of sport would not be the worst outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com